In mid-September, my latest documentary, The Shadows of War, will be released internationally as part of “Infidel Awareness Month,” an initiative launched by Professor Richard Landes and several organizations committed to fighting antisemitism and exposing the militant, financial, intellectual, and insidious expansion of Islamism.

The Shadows of War explores 78 years of Palestinian propaganda and deception, leading up to the invention of “Pallywood” at the beginning of the Second Intifada—a phenomenon that has since become a blueprint for the disinformation spread by Palestinian terrorist organizations, numerous corrupt NGOs, far-left political movements, and a large part of the United Nations apparatus.

As promised, I am offering my paid subscribers immediate access to the film. If you subscribe to my Substack, you will be among the very first to see it. Please feel free to spread the word. Note: The file size is fit for computers and cellphones, so I don’t recommend you watch the film on a TV screen. The broadcast version will be released later. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you warmly for your continued support and loyalty.
Note : There was an error during the previous upload, and only 17 minutes of the film were available. The problem has been fixed. Below, the whole film.

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I. THE LAWN

On 13 September 1993, on the South Lawn of the White House, Yitzhak Rabin shook a hand he did not want to shake, and the photograph went around the world as the image of peace arriving. What was actually signed that morning was not a peace treaty. It was a Declaration of Principles, a five-year interim arrangement, and its real substance sat in two letters exchanged four days earlier.

In his letter of 9 September, Yasser Arafat committed the PLO to a short list of specific obligations. He recognised the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security. He accepted Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. He undertook to resolve every outstanding issue through negotiation. He renounced the use of terrorism and other acts of violence. He assumed responsibility over all PLO personnel to ensure their compliance, prevent violations, and discipline violators. And he declared the clauses of the Palestinian National Covenant denying Israel’s right to exist to be inoperative and no longer valid, undertaking to have the Palestine National Council formally amend the text.

Rabin’s reply was a single sentence recognising the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. Israel then delivered the rest in kind: territory, in six successive withdrawals; a police force it armed with tens of thousands of rifles; a tax-collection mechanism under the Paris Protocol that funded the new administration; and the diplomatic legitimacy that turned a proscribed guerrilla organisation into an internationally underwritten government receiving one of the highest per-capita aid flows on earth. Thirty-three years later, of the obligations Arafat signed, not one has been fully honoured, and the Covenant he promised to amend has never been amended. This is not a story of a process that broke down. It is a story of a contract that one party never intended to perform.

II. THE FILE ON THE MAN WHO SIGNED

It is worth remembering what Israel was asked to accept as a partner. On 1 March 1973, eight operatives of Black September stormed the Saudi embassy in Khartoum and seized the American ambassador Cleo Noel, the American chargé d’affaires George Curtis Moore, and the Belgian chargé Guy Eid. The next evening all three were machine-gunned in the basement. For thirty-three years Washington declined to say who had ordered it. Then, in 2006, the State Department declassified an intelligence memorandum, published in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, which states in its opening summary that the Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO and head of Fatah. Two American diplomats were murdered on the orders of the man who would stand on the White House lawn twenty years later.

Khartoum was not an aberration in the record; it was a routine entry. Black September, a Fatah instrument, murdered eleven Israeli athletes at Munich in September 1972 and hijacked Sabena Flight 571 that May. On 11 March 1978, a Fatah squad landed north of Tel Aviv, murdered an American photographer on the beach, seized a bus on the coastal highway, and left thirty-eight civilians dead, thirteen of them children. Its commander, Dalal Mughrabi, has since been honoured by the Palestinian Authority with schools, squares and summer camps bearing her name. Other PLO constituents kept the same accounts: the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine machine-gunned a school bus at Avivim in May 1970, killing twelve, nine of them children, and four years later seized a school at Ma’alot and murdered twenty-two teenagers. Arafat chaired the umbrella under which all of this was organised, financed and celebrated from 1969 onwards.

The Lebanese chapter is the one most systematically forgotten, and the one Europe should find hardest to read. Expelled from Jordan in 1970, the PLO rebuilt itself in Lebanon as a state within a state, and in January 1976 it took part in the destruction of Damour, a Maronite town on the coast road south of Beirut. Fatah units, alongside the Syrian-run Sa’iqa and the Mourabitoun, overran the town; estimates of the civilian dead run from roughly a hundred and fifty to close to six hundred. The church was desecrated and the cemetery dug up. Damour followed by two days the Phalangist massacre at Karantina, and the Lebanese civil war produced atrocities in every direction, including against Palestinians. That sequence explains the chronology. It does not convert the killing of a Christian town into an act of resistance, and it does not explain why the organisation responsible was, seventeen years later, handed the keys to a territory adjacent to Israel’s coastal plain.

The last entry before Oslo is the Achille Lauro. In October 1985, hijackers from the Palestine Liberation Front, whose leader Abu Abbas sat on the PLO Executive Committee, shot Leon Klinghoffer, a sixty-nine-year-old American in a wheelchair, and pushed him and his chair into the Mediterranean.

III. THE MOSCOW FILE

The Soviet dimension of Arafat’s career is often waved away as Israeli folklore. It is documented, though the documentation requires care. The Mitrokhin archive, the handwritten copies of KGB First Chief Directorate files smuggled out by the archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and published by Cambridge’s Christopher Andrew, records Arafat as a cultivated contact under the codename Aref, assigned a dedicated liaison officer, and it records the KGB’s private contempt for him: an internal note dismissed his information as thin and self-serving. The same archive is far more categorical about Wadie Haddad of the PFLP, the architect of the hijacking era, listed as a recruited agent codenamed Nationalist, with the Soviets funding and arming his organisation and, on Andrew’s reading, having advance knowledge of and almost certainly sanctioning the multiple-aircraft hijackings of September 1970. When Haddad was poisoned in 1978, Arafat asked the KGB for help and the Stasi hid him in an East Berlin hospital under a false name.

The more colourful claims — that the KGB fabricated Arafat’s Palestinian birth certificate, trained him at the Balashikha special-operations school, and funnelled him two hundred thousand dollars a month in laundered cash — come from Ion Mihai Pacepa, the defecting head of Romanian foreign intelligence, and rest on his testimony alone. They should be cited as what they are. The documented core does not need them. Mitrokhin’s notes also identify Mahmoud Abbas as a KGB agent recruited in Damascus in 1983 under the codename Krotov, the Mole; Fatah has called it a smear. What is not in dispute is that Abbas took his doctorate at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University and that his 1982 thesis, later published, minimised the scale of the Holocaust and advanced the claim that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazis in the destruction of European Jewry. That is the intellectual formation of the man the international community has spent two decades describing as the moderate.

IV. A NATION DECLARED IN CAIRO, 1964

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Cairo in January 1964, at the initiative of the Arab League and under Egyptian sponsorship. This is three and a half years before Israel held a single square metre of Judea, Samaria, Gaza or eastern Jerusalem. Whatever the PLO was created to liberate in January 1964, it was not the West Bank, which was held by Jordan, and it was not Gaza, which was held by Egypt.

The founding Charter says so in terms. Article 24 of the 1964 text states that the organisation exercises no territorial sovereignty over the West Bank within the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, over the Gaza Strip, or over the Himmah area. Defenders of the movement answer, not unreasonably, that Article 24 was a diplomatic courtesy to Amman, Cairo and Damascus rather than a renunciation, and that Article 2 already defined Palestine by the boundaries of the Mandate. Take the objection at full strength; it changes nothing that matters. For nineteen years, from 1948 to 1967, Jordan ruled Judea and Samaria and Egypt ruled Gaza, and in those nineteen years no Palestinian state was established, none was demanded, and no liberation movement fired a shot to obtain one. Article 24 was quietly deleted in the revised Charter of 1968 — the year after Israel took the territories. The claim to Judea, Samaria and Gaza did not produce the conflict. The conflict produced the claim.

The most candid witness on this point is not Israeli. Zuheir Mohsen sat on the PLO Executive Committee and led the Syrian-backed Sa’iqa faction. In an interview with the Dutch daily Trouw on 31 March 1977, he told the journalist James Dorsey that “the Palestinian people does not exist”, that there was no real distinction between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese, and that a separate Palestinian identity was asserted for tactical reasons because Arab national interests required a distinct people to set against Zionism. Mohsen was a pan-Arabist making a pan-Arabist argument, and he was arguing for the erasure of Palestinian particularity in favour of a greater Syria. His candour is nonetheless on the record, from the leadership itself, in a European newspaper. Identity is not the point in dispute. The point in dispute is what the movement was built to accomplish, and its own founders keep saying that the state was the instrument and the war was the objective.

V. THE CONTRACT

The Interim Agreement of 28 September 1995, Oslo II, is a hundred-page legal instrument, and it is worth stating precisely what it required of the Palestinian side, because the obligations are almost never enumerated in the coverage that treats the process as something Israel did to somebody.

Article XV obliged the Authority to take all measures necessary to prevent acts of terrorism, crime and hostilities directed against Israelis, and to take legal measures against offenders — not to condemn, not to deplore, but to arrest and prosecute. Article XIV established a monopoly of force: apart from the Palestinian Police and the Israeli army, no armed force was to be established or to operate in the territories, and no organisation, group or individual was to manufacture, acquire, possess or import weapons or explosives outside the enumerated, registered and capped inventory of that police force. Article IX(5) withheld foreign relations from the Council altogether, naming embassies, consulates and other foreign missions, and the appointment of diplomatic staff, as spheres it would not possess. Article XXII(1) required both parties to abstain from incitement, including hostile propaganda, and to take legal measures to prevent incitement by any organisation, group or individual within their jurisdiction; Article XXII(2) required their education systems to contribute to peace and to refrain from introducing any material that could damage reconciliation. Article XXXI(7) provided that neither side would initiate or take any step altering the status of the West Bank and Gaza pending the outcome of permanent-status negotiations. Article XXXI(9) required the Palestine National Council to convene within two months of the Council’s inauguration and formally approve the changes to the Covenant. And the Declaration of Principles bound both parties to resolve disputes arising from the accords by negotiation, through the joint liaison machinery — not in third-party forums.

Read together, these are not vague aspirations. They are a set of enforceable undertakings: stop the killing, monopolise the guns, stop the incitement, teach peace in the schools, do not conduct foreign policy, do not prejudge the outcome unilaterally, and rewrite the founding document that calls for the destruction of the other party. Every one of them has been breached, most of them continuously, and several of them as declared policy.

VI. THE BREACHES

Start with the Covenant, because it is the simplest test and the one no one can blame on circumstance. In April 1996 the Palestine National Council voted to annul the clauses inconsistent with the letters of recognition and to task a legal committee with drafting a new charter. The committee never produced one. President Clinton flew to Gaza in December 1998 to obtain a show of hands reaffirming the annulment. Thirty years on, there is no amended Palestinian National Charter. The single obligation that required nothing but a pen was never completed.

On the monopoly of force, the record is worse than non-compliance. In January 2002 Israeli commandos boarded the Karine A in the Red Sea and found fifty tonnes of Iranian ordnance — Katyushas, mortars, anti-tank missiles, explosives — procured through Fuad Shubaki, the senior financial officer of the Palestinian Authority’s security apparatus. Arafat wrote to President Bush denying all knowledge. Shubaki was later convicted. Meanwhile the signatory party itself ran an armed wing: the Tanzim and the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which the United States designated as a terrorist organisation in 2002, were Fatah, not some uncontrollable rival. During the Second Intifada more than a thousand Israelis were murdered, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, in buses, cafés, discotheques and at a Passover seder, by an insurgency in which the ruling party of the Authority was a direct participant.

On incitement, the Authority has never even feigned compliance. It names streets, schools, squares and youth tournaments after the perpetrators of the coastal road massacre and the Sbarro bombing; its official media have run the celebration of “martyrdom” as a continuous editorial line; and the review of Palestinian textbooks commissioned by the European Union and carried out by the Georg Eckert Institute, published in 2021, found material inconsistent with UNESCO standards on peace and tolerance still embedded in the state curriculum a quarter of a century after Article XXII was signed.

On unilateralism, the strategy has been open. Having undertaken to determine status only by negotiation, the Authority joined UNESCO in 2011, obtained non-member observer state status at the General Assembly in 2012, acceded to the Rome Statute in 2015 and immediately referred Israel to the International Criminal Court, drove the advisory proceedings at the International Court of Justice, and in September 2025 harvested a wave of European recognitions. Each of these steps is an attempt to obtain the permanent-status outcome from third parties while giving nothing that a permanent-status agreement would have required in exchange. That is precisely the conduct Article XXXI(7) and the negotiation clause were drafted to prohibit, and the Authority has pursued it as its principal foreign policy for fifteen years — while formally possessing no foreign-policy powers at all.

And on the democratic architecture the accords were supposed to build: the last presidential election was in January 2005, the last legislative election in 2006, the Legislative Council was dissolved in 2018 by a court Abbas appointed, and the elections scheduled for May 2021 were cancelled when Fatah looked likely to lose them. Mahmoud Abbas is in the twenty-first year of a four-year term. Municipal ballots were held in April 2026 and presented as evidence of renewal.

The obvious rejoinder is settlements, and it deserves an answer rather than a silence. Critics of Israel invoke the same Article XXXI(7) against the growth of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, and the argument is not frivolous. But the accords contain no settlement freeze; the parties expressly deferred settlements, along with Jerusalem, borders and refugees, to permanent-status talks; and Israel has twice offered to evacuate them wholesale as part of a final agreement, which is what a deferred issue looks like when it is finally negotiated. Above all, the two categories are not commensurate. A housing tender is reversible, and in 2005 Israel proved it by removing every settlement in Gaza in a fortnight. A bus bombing is not reversible. No apartment block in Ariel has ever detonated in a pizzeria.

VII. THE PRICE LIST

Of all the breaches, one deserves separate treatment, because it is not a failure of control but a budget line. Under Law No. 14 of 2004 and the Law of Prisoners and Released Prisoners of 2013, the Palestinian Authority paid monthly salaries to Palestinians imprisoned for attacks on Israelis, and to the families of those killed carrying them out, on a scale that rose with the length of the sentence. The longer the sentence, the larger the payment. That is not welfare. Welfare is calibrated to need. This was calibrated to the gravity of the crime, which makes it a tariff, and a tariff is an incentive. The United States responded with the Taylor Force Act in 2018, named for an American army veteran stabbed to death in Jaffa; Israel responded the same year with a law deducting the sums from the tax revenues it collects on the Authority’s behalf.

In February 2025, under sustained American and European pressure, Abbas issued a decree revoking the relevant laws and transferring the function to a new body, the Palestinian National Foundation for Economic Empowerment, on a purported needs basis. Eight days later he dismissed Qadura Fares, the head of the Authority’s prisoners’ commission, for objecting. He then told Fatah’s Revolutionary Council that if a single penny remained, it would go to the prisoners and the martyrs. On the strength of that decree, France recognised a Palestinian state at the General Assembly podium in September 2025, with Emmanuel Macron citing the pledge explicitly; the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Luxembourg and Norway followed within days.

In April 2026 the State Department submitted its mandatory report to Congress under the Taylor Force Act. It found that the Authority continues to run a system of compensation supporting terrorism through new mechanisms and “under a different name”, identifying the new welfare foundation as one of the vehicles. It put the sums paid during calendar year 2025 — the year of the decree, the year of the recognitions — at roughly $156 million, of which $126 million went to imprisoned attackers and $30 million to the families of those who died committing attacks. It recorded that in February 2026, a year after the decree, the Authority’s own finance minister publicly reaffirmed the commitment and acknowledged that the payments had not stopped. Palestinian Media Watch traced distributions through the postal system and into accounts in Jordan and Lebanon, beyond the reach of Western auditors. When some former prisoners protested in Bethlehem in December 2025 and January 2026 that their money had been interrupted, no Palestinian outlet reported it.

Seven Western governments granted recognition on the strength of a reform that the American government, reading the same evidence a few months later, concluded was a change of letterhead.

VIII. TWICE OFFERED A STATE, TWICE REFUSED

At Camp David in July 2000, Ehud Barak, with Bill Clinton in the room, put on the table all of Gaza, roughly nine-tenths of Judea and Samaria, Palestinian sovereignty over the Arab neighbourhoods of eastern Jerusalem and a form of control on the Temple Mount that no previous Israeli leader had contemplated. Arafat refused, and — this is the detail that matters — he tabled no counter-proposal. In December, Clinton reduced the terms to written parameters, more generous still, with 94 to 96 per cent of the territory and swaps for the remainder. Israel accepted with reservations. Arafat did not. Two months after Camp David, the Second Intifada began. Clinton’s own verdict on Arafat, recorded in his memoir, was that the chairman had made a failure of him; Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington and no friend of Israel, described the refusal as a crime against the Palestinians and against the whole region.

Eight years later the offer was repeated and improved. Between 2006 and 2008 Ehud Olmert met Mahmoud Abbas thirty-six times. On 16 September 2008 he presented a map: 93.7 per cent of Judea and Samaria, with 5.8 per cent of sovereign Israeli territory transferred in compensation and a corridor linking the West Bank to Gaza; all of Gaza; the Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem as the capital; the Old City and the holy sites removed from Israeli sovereignty and placed under a five-member trusteeship of Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United States, an arrangement that guaranteed a non-Israeli majority over the Temple Mount; and a symbolic intake of refugees. Olmert asked Abbas to initial the map. Abbas asked to take it away, was refused, left, and never returned; the thirty-seventh meeting never happened. In May 2009 he told the Washington Post that the gaps had been too wide. In November 2015, on Israeli television, he said plainly that he had rejected it out of hand. Saeb Erekat maintained that the Palestinians deposited a counter-map with the Americans three months later; whatever was in it, no Palestinian leader in fifty years has ever put his signature on a map of the state he says he wants.

Between them, Arafat and Abbas were offered a sovereign Palestinian state on substantially all of the territory captured in 1967, with a capital in Jerusalem, three times in eight years. Each time the answer was no, and on no occasion was the no accompanied by a yes to anything else. A national movement that declines statehood three times is not being denied a state. It is declining one, because accepting it would mean signing an end to the claim, and the claim is the enterprise.

IX. THE FAMILY BUSINESS

The other reason the Authority cannot make peace is that peace would end the arrangement it exists to protect. In September 2003 the International Monetary Fund published a study of Palestinian public finances which found that some $900 million in revenues from the Authority’s commercial holdings had been diverted between 1995 and 2000 into a special account controlled by Arafat and his financial adviser. The same review found that $34 million of the $74 million allocated to the presidency’s own 2003 budget went out as unexplained transfers to unnamed organisations and individuals. Arafat’s wife lived in Paris on a reported allowance of $100,000 a month; in 2003 French prosecutors opened a money-laundering inquiry into $11.4 million transferred into her accounts over fourteen months. She denied wrongdoing, and no charges followed. The Authority’s commercial life — cement, fuel, flour, tobacco — ran through monopolies administered by Arafat’s adviser Mohammed Rashid, later convicted in absentia of embezzlement by a Palestinian court.

Under Abbas the method changed and the substance did not. His sons Yasser and Tarek built the Falcon consortium, spanning tobacco, construction, engineering, media and investment, alongside insurance interests; both took American-funded contracts in the West Bank, including from USAID, and a lawsuit against one journalist who wrote about it went nowhere. The Panama Papers named a holding of Tarek’s in a company linked to the Authority, and the Palestinian anti-corruption coalition AMAN called for an investigating team that was never seriously constituted.

The most damning testimony is Palestinian. A survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in October 2025 found that eighty per cent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza want Abbas to resign. In January 2026, Tawfiq Tirawi — former head of Palestinian General Intelligence, a member of Fatah’s Central Committee, and a man with no discernible sympathy for Israel — published an open appeal to Abbas denouncing the institutional corruption of the Palestinian leadership, the seizure of public and private land by regime-connected brokers, and a moral collapse of Palestinian institutions, and accused the president’s own entourage of concealing the state of affairs from him. When the man who ran your intelligence service says the institution is rotten, the accusation cannot be filed under Israeli propaganda.

X. THE VERDICT

On 3 August 2026, Justice Sonia Sotomayor refused to halt enforcement of a $656 million judgment against the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, obtained under the Anti-Terrorism Act by American families killed and maimed in Jerusalem in the early 2000s. The Authority’s argument to the Supreme Court was that paying would destabilise its provision of government services in the West Bank. Set that alongside the State Department’s finding four months earlier. An institution that cannot afford to compensate the American dead has found $156 million a year for the people who killed them, and it says both things in public, in the same year, to different audiences, and expects neither audience to check.

There is also a control experiment, and it has already been run. In 2005 Israel withdrew every soldier and every settler from Gaza, uprooting its own citizens by force to do it. The Authority lost the 2006 election and then lost Gaza itself in the 2007 coup. What grew in the vacuum was not a Singapore on the Mediterranean but a garrison that spent eighteen years building tunnels instead of sewers and produced the 7 October 2023 massacre. Today Gaza is administered by a transitional authority under Security Council Resolution 2803, because after all of it neither the Authority nor Hamas can be trusted to hold it. That is the answer to the question of what a sovereign state under this leadership would have become, and it is not a hypothesis.

Oslo was not killed by Israeli housing tenders. It was killed by a leadership that signed a renunciation of violence and kept an armed wing, signed a ban on incitement and named schools after bus bombers, signed away foreign relations and built a diplomatic campaign against the other party, signed a promise to amend a charter and never amended it, and was offered the state three times and refused it three times while paying salaries to the men who made the state impossible. The Palestinians do have a national tragedy. Its authors are buried in Ramallah, or governing from it.

I. THE THRONE

Around the year 1000 BCE, a shepherd turned warrior-king named David took a Jebusite hill town wedged between two ravines and made it the capital of a united Israelite kingdom. His son Solomon built a temple on that hill, and for the next four centuries the House of David sat on a throne in Jerusalem while the twin institutions of monarchy and priesthood fused into the spine of a nation. That kingdom split, was conquered, was exiled to Babylon in 586 BCE, and its Temple was burned to the ground. This is the part every enemy of the Jews since Nebuchadnezzar has counted on: destruction as an ending. It was not one. Within two generations the exiles were back, rebuilding on the same foundation stones, and by 516 BCE a Second Temple stood where the first had stood, on the same hill David had bought for full price from a Jebusite farmer a thousand years earlier so that no one could ever say it had been seized rather than owned. Persians, Greeks, and finally Rome came and went as landlords over that hill, and in 70 CE Titus burned the Second Temple as his father Vespasian consolidated an empire on the backs of a crushed province. Josephus, who watched it happen, put the dead in the hundreds of thousands. Even that did not end it. The lesson of the first eleven hundred years of this story is simple and it is the lesson every subsequent conqueror refused to learn: you can burn the building. You cannot burn the claim.

II. THE NAME THEY STOLE

Sixty years after the Temple burned, the Jews rose again, this time under a commander named Simon bar Kokhba, and for three years, from 132 to 135 CE, they ran an independent Judean state in the teeth of the Roman Empire at its zenith. Hadrian, who had started his reign as a builder and finished it as a butcher, brought in his best legions and crushed the revolt with a thoroughness that shocked even Roman chroniclers. Cassius Dio put the toll at fifty demolished fortresses, nine hundred and eighty-five villages razed, and close to six hundred thousand dead in battle alone, with famine and disease taking uncounted more. Hadrian was not satisfied with victory. He wanted the memory erased along with the men. He rebuilt Jerusalem as a pagan colony, Aelia Capitolina, planted a temple to Jupiter on the ruins of the Jewish one, and barred Jews from entering the city on pain of death, an exile from their own capital that would last for centuries. And then he did something no losing side in any other Roman war ever had done to it: he abolished the name of the country. Judea, the name of David’s kingdom, the name that had identified this land and this people for a thousand years, was struck from the map by imperial decree and replaced with Syria Palaestina, a label lifted deliberately from the Philistines, a seafaring Aegean people who had vanished from history half a millennium earlier and who were not Semites, not Arabs, and not remotely connected to the land’s actual population. It was not a geographic correction. It was an act of psychological warfare aimed at the historical record itself, a Roman emperor’s attempt to sever a people from its own name by handing their homeland to the ghost of an extinct enemy. Nineteen centuries later, that name would still be doing exactly the political work Hadrian designed it to do. That is how long a well-placed lie can travel when nobody is left standing to correct it in real time.

III. THE PEOPLE WHO STAYED

Here is what the imperial decree did not accomplish, because no decree ever can: it did not empty the land of Jews. Barred from Jerusalem, the surviving Jewish population regrouped in the Galilee, in towns like Sepphoris, Usha, Beit She’arim, and Tiberias, and kept functioning as a self-governing religious civilization under Roman and then Byzantine rule for the next five hundred years. The Patriarchate, the Nasi, continued to lead world Jewry from Galilean soil. Judah HaNasi compiled the Mishnah there around 200 CE. The academies of Tiberias produced the Jerusalem Talmud around the year 400. This was not a diaspora community writing wistfully about a lost homeland from safe exile abroad. This was the seat of Jewish law and Jewish leadership, physically resident on the land, for centuries after the world was told the Jews had been removed from it. Byzantine Christian rule piled on new restrictions, barring Jews from public office and from building new synagogues, but restriction is not eviction, and when the Sassanid Persians briefly seized the country in 614 CE, Galilean and Jerusalemite Jews rose up to fight alongside them, still holding out hope for restoration five centuries after Hadrian thought he had settled the matter permanently. That hope was premature by thirteen more centuries. It was not, in the end, wrong.

IV. THE PROTECTED WHO WERE NEVER FREE

The Byzantines were still recovering from the Persian war when Arab armies under Caliph Umar took the country between 636 and 640 CE, and a new legal category was invented for the Jews and Christians who remained: dhimmi, the “protected” people. Protection came with a price and a ceiling. The Pact of Umar, codified in the decades that followed, required Jews to pay a special poll tax, the jizya, forbade them from building new synagogues or repairing old ones without permission, barred them from riding horses, from bearing arms, from testifying against a Muslim in court, and imposed, in various periods and places, distinguishing dress meant to mark them visibly as subordinate. This status was not static, and honesty requires saying so: under some caliphs and in some centuries, Jewish physicians, poets, philosophers, and administrators rose to real prominence in Muslim courts, and Jewish communities in Baghdad and Cordoba produced some of the richest scholarship in Jewish history. But the protection was always conditional, always revocable at the whim of the ruler, and never equal. When the Almohad dynasty swept across Muslim Spain and North Africa in the twelfth century, it did not bother refining the dhimma. It abolished it outright and gave Jews a choice between conversion and death, a policy that emptied Jewish Cordoba and sent an entire generation of refugees, Maimonides’s family among them, running for their lives. Centuries of court poetry does not erase that the entire structure, at its most generous, was a legal ceiling built over the heads of a native population in its own ancestral country, and at its most brutal, a death sentence with a grace period.

V. THE CROSS AND THE SWORD

If the Muslim conquerors offered subjugation with an occasional golden age attached, the Crusaders offered no such ambiguity. In 1096, before the First Crusade had even reached the Holy Land, Christian mobs under commanders like Count Emicho tore through the Rhineland, and the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne, and Trier were slaughtered in what remain among the largest anti-Jewish massacres of the medieval period, chronicled in searing detail by contemporary Hebrew writers who recorded families choosing collective death over forced baptism. Three years later the Crusaders reached Jerusalem, and on July 15, 1099, when the city fell, they did not stop at killing the Muslim garrison. Contemporary Christian chroniclers, not hostile propagandists but the Crusaders’ own scribes, record that the city’s Jews were driven into the main synagogue, and the building was set on fire with them locked inside. It stands as one of the only massacres in this entire three-thousand-year record for which the perpetrators’ own witnesses supplied the evidence. For the better part of the following century, the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem barred Jews from residing in the city their king David had built, and what remained of organized Jewish life in the country clung on in Tyre, Ashkelon, and Caesarea until Saladin’s reconquest in 1187 reopened Jerusalem to Jewish resettlement. Two rival powers, waving two different holy books, agreed on exactly one policy toward the people native to this land: neither wanted them in it.

VI. THE PHYSICIAN OF TWO EXILES

Moses ben Maimon was born in Cordoba in 1138, into a Jewish community then living the more tolerant version of Muslim rule, and by the time he was thirteen the Almohads had taken the city and ended that arrangement for good. What followed was over a decade of flight, first through Muslim Spain, then to Fez in Morocco, living in a Jewish community whose choice was outward disguise or death. In 1165 the family finally sailed for the one place that was, whatever its condition, still theirs by inheritance: they landed at Acre, and Maimonides went to Jerusalem and prayed among the ruins on the Temple Mount, then traveled to Hebron to the Cave of the Patriarchs where Abraham is buried. He recorded both dates afterward as personal holidays for the rest of his life, an extraordinary admission from a man whose entire philosophical project was built on disciplined rationalism, and proof that even the coldest mind in medieval Judaism could not approach that ground without being shaken by it. Political reality then did what it had done to Jews in this land for a thousand years before him: Crusader control and a devastated local Jewish infrastructure left no room to build a life there, and the family moved on to Fustat, in Egypt, where Maimonides became court physician to Saladin’s vizier and Nagid of Egyptian Jewry, and where he wrote the Mishneh Torah and the Guide for the Perplexed, the two works that would define rabbinic Judaism for the next eight hundred years. He died in Fustat in 1204. Tradition holds that his body was carried north for burial in Tiberias, back to the Galilee that had sheltered Jewish leadership since the Bar Kokhba catastrophe, and his tomb stands there to this day, a pilgrimage site for a people whose greatest philosopher chose, even in death, to return to the one address Hadrian had spent an empire trying to convince the world was no longer his.

VII. THE HILLS THAT NEVER EMPTIED

Jerusalem’s Jewish community, battered nearly to nothing by a Khwarezmian sack of the city in 1244, was rebuilt after the Mamluks took the country in 1260 largely through the arrival in 1267 of Nachmanides, another Spanish exile, who found a handful of Jews left in the city, founded the synagogue that still bears his name, and wrote home urging Jews across the Mediterranean to come rebuild what conquest kept trying to dismantle. The Ottoman conquest of 1517 brought fresh waves, many of them refugees from the 1492 expulsion from Spain, and in the sixteenth century they turned Safed into the intellectual capital of the Jewish world, the town where Joseph Karo compiled the Shulchan Aruch and Isaac Luria reshaped Jewish mysticism for every generation since. Through every one of these centuries, in the Galilean village of Peki’in in particular, Jewish habitation is documented without a single interruption since Second Temple times, a single unbroken thread running underneath every empire that thought it had cut it. By the middle of the nineteenth century, before political Zionism existed as an organized movement, Ottoman records and the reports of the British and Prussian consuls stationed in Jerusalem agree that Jews already formed the largest single population group in the city. The waves that followed in the following decades, refugees from Russian pogroms, from European fascism, from a Holocaust that left survivors with literally nowhere else on earth that would take them in, were not colonists arriving in a foreign country. They were the latest returning current in a river that had never actually stopped flowing, converging back onto hills their ancestors had never fully left.

VIII. THE CIRCLE CLOSES

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion stood in Tel Aviv and declared a state. He did not call it Palaestina. He called it Israel, the name of the patriarch Jacob, the name of David’s kingdom, the name Hadrian had spent the full weight of the Roman Empire trying to strike permanently from the map thirty-five years after he believed he had finished the job. Rome is gone; its emperors are footnotes assigned to graduate students. The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem is gone. The Almohad Caliphate is gone. Aelia Capitolina does not exist on any map printed after antiquity. What remains, in Jerusalem, in Hebron, in Tiberias, in the Galilee towns whose synagogues have stood since the Mishnah was written there, is the same people this land was named for before an emperor decided a lie could outlast a nation. It could not. Every power that ever tried to rename this people out of their own history is now a chapter in someone else’s; the people themselves are not a chapter. They are still writing.

On the evening of 3 September 1897, in a rented hall in Basel, a Viennese journalist wrote a line in his diary that would sound insane to anyone who read it. At Basel, he wrote, he had founded the Jewish State. If he said so aloud, the world would laugh. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty, everyone would see it.

Fifty years and two months later, on 29 November 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state. Theodor Herzl had been dead for forty-three years. He had been wrong about almost every detail and right about the only thing that mattered.

That is the story worth telling, and it has been buried under seventy years of accumulated slander so thick that most educated Westerners now believe the exact inverse of every load-bearing fact.

What Zionism actually is

Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. That is the whole definition. It holds that the Jews constitute a nation, that nations are entitled to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, and that the Jewish homeland is the strip of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jewish peoplehood was formed, where Jewish law was written, where Jewish kings ruled, and toward which every Jew in every exile prayed three times a day for nineteen centuries without a single year’s interruption.

The word was coined by Nathan Birnbaum in 1890. The idea is considerably older than the word. It predates European colonialism by two thousand years and it predates the modern nation-state by roughly the same margin. When a Jew in Vilna or Fez or Baghdad ended the Passover seder with next year in Jerusalem, he was not indulging in metaphor. He was stating an address.

Every other national movement of the twentieth century is granted this framing automatically. The Irish, the Poles, the Czechs, the Algerians, the Vietnamese, the Kurds. Their aspiration to a state of their own is treated as the natural expression of a people’s dignity. Only in the Jewish case is the identical aspiration reclassified as a crime, and the reclassification is itself the oldest tell in the book. The demand that Jews alone forgo what everyone else is granted by default has a name, and the name has not changed since the Middle Ages.

Why the state was not optional

The nineteenth century offered the Jews of Europe a deal. Assimilate, stop being conspicuous, dress like your neighbours, speak their language, serve in their armies, and you will be accepted as citizens. Millions of Jews took the deal in perfect good faith. They became German patriots, French officers, Austrian professors, Russian doctors. They gave Europe its physics and its music and its jurisprudence.

The deal was a fraud, and it was exposed twice within twenty years.

In 1881 the assassination of Alexander II triggered a wave of pogroms across the Pale of Settlement, followed by the May Laws that stripped Jews of the right to live in villages, hold mortgages, or trade on Sundays. In Odessa, a physician named Leon Pinsker who had spent his career arguing for Jewish integration into Russian society wrote a pamphlet called Auto-Emancipation. Its argument was brutally simple. The Jews were everywhere a ghost people, present without a body, and the world reacted to them with the instinctive horror reserved for ghosts. No amount of civic virtue would cure the world of this. Only a body would. Only a territory.

Thirteen years later, in the most enlightened republic in Europe, a Jewish artillery captain was stripped of his rank in the courtyard of the École Militaire while a crowd outside the gates chanted for the death of the Jews. The correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse covering the degradation was Theodor Herzl. He had arrived in Paris a comfortable liberal who believed the Jewish question would dissolve in the acid of modernity. He left convinced that emancipation had failed in the one country where it had been given every possible advantage.

Both men reached the same conclusion by different roads. Antisemitism is not a Jewish behaviour problem. It cannot be solved by Jews becoming better, quieter, more useful, more grateful. It is a permanent structural feature of societies that host a stateless minority, and the only remedy available to a stateless people is to stop being stateless.

Europe spent the years between 1941 and 1945 proving them right with an industrial thoroughness that left nothing to argue about. Six million people were murdered because there was no government on earth obliged to defend them, no army that would come, no embassy that would issue papers, no navy that would sail. The St. Louis sailed from Hamburg in May 1939 with 937 Jewish refugees and was turned away from Cuba, from the United States, and from Canada. It sailed back to Europe. A quarter of its passengers were later murdered.

And then, in the decades after 1948, roughly 850,000 Jews were driven out of Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Tripoli, Sanaa, Fez and Algiers, communities that in some cases predated Islam by a thousand years, their property confiscated, their citizenship revoked, their synagogues burned. They were absorbed almost entirely by a bankrupt new country of 800,000 people that took them in without conditions and without international funding, and today their descendants make up more than half the Jewish population of Israel. The world has never once been asked to consider them refugees.

Zionism was the correct answer to a question that Europe and the Arab world posed with unmistakable clarity. The Jews who understood it early lived. The ones who waited for civilization to protect them died.

The land they came to

The Palestine of the nineteenth century was one of the most neglected backwaters of a decomposing empire. It had no separate administrative existence. It was carved among the vilayet of Beirut and the sanjaks of Acre, Nablus and Jerusalem, governed from Constantinople by men who regarded the posting as a punishment.

Ottoman fiscal policy had ruined it methodically. The land code of 1858 required registration for title, and peasants who feared conscription and taxation registered nothing, allowing vast tracts to be consolidated in the hands of absentee notables in Beirut and Damascus who never saw the fields they owned. The tithe on tree crops was assessed in a way that made planting an orchard an act of financial self-harm, so the hillsides that had once been terraced and forested went bare. What timber remained was cut for the Hejaz railway. The coastal plain, denied drainage, reverted to malarial swamp. The Huleh basin in the north was a mosquito factory. The Jezreel valley, the breadbasket of biblical Israel, was standing water.

The population figures tell the story without editorializing. The Ottoman census of 1878 counted something in the range of 460,000 people in the three districts. Fewer than half a million souls on ground that today sustains fifteen million between the river and the sea.

Every Western traveller who crossed it in that century recorded the same impression, and they were not coordinating. Mark Twain, who went through in 1867 and had no interest whatever in Jewish national revival, described a country given over to weeds, a silent and mournful expanse where he rode for hours without meeting a human being. He called Jerusalem a village. The land was not empty. It was exhausted, depopulated relative to any capacity it had ever had, and dying.

This is the territory that the first Zionist pioneers bought. Bought, at inflated prices, in cash, from willing sellers, with money raised from Jewish farmers and Jewish shopkeepers across Europe. In 1921 the Sursock family of Beirut, Greek Orthodox Christian grandees who had acquired the Jezreel valley from the Ottoman state and had never lived within two hundred kilometres of it, sold some 240,000 dunams of malarial marsh to Jewish purchasers at a price that would have bought prime agricultural land in France. The buyers drained it by hand. Many of them died of malaria doing it. That is the colonial conquest the world has been instructed to condemn.

The immigration nobody mentions

Here is the fact that detonates the entire modern narrative, and it comes from British colonial records rather than from any Israeli source.

Between the census of 1922 and the end of the Mandate, the Arab population of Palestine grew at a rate that no natural increase in the region could explain. It grew fastest precisely where Jewish settlement and Jewish capital were most concentrated. Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem, the three centres of Jewish economic activity, saw their Arab populations multiply several times over in twenty-five years. Nablus and Hebron and Gaza, wholly Arab towns untouched by Jewish investment, grew at a fraction of that rate. People do not migrate toward oppression. They migrate toward wages.

The British knew exactly what was happening. The Hope Simpson report of 1930 noted illegal immigration from Syria and Transjordan and recommended that it be policed. Labourers came down from the Hauran in their thousands to work on the construction of Haifa port and to take jobs in the citrus groves. Winston Churchill, testifying before the Peel Commission in 1937, dismissed the entire premise of Arab grievance in one sentence, observing that far from being persecuted, the Arabs had crowded into the country and multiplied.

The surnames remain in the phone book to this day. Al-Masri, the Egyptian. Al-Hourani, from the Hauran in Syria. Al-Mughrabi, from the Maghreb. Al-Halabi, from Aleppo. Al-Iraqi. Al-Yamani. A population that has occupied the same soil since time immemorial does not name itself after the places it came from three generations ago.

So the true sequence runs in the exact opposite direction from the one taught in Western universities. Jewish immigrants bought derelict land, drained it, irrigated it, planted it, built ports and roads and power stations and hospitals, and generated the only functioning economy between Cairo and Beirut. Arab immigrants came from the surrounding countries to share in the prosperity that had been created. And their grandchildren now claim the moral status of an indigenous people dispossessed by foreign settlers.

The miracles

What the Zionists did with that land in a single lifetime has no parallel anywhere in the record of nation-building, and the details deserve to be recited rather than summarized.

They resurrected a language. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda landed at Jaffa in 1881 speaking a tongue that had been liturgical and literary for eighteen centuries and vernacular in no household on earth. He raised his son as the first native Hebrew speaker since antiquity. Today nine million people argue, flirt, litigate and write software in it. No other dead language in human history has been brought back to daily use, and none ever will be, because the conditions cannot be reproduced.

They solved water. Simcha Blass noticed a tree growing conspicuously larger than its neighbours and traced the cause to a slow leak in a buried pipe, which gave him the principle of delivering water drop by drop to the root rather than flooding the field. Netafim was founded on that insight at Kibbutz Hatzerim in the Negev in 1965, and drip irrigation now waters crops on every continent, feeding people who have never heard of Israel and would loathe it if they had. Israel today recycles close to ninety per cent of its wastewater, a rate more than four times that of the second-place country on earth, and draws roughly half its drinking water from the Mediterranean through reverse osmosis. A desert state in a region of perpetual water wars runs a surplus.

They killed the swamps. The Huleh was drained through the 1950s, the Jezreel valley a generation earlier, and the World Health Organization certified Israel free of malaria in 1967, in a region where the disease had been endemic since the Bronze Age.

They planted forests. The Jewish National Fund has put more than 240 million trees into that soil, making Israel one of the very few countries on the planet that entered the twenty-first century with more forest cover than it had at the start of the twentieth, while the Sahel and the Amazon went the other way.

They rebuilt agriculture from nothing. The modern commercial cherry tomato was engineered at the Hebrew University. Israeli dairy herds produce more milk per cow than any others in the world. The country exports food while sitting on sand.

They built a scientific culture out of refugees. Fourteen Nobel Prizes, six of them in chemistry, in a nation of ten million. Research and development spending running above six per cent of GDP, the highest of any country in the OECD and more than double the average. Intel opened its first design centre outside the United States in Haifa in 1974, and the processor at the heart of the original IBM personal computer was designed there, as was the architecture that saved the company thirty years later. The flash drive, the firewall, the pill-sized camera that photographs the small intestine, Waze, Mobileye, Copaxone, Iron Dome. A country the size of New Jersey, permanently at war, produces more of this in a decade than the twenty-two states of the Arab League have produced since the discovery of oil made them the richest accident in economic history.

And they took everyone in. In thirty-six hours in May 1991, thirty-four aircraft with their seats removed flew 14,325 Ethiopian Jews out of Addis Ababa. Two babies were born in the air. It remains the only occasion in modern history in which Africans were transported en masse across the sea by a white-majority country for the purpose of making them free citizens rather than slaves. A million Soviet Jews followed after 1991 and were absorbed into a country of five million, which is the demographic equivalent of the United States admitting sixty million people in a decade and giving all of them passports.

The verdict

Zionism took a scattered, unarmed, systematically murdered people and gave them an army, a parliament, a currency, a language, a coastline and a future. It did this in fifty years, on ruined ground, with no imperial sponsor, while fighting off invasion in 1948, 1967 and 1973 and absorbing more refugees per capita than any state has ever absorbed.

Measured by any standard the world applies to anyone else, it is the most successful national liberation movement of the twentieth century and one of the great constructive achievements in the history of the species.

That is precisely why it cannot be forgiven. A failed Jewish state would be pitied. A modest one would be tolerated. What cannot be endured is a Jewish state that works, that wins, that feeds its enemies’ children through irrigation technology it gave away, and that stands as a permanent living refutation of every excuse offered by every neighbouring regime for its own squalor.

Herzl was right in Basel. The world laughed, and then it stopped laughing, and now it has decided to be furious instead. Let it be furious. The trees are planted, the language is spoken, the water flows uphill through pipes into the Negev, and the flag is not coming down.

Europe has spent decades arguing about immigration in the language of borders: how many people entered, how many should be admitted, how many should be deported, how many eventually became citizens. Far less attention was paid to a more consequential question. Once millions of newcomers and their children were living in Europe, which culture would be expected to adapt? Increasingly, part of the answer can be found in schools.

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INTRODUCTION — “MONEY WILL STOP BEING RELEVANT”: ANATOMY OF A PROPHECY

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On 25 March 1144, Holy Saturday, passers-by discovered in Thorpe Wood, on the outskirts of Norwich, the body of a boy of about twelve. His name was William; he was apprenticed to a skinner in the town. No one knew who had killed him, or why. The crime would never be solved: no suspect was ever arrested, no trial was ever held, no guilt was ever established. And yet from this obscure local tragedy would emerge one of the most murderous inventions in European history: the accusation of ritual murder levelled against the Jews, the matrix of what posterity would call the blood libel. For eight centuries, from Norwich to Damascus and from Blois to Kiev, entire Jewish communities would pay with their lives for a fable born in a Benedictine priory in Norfolk.

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Le 25 mars 1144, un samedi saint, des passants découvrent dans le bois de Thorpe, aux portes de Norwich, le corps d’un adolescent d’une douzaine d’années. Il s’appelle Guillaume, il est apprenti chez un pelletier de la ville. Nul ne sait qui l’a tué, ni pourquoi. Le crime restera à jamais non élucidé : aucun suspect ne sera arrêté, aucun procès ne sera tenu, aucune culpabilité ne sera jamais établie. Et pourtant, de ce fait divers obscur va sortir l’une des inventions les plus meurtrières de l’histoire européenne : l’accusation de meurtre rituel portée contre les Juifs, matrice de ce que la postérité appellera le blood libel, la calomnie du sang. Pendant huit siècles, de Norwich à Damas et de Blois à Kiev, des communautés juives entières paieront de leur vie une fable née dans un prieuré bénédictin du Norfolk.

Un cadavre sans coupable

Reprenons les faits, tels que les sources elles-mêmes permettent de les établir. Guillaume disparaît durant la semaine sainte de 1144. Son corps est retrouvé dans un bois, portant des traces de violence. Sa famille, et notamment son oncle Godwin Sturt, un prêtre, accuse aussitôt les Juifs de la ville — sans le moindre commencement de preuve. L’accusation est portée devant le synode diocésain, c’est-à-dire devant un tribunal d’Église, incompétent en matière criminelle et dépourvu de tout pouvoir d’enquête.

La réaction des autorités royales est éloquente. Le shérif Jean de Chesney, représentant du roi Étienne à Norwich, refuse catégoriquement de livrer les Juifs au tribunal ecclésiastique et les place sous sa protection dans le château. Les Juifs d’Angleterre relèvent alors directement de la couronne ; s’il avait existé le moindre élément sérieux contre eux, le pouvoir royal, qui n’avait aucune tendresse particulière pour ses protégés mais tenait à son monopole judiciaire, aurait instruit l’affaire. Il ne le fit pas. Personne ne fut jugé, personne ne fut condamné. Le dossier, au sens propre, était vide — et il l’est resté.

Pendant six ans, l’affaire sommeille. Guillaume est enterré sans gloire, la ville passe à autre chose. Le mort ne fait pas de miracles, ne draine pas de foules, n’intéresse personne. Il faudra l’arrivée d’un entrepreneur de sainteté pour transformer ce cadavre encombrant en fonds de commerce.

Thomas de Monmouth, fabricant de martyr

Vers 1150 arrive au prieuré cathédral de Norwich un moine gallois nommé Thomas de Monmouth. Il n’a pas connu Guillaume, n’était pas à Norwich en 1144, n’a assisté à rien. C’est pourtant lui qui va tout écrire. Entre 1150 et 1173 environ, il compose en sept livres la Vie et Passion de saint Guillaume, martyr de Norwich, texte fondateur du culte et, sans qu’il le sache, acte de naissance d’un mythe criminel.

Sa méthode mérite d’être décrite, car elle est celle de tous les fabricants de rumeur. Thomas rassemble des « témoignages » recueillis six ans ou plus après les faits : les visions de la mère du garçon, qui aurait rêvé de l’agression avant qu’elle ne survienne ; les dires d’une servante chrétienne affirmant avoir aperçu, par l’entrebâillement d’une porte, l’enfant chez un Juif de la ville ; des rumeurs de voisinage promues au rang de preuves. Sur cette base, il échafaude un récit précis et spectaculaire : Guillaume aurait été attiré chez les Juifs pendant la Pâque, torturé, couronné d’épines et crucifié en dérision de la Passion du Christ. Aucun élément matériel ne vient soutenir ce scénario, qui contredit du reste tout ce que l’on sait du judaïsme, dont la loi prohibe absolument le meurtre et l’usage du sang. Thomas ne s’en soucie pas : il n’écrit pas une enquête, il écrit une hagiographie, et le genre exige un martyre.

Théobald, le converti qui fournit le complot

Il manque toutefois à Thomas la pièce maîtresse : le mobile. Pourquoi des Juifs tueraient-ils un enfant chrétien ? C’est ici qu’intervient le personnage le plus trouble de l’affaire, Théobald de Cambridge, un Juif converti au christianisme devenu moine. Thomas rapporte son « témoignage » comme une révélation venue de l’intérieur : selon Théobald, les Juifs d’Europe, réunis chaque année à Narbonne autour de leurs notables, tireraient au sort le pays où devrait être sacrifié un enfant chrétien, sacrifice annuel censé leur permettre de recouvrer un jour leur terre. En 1144, le sort serait tombé sur l’Angleterre, et Norwich aurait été choisie.

Tout, dans cette confession, est invraisemblable : le synode occulte de Narbonne n’a jamais existé, aucune source juive ni chrétienne n’en porte trace, et l’idée même d’un sacrifice humain expiatoire est une inversion pure du judaïsme rabbinique. Mais la parole du converti possède une redoutable efficacité rhétorique : voilà un homme qui « en était », qui prétend dévoiler les secrets de sa communauté d’origine, et dont la conversion semble garantir la sincérité. Le procédé fera école. De Nicolas Donin au XIIIe siècle jusqu’aux « experts » du procès Beilis en 1913, l’accusation antijuive s’appuiera régulièrement sur des transfuges réels ou supposés, seuls capables de donner au fantasme l’apparence du témoignage. Théobald est le premier de cette lignée, et sa fable du complot juif international, tirant au sort ses victimes depuis un centre occulte, contient déjà en germe toute la mythologie conspirationniste qui culminera, sept siècles plus tard, dans les Protocoles des Sages de Sion.

Le commerce du martyr

Reste à comprendre pourquoi Norwich a adopté la fable avec tant d’empressement. La réponse tient en un mot : l’intérêt. Le prieuré cathédral de Norwich est une fondation récente, établie à la fin du XIe siècle, dépourvue de reliques prestigieuses dans une Angleterre où la sainteté est une industrie florissante. À quelques lieues de là, l’abbaye de Bury St Edmunds prospère autour du tombeau du roi martyr Edmond et capte pèlerins, donations et prestige. Un saint local, c’est un flux de visiteurs, des offrandes à l’autel, des ex-voto, des guérisons à consigner, une position renforcée face aux établissements rivaux. Guillaume, enfant du pays assassiné pendant la semaine sainte, offrait un candidat idéal — à condition de faire de sa mort un martyre, et d’un martyre il fallait des bourreaux.

La suite le confirme sans ambiguïté. Le corps de Guillaume est exhumé et déplacé à plusieurs reprises, chaque translation le rapprochant du cœur de la cathédrale : du cimetière des moines à la salle capitulaire, puis dans l’église même, auprès du maître-autel — trajectoire immobilière qui épouse exactement la montée en gamme du culte. L’évêque Guillaume de Turbe, l’un des rares prélats à soutenir l’accusation dès l’origine, patronne l’entreprise. Thomas de Monmouth consigne méthodiquement les miracles, qui ont cette particularité de se multiplier à mesure que la promotion du sanctuaire l’exige. Rome, notons-le, ne canonisera jamais Guillaume : le culte restera local, toléré, jamais authentifié. Mais l’essentiel était acquis : Norwich avait son martyr, et les Juifs, qui n’avaient tué personne, avaient endossé le rôle du bourreau parce que la dramaturgie du récit et la comptabilité du prieuré le réclamaient.

L’innocence, pièce par pièce

Il faut le redire avec la netteté que les faits autorisent : les Juifs de Norwich n’étaient coupables de rien. Aucune enquête n’a établi leur implication ; aucun tribunal, royal ou autre, ne les a condamnés ; le shérif du roi les a protégés précisément parce que rien ne les accablait. Les « preuves » de Thomas de Monmouth se réduisent à des songes, des ouï-dire tardifs et la confession fantasmatique d’un converti. Les historiens modernes, à commencer par les éditeurs de la Vie au XIXe siècle puis toute l’historiographie contemporaine, sont unanimes : le meurtre rituel n’a pas existé, ni à Norwich ni ailleurs. Chaque fois que l’accusation a été instruite sérieusement — par l’empereur Frédéric II après Fulda en 1235, par le pape Innocent IV en 1247, par la commission ottomane et les chancelleries européennes après Damas en 1840, par le jury russe qui acquitta Mendel Beilis en 1913 — elle s’est effondrée. Les papes eux-mêmes ont condamné la calomnie à plusieurs reprises. Elle a survécu à toutes les réfutations, parce qu’elle ne reposait pas sur des faits mais sur un besoin : celui d’un coupable disponible.

La contagion

Car la fable de Norwich ne reste pas confinée au Norfolk. Elle fournit un modèle immédiatement réplicable : partout où l’on trouve un enfant mort et une communauté juive, le scénario est désormais écrit d’avance. Gloucester l’applique en 1168, Bury St Edmunds en 1181, chaque ville se dotant de son petit martyr et de son pèlerinage. En 1171, à Blois, l’accusation franchit un seuil : sans même qu’il existe de cadavre, une trentaine de Juifs sont brûlés vifs sur la foi d’un témoignage unique — première mise à mort collective fondée sur le mythe né à Norwich. En 1235, à Fulda, en Allemagne, l’accusation s’enrichit du motif du sang, prétendument recueilli à des fins rituelles : le blood libel proprement dit est constitué, en contradiction flagrante avec les interdits alimentaires juifs les plus élémentaires. En 1255, l’affaire du petit Hugues de Lincoln voit pour la première fois la couronne d’Angleterre elle-même se faire complice : Henri III fait exécuter dix-neuf Juifs. La calomnie traversera ensuite les siècles — Trente en 1475, Damas en 1840, Kiev en 1913 — jusqu’aux pages du Stürmer nazi, qui lui consacra en 1934 un numéro spécial illustré. La chaîne est continue, documentée, et son premier maillon a été forgé par Thomas de Monmouth.

1189-1190 : le couronnement de Richard et le sang bien réel

Quarante-cinq ans après l’affaire Guillaume, l’Angleterre montra ce que produit une génération nourrie de cette propagande. Le 3 septembre 1189, Richard Cœur de Lion est couronné à Westminster. Des notables juifs venus, comme les autres corps du royaume, présenter leurs hommages et leurs présents au nouveau roi sont refoulés du banquet ; la rumeur enfle, la foule s’embrase, et Londres bascule dans le pogrom : maisons incendiées, Juifs massacrés ou contraints au baptême sous la menace. Richard, furieux de ce désordre commis le jour de son sacre contre des hommes qui relevaient de sa protection, ne punit que mollement les émeutiers avant de partir en croisade.

Son départ libère les violences. Au début de 1190, les massacres se propagent de ville en ville — King’s Lynn, Stamford, Bury St Edmunds. Le 6 février 1190, ils atteignent Norwich même : les Juifs surpris dans leurs maisons y sont tués, seuls survivent ceux qui ont pu se réfugier au château. La ville qui avait inventé le martyre fictif d’un enfant chrétien produisait, quarante-six ans plus tard, de vrais cadavres juifs. Le paroxysme est atteint à York, les 16 et 17 mars 1190 : environ cent cinquante Juifs, assiégés dans la tour du château où ils avaient cherché la protection royale, se donnent la mort ou périssent massacrés à la reddition. Détail qui dit tout des mobiles réels : les meneurs, des gentilshommes locaux lourdement endettés auprès de prêteurs juifs, se rendent aussitôt après à la cathédrale pour y brûler les reconnaissances de dettes déposées dans ses archives. Là encore, derrière l’alibi religieux, le profit.

Un siècle plus tard, en 1290, Édouard Ier expulse les Juifs d’Angleterre — première expulsion générale d’un royaume européen. Le pays qui avait inventé l’accusation de meurtre rituel fut aussi le premier à se vider de ses Juifs, et il le resta pendant plus de trois cent cinquante ans.

Ce que Norwich enseigne

L’affaire de Norwich n’est pas une curiosité médiévale. Elle expose, à l’état natif, la mécanique de toute calomnie collective : un fait divers réel mais inexpliqué ; un entrepreneur idéologique qui lui donne forme et sens ; un transfuge qui prête au fantasme la caution du témoignage intérieur ; une institution qui y trouve son compte et met sa légitimité au service du mensonge ; enfin des foules qui, une ou deux générations plus tard, passent du récit à l’acte. À chaque étape, des hommes savaient ou pouvaient savoir que rien n’était vrai — le shérif de 1144 le savait, les papes le dirent, les tribunaux le confirmèrent. La calomnie a prospéré quand même, parce qu’elle rapportait : des pèlerins à un prieuré, une absolution à des débiteurs, un exutoire à des foules. Guillaume de Norwich fut sans doute victime d’un crime ; les Juifs de Norwich, d’York et de Blois furent victimes d’un mensonge. Huit siècles après Thomas de Monmouth, celui-ci circule encore. C’est une raison suffisante pour continuer à en démonter, pièce par pièce, la fabrication.

In the spring of 2024, students at Columbia University occupied buildings, intimidated Jewish classmates, waved Hamas flags, and demanded the dismantling of the world’s only Jewish state. Similar scenes unfolded at Harvard, UCLA, Yale, and dozens of other campuses. Most of those students had never read Jacques Derrida. Few could explain Michel Foucault’s theories or identify a single work by Gilles Deleuze. Yet the intellectual reflexes they displayed—the division of the world into oppressors and oppressed, the suspicion toward institutions, the belief that power defines truth, the rejection of universal values in favor of competing narratives—had all been forged decades earlier by a handful of French philosophers. The slogans were new.The ideas were not.

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L’une des plus grandes révolutions de l’histoire de l’humanité n’a pas été l’invention de la roue, de l’agriculture, de l’imprimerie ou d’Internet. Elle est beaucoup plus discrète, presque invisible. Elle ne résulte pas d’une découverte scientifique mais d’un glissement culturel qui, en quelques décennies seulement, a profondément modifié le fonctionnement de nos sociétés. Nous avons rompu le lien qui unissait depuis toujours l’effort à la récompense. Cela peut sembler anodin. C’est peut-être pourtant l’événement le plus lourd de conséquences depuis le début de la civilisation.

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Comme dans « Les Habits neufs de l’empereur » d’Andersen, une illusion collective peut s’installer quand tout le monde a peur d’être traité d’idiot ou de mauvais citoyen. Les courtisans, les ministres, le peuple entier feignent de voir un tissu magnifique qui n’existe pas. Seul un enfant (ou, dans certaines versions, une voix isolée) brise le sortilège en nommant la réalité nue.
De nombreux observateurs voient aujourd’hui dans les campagnes internationales contre Israël un phénomène similaire : des narratifs répétés en boucle (« génocide », « apartheid », « disproportion ») qui masquent souvent la réalité du terrain. Un État démocratique, né des cendres de l’Holocauste, confronté à des organisations dont la charte appelle explicitement à sa destruction, et qui doit se défendre après des massacres comme celui du 7 octobre 2023.
La foule internationale, par conformisme, peur des accusations ou calculs géopolitiques, feint parfois de ne pas voir les boucliers humains, les tunnels sous les hôpitaux, les otages, ou les tirs de roquettes visant des civils. Israël, comme l’enfant du conte, rappelle que l’empereur (ou ici, certains discours dominants) est parfois nu.

La légende de Galilée va plus loin encore. Face à l’Inquisition et au consensus de son époque, Galilée défend une vérité scientifique que tout le monde « sait » fausse. Il est contraint d’abjurer, mais la réalité astronomique ne change pas. De même, Israël avance des arguments factuels et juridiques (droit à la légitime défense, proportionnalité dans les efforts pour épargner les civils malgré les tactiques de l’ennemi) que beaucoup refusent d’entendre parce qu’ils dérangent un récit confortable. Les votes automatiques à l’ONU, les résolutions disproportionnées, les boycotts sélectifs : autant de pressions institutionnelles qui rappellent l’Inquisition d’hier. « Et pourtant… » les faits persistent : Israël est la seule démocratie du Moyen-Orient, une société qui innove dans la médecine, l’agriculture et la tech tout en protégeant ses citoyens sous la menace permanente de missiles et de terrorismes.

La parabole chinoise du vieil homme et du cheval blanc (ou « la fortune et le malheur ») nous invite à ne pas juger trop vite les événements. Ce qui paraît une catastrophe (perte d’un cheval, blessure du fils, guerre) se révèle parfois une bénédiction à long terme (sauvetage de la vie, acquisition d’autres chevaux, survie du village). Israël a traversé guerres d’indépendance, attentats, intifadas et conflits successifs. Chaque épreuve a renforcé sa résilience, son armée de citoyens, ses alliances stratégiques et son avance technologique. Les critiques immédiates et les pertes humaines sont réelles et douloureuses ; mais à l’échelle historique, la capacité d’Israël à survivre et à prospérer au milieu d’ennemis déclarés illustre cette sagesse ancienne : ce qui semble « malchance » aujourd’hui peut être la condition de la survie demain.

Enfin, les figures de Noé ou des prophètes bibliques (et les frères « Vrai » et « Faux » des contes folkloriques) nous rappellent que celui qui avertit, qui construit l’arche malgré les moqueries, ou qui reste honnête dans l’adversité, finit souvent par avoir raison quand le déluge arrive.

Israël avertit depuis des décennies sur les intentions de ses voisins radicaux, sur l’usage du terrorisme comme stratégie, sur les dangers d’une idéologie qui glorifie la mort. Il paie le prix fort en vies humaines et en image internationale, mais continue de choisir la vie et la défense plutôt que la soumission.
Ces contes et légendes ne prétendent pas que tout est simple ni que les erreurs n’existent pas de part et d’autre. Le conflit israélo-palestinien est tragiquement complexe, avec des souffrances réelles dans les deux camps et des responsabilités partagées au fil de l’histoire.
Mais ils nous enseignent surtout le courage de la lucidité : refuser le conformisme de la foule, regarder les faits en face, et comprendre que la raison n’est pas toujours majoritaire.Dans un monde saturé d’informations déformées et de pressions morales sélectives, les sages d’autrefois nous invitent à écouter, non pas le plus fort cri, mais la voix la plus cohérente avec la réalité et la survie. C’est peut-être, aujourd’hui encore, la leçon la plus actuelle de ces récits intemporels.

( Note : it’s a theory… it might work, it might not… )
For a decade, the political class of the West has labored under a single, comforting illusion about Donald Trump: that there is nothing to decode. The insults aimed at allies, the flattery lavished on adversaries, the threats inflated to absurdity and then quietly withdrawn, the summits that collapse one week and resurrect the next — all of it has been filed away under the heading of chaos. A man without a doctrine, the commentators repeat, governed by impulse, vanity and the news cycle. It is the most reassuring possible interpretation, because a man without a doctrine cannot be feared as a strategist; he can only be endured as a weather system. The trouble is that the interpretation keeps failing. The deals get signed. The adversaries come to the table. The wars stop. And the men who predicted disaster are left explaining, again, why the disaster did not arrive. There is another reading available, older than the Western political science that cannot account for him, and it comes from two Chinese sources separated by a few centuries and a vast difference in temperament: Sun Tzu, the military strategist of The Art of War, and Laozi, the sage of the Tao Te Ching. Read Trump through them rather than through CNN, and the chaos resolves into something disconcertingly coherent. What looks like aberration from the standpoint of Western rationalism looks, from the standpoint of ancestral Asian wisdom, like a method — perhaps an intuitive one, perhaps one its practitioner could not articulate, but a method all the same. The purpose of what follows is not to flatter the man but to take his statecraft seriously enough to describe how it actually operates, because the failure to do so has cost his critics every prediction they have made.

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On situe d’ordinaire la naissance de cette chose en Californie, ou sur Twitter, ce qui est une manière commode de la croire récente et donc passagère. Elle est beaucoup plus vieille. Elle naît à Paris au printemps 1794, dans la bouche d’un avocat d’Arras qui s’était mis en tête de sauver la République en rendant les Français vertueux par décret. L’idée a coûté quelques milliers de têtes avant de coûter la sienne. Elle est revenue depuis, sous d’autres costumes, et c’est toujours le même costume : celui de la générosité.

Robespierre, ou la vertu armée

Le 5 février 1794, devant la Convention, Robespierre lit son Rapport sur les principes de morale politique. C’est là qu’il lâche la formule qui contient tout le reste : le ressort du gouvernement populaire en révolution est « à la fois la vertu et la terreur ; la vertu, sans laquelle la terreur est funeste ; la terreur, sans laquelle la vertu est impuissante ». La terreur, précise-t-il, n’est que la justice « prompte, sévère, inflexible », et à ce titre « une émanation de la vertu ».

Notez le glissement, parce que c’est lui qui fait tout le travail. La vertu cesse d’être quelque chose qu’on cultive en soi pour devenir un programme qu’on applique aux autres. Robespierre, bon élève de Rousseau, tient le peuple pour naturellement bon et soupçonne donc une poignée de méchants de l’empêcher de le rester. À partir de là, plus de demi-mesure possible : celui qui n’adhère pas à la vertu n’est pas un homme qui pense autrement, c’est un vicieux, et un vicieux, en bonne logique, est un ennemi public. « Il n’y a de citoyens dans la République que les républicains », tranche l’Incorruptible. Comprenez : les autres ont cessé d’être des citoyens.

Le piège se referme tout seul. Dès que le pouvoir s’arroge le droit de dire ce qu’est la vertu, contredire devient une faute, puis un délit, et la guillotine n’est plus que le bout logique d’un raisonnement parti d’une intention charmante : rendre les hommes meilleurs. Robespierre y passera lui-même en juillet, rattrapé par sa propre mécanique. Reste la leçon, qui n’a pas pris une ride : la vertu obligatoire ne fabrique pas des saints. Elle fabrique des suspects.

Le wokisme, héritier sans le savoir

Les idées ont une grammaire, et celle du wokisme est, à la conjugaison près, celle de la vertu faite loi. Les axiomes sont les mêmes. Il existe un Bien moral, connu, et qui ne se discute pas. Ce Bien doit s’imposer, et pas seulement par la conviction : par la contrainte, sociale à défaut d’être pénale. Et celui qui le conteste ne se trompe pas, il pactise avec le Mal. C’est du Robespierre sans le savoir, ce qui est la pire façon de l’être.

Les outils, eux, ont changé. L’an II avait son Tribunal révolutionnaire ; nous avons le licenciement, le bannissement numérique, la pétition signée par trois cents collègues qui ne vous avaient jamais adressé la parole, le séminaire obligatoire de « sensibilisation ». On ne tranche plus les cous, on tranche les salaires. La cancellation est une guillotine de bureau : plus lente, plus propre, mais qui vise exactement la même chose, retrancher du corps social ceux dont la vertu laisse à désirer.

C’est le vocabulaire qui vend la mèche. Le militant ne discute pas, il « éduque » ; il ne s’excuse pas, il « fait un travail sur lui-même » ; il n’exclut pas, il « responsabilise ». Cette langue de pénitents, où l’on doit confesser des privilèges et expier des fautes qu’on n’a pas commises, c’est le salut par la vertu repassé à la moulinette des ressources humaines. Robespierre aurait reconnu la liturgie. Il aurait trouvé le ton un peu mou.

Une lecture psychanalytique : la vertu comme jouissance

Pourquoi cette tentation revient-elle avec une telle régularité ? La science politique sèche un peu sur la question ; la psychanalyse, elle, a une réponse, et elle est désagréable. Imposer sa vertu aux autres, ça procure du plaisir. Un plaisir précis. Et c’est ce plaisir, beaucoup plus que le souci d’autrui, qui fait tourner la machine.

Freud avait flairé l’affaire dans Le Malaise dans la civilisation. Le surmoi, cette instance morale qu’on a intériorisée, ne se borne pas à réprimer nos pulsions : il jouit de les réprimer. Et plus on lui cède, plus il réclame. La sévérité morale n’apaise pas la conscience, elle la met en appétit. D’où ce militant jamais rassasié, parce que la vertu fonctionne, comme le surmoi, à crédit illimité : il restera toujours un privilège à débusquer, un mot de travers, une micro-agression tapie quelque part. Le procès ne se clôt jamais. S’il se clôturait, le plaisir s’arrêterait avec lui.

Lacan a poussé le bouchon plus loin en montrant un surmoi qui, derrière l’ordre « Sois bon », souffle en réalité « Jouis ». L’injonction de pureté est une fabrique à culpabilité, et la culpabilité, c’est le carburant. Celui qui culpabilise son prochain s’installe du même mouvement au-dessus de lui : il devient celui qui sait, qui jauge, qui absout ou qui condamne. Au fond la vertu imposée est une affaire de narcissisme avant d’être une affaire de morale. On ne sauve pas le monde ; on savoure d’être celui qui pourrait le sauver, et on savoure davantage encore de pointer ceux qui le perdent.

Ça explique une bizarrerie : la férocité des gens doux. Le militant de la bienveillance se permet souvent des brutalités qu’un cynique n’oserait pas, et pour cause, sa brutalité à lui est bénie d’avance, elle se vit comme un exercice du Bien. On raconte que Robespierre ne supportait pas la vue du sang. Il signait quand même. La vertu sert d’abord à ça : faire le mal sans le moindre remords, puisqu’on le fait au nom du Bien.

Ce que la vertu obligatoire fait à une société

Le premier dégât, c’est le silence. Quand une opinion devient une faute morale, plus personne ne la formule à voix haute ; elle ne disparaît pas pour autant, elle file se terrer dans le ressentiment et ressort le jour du vote. La vertu d’État ne convertit pas les récalcitrants, elle les rend muets, et un muet furieux finit toujours par parler quelque part. Les sociétés qui interdisent de penser tout haut ne deviennent pas plus vertueuses ; elles deviennent hypocrites, ce qui n’est pas pareil.

Vient ensuite la prime au conformisme. Dans un climat où la vertu est surveillée, l’audace se paie et la prudence se récompense. On ne promeut plus les têtes chercheuses mais les bons élèves du catéchisme du moment, ceux qui connaissent le formulaire par cœur et devinent l’orthodoxie avant qu’elle soit écrite. Les facs, les journaux, les entreprises se remplissent doucement de gens qui ont appris à ne jamais dire ce qu’ils pensent. Une époque qui récompense la docilité n’obtient pas des justes, elle obtient des courtisans.

Le pire, c’est ce que ça fait à la confiance. À partir du moment où n’importe qui peut être traîné en place publique pour une phrase d’il y a dix ans, une blague mal comprise, un « j’aime » distrait, chacun se met à surveiller, à s’autocensurer, à archiver les fautes du voisin au cas où. La vertu d’État ne produit pas la fraternité qu’elle promet. Elle produit une société de délateurs bien élevés.

Pourquoi un libéral et un démocrate doivent s’insurger

Disons-le sans détour, parce que la confusion est entretenue à dessein : refuser la dictature de la vertu n’a rien de réactionnaire. C’est la position libérale et démocrate dans ce qu’elle a de plus classique. Tout le libéralisme politique, de Locke à Constant, tient dans une intuition : personne ne possède le monopole du Bien, et c’est justement pour ça qu’on borne le pouvoir. La liberté d’expression ne sert pas à protéger les idées tièdes, elles n’en ont pas besoin. Elle sert à protéger celles qui dérangent la vertu officielle du moment.

Le démocrate sait, lui, ce que le vertueux ne veut pas entendre : le désaccord n’est pas une maladie à soigner, c’est la matière première de la vie commune. Une démocratie n’a jamais été une réunion d’âmes pures tombées d’accord ; c’est un bricolage qui permet à des gens qui se détestent cordialement de cohabiter sans s’égorger. Le jour où l’on entreprend de trier les citoyens d’après leur vertu, on a déjà mis un pied hors de la démocratie et l’autre dans la sacristie.

Et c’est là que l’ironie devient franchement réjouissante. Nos petits Robespierre se rêvent en avant-garde du progrès. Ils sont en vérité les gardiens d’un ordre moral, les dévots d’une religion sans Dieu qui a juste remplacé le péché par le privilège et la confession par le communiqué d’excuses. De la Révolution, ils ont retenu très exactement ce qu’elle avait de plus mortel, la manie de régenter les consciences, et oublié le seul morceau qui valait la peine : la liberté.

Contre cette engeance, il n’y a qu’une réplique, et elle a le bon goût d’être joyeuse : ne pas se confesser. Décliner l’invitation au tribunal permanent, refuser la dette qu’on ne finira jamais de rembourser, ne pas endosser le rôle du coupable qui n’a rien fait. Qu’on rende à la vertu le seul terrain qui lui revienne, la conscience de chacun, et qu’on la prie de laisser l’espace public au débat. Une vertu qui a besoin de la contrainte pour s’imposer n’est plus une vertu, c’est un pouvoir qui s’est trouvé un joli déguisement. Et un déguisement, ça se montre du doigt en riant.

On November 12, 2025, an 81-year-old French-Algerian writer with cancer walked out of an Algerian prison after a year behind bars for the crime of holding an opinion about borders. Boualem Sansal, one of the great francophone novelists of his generation and one of the most lucid critics of Islamism alive, boarded a plane that same evening. The plane landed in Berlin. The pardon that freed him had been granted to the president of Germany, who requested it on November 10 and obtained it within forty-eight hours. France, which for an entire year had begged, petitioned, summoned ambassadors and appealed publicly to Algiers for “mercy and humanity,” was left to express its gratitude by telephone to Berlin. A country that shelters millions of Algerian nationals, that underwrites the Algerian regime with visas, remittances and the exorbitant privileges of the 1968 migration accords, proved unable to extract one dying novelist, its own citizen, from a government that survives in part on French indulgence. Germany asked once.

The question that hangs over that Berlin tarmac deserves to be put brutally: why does Algeria fear nothing from France? Why does Tehran fear nothing, or Doha, or the street agitators of Paris itself? The answer requires another tarmac, eighty-seven years earlier. On the evening of September 30, 1938, Édouard Daladier landed at Le Bourget after signing away Czechoslovakia to Hitler at Munich, braced for a hostile crowd, and found instead a delirious one. He turned to an aide and said the words history has kept: “Ah, the fools. If only they knew what awaits them.” The men who appease are almost never deceived. Daladier knew; the German general staff, convinced the Wehrmacht of 1938 could not survive a confrontation with France and Britain, stood ready to depose Hitler the moment Paris and London held firm, and the signal never came. Eleven months later began the war that one act of nerve might have prevented. Munich was supposed to be a date. France turned it into a method.

The method matured fast. Vichy drafted its anti-Jewish statutes in October 1940 without waiting for a German request, anticipation being the purest form of submission, and the French police of 1942 filled the Vélodrome d’Hiver with an efficiency the occupier had not dared demand. After the Liberation the habit simply changed beneficiaries. In May 1946, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who had spent the war at Hitler’s side recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the SS, slipped out of the comfortable villa near Paris where France had parked him and surfaced in Cairo. Yugoslavia wanted him for war crimes; Paris had calculated that a friend of the Arab capitals was worth more than a Nazi collaborator in the dock, and the guard around the villa proved conveniently porous. The fugitive France declined to judge spent the next two decades grooming the generation of Yasser Arafat.

Nor should anyone imagine the betrayals were reserved for Jews. In 1962 France abandoned the harkis, the tens of thousands of Muslim soldiers who had fought under its flag in Algeria, disarming them, barring their escape by ministerial telegram and shipping back across the Mediterranean those who managed to flee. They were tortured, mutilated and slaughtered by the regime France had just handed the country to, in numbers the Republic has never had the stomach to count. The French state betrays its Jews, its Muslim loyalists, its writers and its allies with perfect impartiality; the only constant in the ledger is the betrayal itself.

Charles de Gaulle gave the method its modern doctrine. In June 1967 he slapped an arms embargo on Israel on the eve of the Six-Day War, at the precise moment its entire combat aviation was French. That November he described the Jews as “an elite people, sure of itself and domineering,” restoring to a certain discourse the respectability Europe believed it had buried at Nuremberg. By 1969 the embargo was total and Israel was reduced to stealing its own property, five missile boats built and paid for at Cherbourg, spirited out of the harbor by Israeli crews on Christmas night while French officials looked at their shoes. The doctrine now had a name, la politique arabe de la France, and a unit of account, the oil barrel.

The 1970s turned doctrine into routine. Jacques Chirac embraced Saddam Hussein in 1975, “my personal friend,” sold him the Osirak reactor and trained the engineers of his bomb; Israeli pilots had to destroy in June 1981 what French ones had delivered, to theatrical indignation in Paris. In January 1977 French police arrested Abu Daoud, the planner of the Munich Olympics massacre, as he passed through the capital. West Germany requested extradition; a French court discovered a technicality in the paperwork, and within days the government flew the killer of eleven Israeli athletes to Algiers, first class, its arms contracts intact. The following year France installed Ayatollah Khomeini in a villa at Neauphle-le-Château, handed the world’s cameras a pastoral backdrop for his sermons, and on February 1, 1979, returned him to Tehran aboard a chartered Air France 747. The Islamic Revolution arrived by French national carrier, with cabin service.

What Tehran learned about France in the decade that followed, it has never needed to revise. When a bomb aimed at a synagogue on rue Copernic killed four people in October 1980, Prime Minister Raymond Barre mourned the “innocent French passers-by” struck by an attack meant for Jews, a slip that told French Jewry precisely where it stood. The regime’s networks then bombed Paris in 1985 and 1986, killing thirteen; its proxies took French hostages in Beirut; its embassy sheltered Wahid Gordji, the key suspect in the bombings, until Paris ended the siege of 1987 by letting him fly home in a face-saving swap. Its envoys demanded the freedom of Anis Naccache, the gunman Khomeini had dispatched in 1980 to murder Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, an operation that killed a policeman and a neighbor. In July 1990 François Mitterrand pardoned Naccache and his four accomplices and put all five on a plane to Tehran; the next year Paris settled the billion-dollar Eurodif nuclear dispute in Iran’s favor. Bakhtiar was butchered in his guarded home outside Paris in August 1991 by an Iranian hit team anyway, and one of his killers, sentenced to life, walked free in 2010 onto a Tehran-bound flight days after Iran released a detained French academic. The mullahs’ file on France required no updating after that, and it has received none.

In time the method seeped from the chancelleries into the ledgers. Between 2013 and 2014 the cement giant Lafarge paid millions to the Islamic State and other jihadist groups to keep its Syrian plant running while the caliphate beheaded its way across the region; in April 2026 a Paris court convicted the company and its former chief executive of financing terrorism, the first verdict of its kind against a French corporation, and the investigation file showed the intelligence services tracking the payments in real time. The Republic itself had long since perfected the art: by every serious account, tens of millions of euros in ransom flowed to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb for the hostages of Arlit, money that purchased the weapons aimed at the French soldiers then dying in the Sahel to fight al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Doha bought its share of Paris outright, complete with a bespoke 2008 tax exemption on its real-estate fortunes, while hosting the political bureau of Hamas and the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood. And in September 2025 a Paris court sentenced Nicolas Sarkozy to five years in prison for criminal conspiracy over the Libyan dictatorship’s money behind his 2007 campaign, making him the first former head of state of modern France ordered behind bars. The appeasement of tyrants, judicially certified as a personal business model, at the summit of the Republic.

The dictators abroad now have an auxiliary inside the walls. For two decades, French Middle East policy has been drafted with one eye on the banlieues, every position stress-tested against the risk of arson. A schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded on a public street in 2020 for showing cartoons; his colleagues absorbed the lesson and censor themselves to stay alive. After October 7, France recorded an explosion of antisemitic acts, synagogues under military guard, schoolchildren hiding their names, Jews emigrating by the thousands, and the state’s response has been to adjust its diplomacy to the temper of those doing the menacing. The “Arab street” that the Quai d’Orsay spent fifty years courting in Cairo and Algiers now sits in Seine-Saint-Denis, and it votes.

That street has acquired a parliamentary arm. La France Insoumise, the largest left-wing bloc in the National Assembly, refused to call Hamas a terrorist organization and filed the October 7 pogrom under the rubric of armed resistance to occupation; its European star, Rima Hassan, militates accordingly. Its methods are those of the leagues it claims to combat. In March 2025 the party published a poster of the Jewish broadcaster Cyril Hanouna, black and white, features distorted by artificial intelligence into a hooked snarl, an image half of France’s political class instantly recognized from the iconography of the Third Reich; a court condemned the movement and banned the image from any further use, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s considered answer to the journalists raising the matter was “taisez-vous”: shut up. Designation of the internal enemy, intimidation of dissenters, the leader’s cult, street muscle on call. The appeasers of the Élysée and the agitators of LFI work as a pincer: one purchases calm from the mob, the other organizes it.

Emmanuel Macron presides over the synthesis. In October 2024, while Israel fought Iran’s proxies on seven fronts, he called for a halt to arms deliveries, de Gaulle’s embargo of 1967 replayed by a smaller man, and French defense fairs began turning away Israeli firms. The single gesture his defenders cite, the French jets that helped intercept Iran’s drone barrage in April 2024, was air-traffic management, a reflex to keep the regional temperature down, and the same president demanded the embargo within six months of it. In July 2025 a French court ordered Georges Ibrahim Abdallah freed after forty-one years in prison for complicity in the murders of an American military attaché and an Israeli diplomat, and Beirut threw him a hero’s welcome. In September Macron solemnly recognized a Palestinian state at the United Nations, a decision Hamas had publicly welcomed from the moment it was announced; Benjamin Netanyahu, in a letter to the Élysée, reached for the one word this entire archive demands: “It is not diplomacy, it is appeasement.” The Élysée called the charge abject. The aides at Le Bourget probably used a similar word.

Then came the proof that nothing had been learned, because nothing ever is. While American and Israeli forces struck the Iranian regime this spring, Paris demonstratively kept its distance from the campaign and negotiated. In April 2026 Tehran allowed its last two French hostages, Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris, to leave after nearly four years of detention on fabricated espionage charges, and the regime’s own news agency published the invoice: the full release of Mahdieh Esfandiari, an Iranian convicted in Paris of glorifying terrorism for celebrating the October 7 massacre, and the abandonment of France’s complaint against Iran at the International Court of Justice. The Élysée denied any swap. Esfandiari’s house arrest was lifted within hours of the hostages’ departure, she landed in Tehran the following week, and the ICJ case had already been quietly withdrawn months earlier. The Islamic Republic has been cashing checks at the same Paris window since 1979, and the window has never once closed.

Daladier knew what he had signed, and said so on the tarmac. His heirs know too. In 1938 France appeased one foreign dictator across one border; in 2026 it appeases Algiers, Tehran, Doha and its own street simultaneously, and files the result under foreign policy. The crowd at Le Bourget cheered because it had been lied to. No such excuse remains, for the governments of the Fourth and Fifth Republics or for the electorates that kept absolving them. Munich was once a city. France has made it a regime.

What the UN’s Own Record Says About the UN

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Reggio Emilia, 28 September 2025. At the Teatro Valli, Mayor Marco Massari, an elected official of the Democratic Party, presents Francesca Albanese with his city’s tricolour prize. It is a tribute from the Italian left to the woman it regards as the voice of the voiceless. Massari, a gracious host, slips in a self-evident line: the release of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas is among the conditions for peace. The hall jeers him. And the United Nations Special Rapporteur, the honouree of the day, then delivers her verdict. She does not judge him, she says; she forgives him. But he must promise her never to raise the subject again.

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Zohran Mamdani took the oath as mayor of New York on January 1, 2026. The city holds the largest Jewish community on earth outside Israel. He won just over half the vote, the first Muslim mayor and the youngest in more than a century, lifted by record turnout among Muslim and South Asian voters and by a Democratic Party that decided his record on Israel was a footnote.

He says he recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and he has said it often, always with the same thing cut out. At the first primary debate he was asked whether the country may exist as a Jewish state. He offered instead a state with equal rights. The next morning on Fox 5, pressed to clarify, he confirmed his opposition to its existence as a Jewish state. By October the formula had hardened. He would not recognize any state built on a hierarchy of race or religion. The sentence is dressed as a principle. It lands on one country.

His statement the morning after October 7 named no one. Hamas had murdered around 1,200 people the day before and dragged the living into Gaza. Mamdani mourned the dead, faulted what he called Netanyahu’s declaration of war, and put the road to peace in ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid. The festival went unmentioned. So did the rapes. He found no room to name the men who did the killing.

Then came the slogan. Reporters asked him repeatedly to condemn “globalize the intifada,” and he declined, explaining that a mayor should not police speech and that the words were not his own. The intifadas in question killed more than a thousand Israelis, many of them blown apart on buses and in cafés. Ritchie Torres, a Democratic congressman, told him the word means violence to Jews and that every official should say so. Mamdani waited months. The shift, when it came, happened inside a closed room before some hundred and fifty business leaders, one of them the son of Holocaust survivors, where he agreed to discourage the phrase. New Yorkers got no condemnation. The donors got a private word.

Before politics he rapped under the name Mr. Cardamom. A 2017 track called “Salaam” carries the line “My love to the Holy Land Five. You better look ’em up.” The Holy Land Five ran a Texas foundation convicted in 2008 of channeling more than twelve million dollars to Hamas, in one of the largest terror-financing cases the country has prosecuted. He calls the song a piece about growing up Muslim in New York. It says what it says, and he wrote it down.

As a state assemblyman he sponsored the Not on Our Dime Act, which would have stripped tax exemption from New York charities found to support what it called Israeli settler violence. The bill reached for the financial spine of organized Jewish life in the city. He has called the boycott movement against Israel legitimate. He has promised, more than once and again after winning, that New York would honor the International Criminal Court warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu and take him into custody if he came. Governor Hochul has said the city cannot do this, and so has Jerry Nadler, and the United States does not recognize the court. Mamdani has read the same law they have. The promise was only ever a way of naming the criminal.

His wife, Rama Duwaji, is a private person, he says, and should be left out of it. The record resists him. She drew artwork for the local Democratic Socialists campaign that backed the candidates pledged to her husband’s charity bill. She illustrated an essay by Susan Abulhawa, who called the October 7 massacre spectacular and has described Jews as vampires, demons and ghouls. She liked posts celebrating that day, among them one that called the documented rapes a hoax. When a tabloid surfaced things she had written as a teenager, she apologized and said that being fifteen did not excuse it. That apology covered the schoolgirl. The illustrations and the campaign were the work of a woman in her late twenties.

Mamdani says the right things about Jewish safety. He has promised to protect Jewish New Yorkers and to keep them from hate. The record behind the promise runs a decade deep. There is a song praising the men who financed Hamas. There is a statement, written on October 8, that could not name Hamas. For months he refused to condemn a call that many Jews hear as a call to violence, and when he bent, it was to discourage it quietly in a room full of donors. Israel he will recognize on every condition but the one that makes it a refuge for Jews. The largest Jewish community outside Israel now has a mayor who spent a career arguing their state should not exist as theirs, and who convinced a major American party that this was not enough to stop him. The reassurances are on the record. So is everything they are meant to cover.

There is a photograph that Medea Benjamin would rather no one bring up. It shows the co-founder of Code Pink — an organization that presents itself to the world as a “feminist” and “pacifist” movement — being introduced to Ismail Haniyeh, the chief of Hamas, during a 2012 delegation to Gaza. Twelve years later, Haniyeh would be eliminated in his capacity as the leader of a terrorist organization responsible for the October 7 massacre. The photo, circulated by the New York Post, comes from Code Pink’s own Flickr account. No one set her up. She posed. She smiled. And her organization published the image with pride.

That single image is enough to summarize a career. But it is not an accident, nor an isolated slip. It is the visible symptom of a decades-long alignment with the worst enemies of democratic societies — an alignment that no amount of pink costumes, no vocabulary of “peace,” and no prizes handed out among fellow activists can disguise.

A “Pacifist” With a Terrorist Address Book

The trajectory of Benjamin and Code Pink reads like a directory of the regimes and movements most hostile to the West. In 2008, several of the organization’s leaders personally met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York — the same Ahmadinejad who publicly called for Israel to be wiped off the map and who denied the Holocaust. That same year, Code Pink launched an aggressive anti-Israel campaign that included open support for Hamas.

In 2009, the organization led a delegation to Gaza where Hamas officials addressed the activists, some in person and Haniyeh himself by phone. During the “Gaza Freedom March,” Benjamin coordinated the group’s stay directly with the Hamas government, its members lodging at the Commodore, a five-star hotel controlled by Hamas. It is hard to imagine a sharper symbol: an American activist who claims to defend human rights, taking her accommodations and her schedule from a terrorist organization.

It must be said plainly: there is no possible neutrality between the firefighters and the arsonists. Benjamin has spent her life shaking hands with the arsonists while being photographed in a firefighter’s uniform.

A Jewish Founder, an Anti-Zionist Obsession

Susan Benjamin — who became “Medea,” after the mythological figure who murders her own children, a name she chose for herself — was born in 1952 to a Jewish family in New York State. That is precisely what makes her anti-Israel obsession so striking, and so useful to her causes. She offers the most virulent anti-Zionism a convenient alibi: “how could this be hatred of Jews, since I am Jewish?”

The answer came from the Jewish community itself. In December 2025, the Coalition for Jewish Values, which represents more than 2,500 Orthodox rabbis, accused Code Pink of revealing itself as an antisemitic organization following a filmed incident at the Capitol. In the video, viewed by millions, a Code Pink activist screams “Free Palestine” in the face of Rabbi Yaakov Menken, visibly identifiable as Jewish, while Benjamin, at her side, echoes the slogan. Menken, who was attending no Israel-related hearing that day, described the episode for what it was: proof that anti-Zionism often serves as cover for hatred of the Jew as such.

There is the mechanism, laid bare. It does not target a policy: it targets a man because he is Jewish, in a hallway, for the sole fact of his appearance. And then it claims this is merely “criticism of Israel.”

“Made in China”: The Money That Changed Everything

But the most devastating element of the Code Pink file is neither the posturing nor the slogans. It is the money. And it is Sino-communist.

Since 2017, roughly a quarter of Code Pink’s funding — more than $1.4 million — has come from entities linked to Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman based in Shanghai who married Jodie Evans, Code Pink’s other co-founder, that same year. According to an investigation by the New York Times, Singham works closely with the Chinese government’s media machine and finances propaganda worldwide through a network of nonprofits and shell companies.

The timeline is damning. Before 2017, Jodie Evans publicly denounced “the brutal repression of women’s human-rights defenders” by Beijing. After 2017 — after the money — the same Evans described China as “a defender of the oppressed and a model for economic growth without slavery or war.” In 2020, Code Pink launched its “China Is Not Our Enemy” campaign. The organization stopped criticizing the treatment of the Uyghurs and began defending it, going so far as to publicly label Uyghurs “terrorists” and to lobby against the evidence of forced labor in Xinjiang.

What is one to make of a “peace” movement that suddenly discovers the virtues of a dictatorship at the exact moment that dictatorship begins funding its operations? The word “pacifism” no longer fits. The accurate word is: subcontracting.

Political Power Is Starting to Take a Closer Look

It is no longer only commentators saying this. In November 2025, Senator Tom Cotton wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi requesting a Justice Department investigation into Code Pink for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and possible material support to foreign terrorist organizations. Senators Grassley and Hawley, along with several House committees, have called for a review of the organization’s tax-exempt status and of the entire network of entities tied to Singham.

Code Pink, for its part, denies receiving funds from the Chinese Communist Party and waves the accusations away as “ridiculous rumors.” It is worth being precise: these investigations are requests, not convictions, and some critics consider them politically motivated. But the figures themselves are not rumors: they appear in tax filings and in the network’s own public admissions — Singham’s operation acknowledged its role as a funder as early as 2021.

The Theater of Permanent Disruption

Then there is the spectacle. Because Code Pink is, above all, an aesthetic: the pink wigs, the fake coffins brandished at military parades to taunt American soldiers, the screaming in congressional hearings. Benjamin has been arrested repeatedly for disrupting official sessions, accusing the United States of supporting “genocide” in Gaza and denying — against all evidence — that diverted aid feeds Hamas.

This staging is not harmless. It turns support for terrorist organizations into a militant performance, a media happening. It dresses up complicity as courage. And it exploits the openness of democracies — free speech, the right to protest, the presumption of good faith — in order to turn it against them.

Conclusion: Judge by the Acts

One can debate Medea Benjamin’s intentions endlessly. That is a trap. Intentions cannot be proven; acts can. And the acts form a straight, perfectly coherent line over nearly twenty years: a handshake with Ahmadinejad, an introduction to Haniyeh, stays coordinated with Hamas, a sudden about-face in favor of Beijing timed precisely to the transfers, the harassment of a rabbi in a Capitol hallway.

The word “pacifism” has been hijacked. The word “feminism” has been hijacked — by an organization that defends a regime interning Uyghur women and bankrolls a movement that terrorizes Israeli women. The phrase “human rights” has been hijacked. There remains one word, a single one, that describes with precision what these acts amount to: complicity. And that one, unlike intention, can be documented. It is in the photographs. It is in the accounts. It is on film.