The Middle East has many traditions.

There is the tradition of insisting Israel is the Middle East’s biggest problem.
There is the tradition of condemning Israel on Monday.
There is the tradition of buying Israeli technology on Tuesday.

And then there is perhaps the region’s finest diplomatic custom: pretending Israel still needs permission to live in the Middle East.

This is called “normalization.”

The wording itself is charming. It suggests Israel has been suffering from some unfortunate social condition, like showing up to a black-tie dinner in sandals, and with enough patience and paperwork, might one day become respectable.

Every few months the world’s diplomats gather to ask the same breathless question: “Will Saudi Arabia normalize relations with Israel?”

You can almost picture the scene. Somewhere in Riyadh there must be a large brass key hanging on the palace wall. It is, apparently, the Key to the Middle East. Nobody knows exactly how Saudi Arabia acquired it.

The Jewish people have only lived in the region for roughly three thousand years. Jerusalem was already a capital while much of Europe was still experimenting with forests. Archaeologists keep digging up Jewish history every few months like municipal workers discovering inconvenient plumbing.

But never mind all that. History is one thing. Permission is another. Israel, we are told, must wait politely until someone else decides it belongs. It is a fascinating policy. Imagine asking the Nile for proof that it belongs in Africa. Now imagine asking the Jewish state whether it has finally earned the right to exist in the Middle East.

Normalization, we’re assured, isn’t merely about trade. Trade is sensible. Trade makes money. Normalization is something nobler. It is recognition. Acceptance. Legitimacy.

Which raises an awkward question. Recognition by whom?

Saudi Arabia? An absolute monarchy.
Qatar? Host to Hamas leadership.
Lebanon? Where Hezbollah enjoys more confidence than the government.

Apparently these are the people responsible for deciding when Israel finally becomes part of the region. This is rather like inviting the Houthis to moderate a discussion on freedom of navigation, or inviting the ayatollahs to judge a women’s rights competition.

Yet somehow the arrangement has survived for decades without provoking laughter. Instead, it is discussed with straight faces. Diplomats speak gravely. Analysts nod thoughtfully as though this all makes perfect sense.

Israel, meanwhile, continues with the extraordinary behaviour of functioning as a country. It holds elections. The Supreme Court regularly annoys politicians. The politicians return the favour. Its citizens insult their prime ministers; nobody disappears. It is all terribly democratic.

This, apparently, is the abnormal country. The normal countries are hereditary monarchies. Theocracies. Military regimes. Places where elections are treated as dangerous foreign experiments. One begins to suspect that the region’s definition of “normal” could use professional assistance.

Israel also continued doing something unfashionable.

Building.

Building universities.
Building hospitals.
Building a technology sector worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Its neighbours built reasons why that state should not exist. The famous Arab League policy of “No peace. No recognition. No negotiations.” was never a moral judgement reached after careful examination of Israel’s conduct. It existed before almost every accusation now routinely levelled against Israel. The verdict came first. The justifications merely changed costumes over the decades.

The Abraham Accords complicated matters. The United Arab Emirates recognized Israel. Nothing exploded. Bahrain normalized relations. The sky remained attached. Morocco survived. Trade increased. Tourists travelled. Life, disappointingly for the professional pessimists, continued. This created an awkward problem. If normalization kept working, somebody might begin asking why it had been delayed for seventy-five years.

So attention shifted to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi became the Final Boss. The last gatekeeper. The diplomatic Holy Grail. The final stamp of approval. The kingdom holding the mystical Certificate of Regional Acceptance.

The truly amusing part is that Israel has never actually needed any of this. Recognition changes diplomatic relations. It does not manufacture history. It cannot relocate archaeology. It cannot erase Hebrew inscriptions. It cannot persuade Jerusalem that it recently wandered into the neighbourhood by mistake. It merely acknowledges facts that existed before the recognition itself.

This is why the conversation has always felt upside down. Israel is treated as though it were applying for membership in the Middle East. The application, unfortunately, has been delayed. There are forms to complete. References to provide. Maybe another archaeological excavation. Someone from the Arab League will be in touch. Eventually. Or perhaps not.

Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich once remarked that if Saudi wished to dictate the terms of Israel’s legitimacy, it could as well continue riding camels in the desert. The wording was predictably condemned. The assumption behind the outrage was more revealing than the remark itself. Everyone debated the “insult.” Almost nobody questioned why Israel was expected to seek approval from the people supposedly being insulted.

That is the true abnormality.

The remarkable thing is not that some governments still refuse to recognize Israel. Countries may choose their diplomatic relationships as they wish. The remarkable thing is that so much of the world still speaks as though those governments possess the authority to decide whether Israel belongs in the Middle East.

They do not. They never did.

So let the Arab League recognize Israel or refuse for another seventy-five years. None of it changes the fact that Israel does not become indigenous when others acknowledge it, nor legitimate when dictators sign papers saying so.

When Saudi Arabia eventually normalizes relations with Israel, and one day it probably will, the headlines will proclaim another great diplomatic breakthrough.

They will have it backwards.

Israel will not have become normal. Reality will simply have caught up with the paperwork.

Every Jewish child inherits two things before learning politics.

A family.
And a story.

The family teaches them their name; the story teaches them who they belong to.

Long before there was an Israel divided into coalitions and oppositions, before there were arguments over judges, draft laws, commissions of inquiry, settlements, religion or constitutional reform...

There was simply a people.

Scattered across continents.
Speaking different languages.

Yet carrying the same memory and the same covenant.

Then came June 1948; the Jewish state was barely old enough to stand.

Arab armies surrounded it.
Every rifle mattered.
Every bullet mattered.

Yet off the coast of Tel Aviv, something happened that no enemy had managed to accomplish.

Jews fired upon Jews.
The Altalena burned.

Nearly two dozen Jewish lives ended at Jewish hands, in what became one of the deepest wounds in Israel’s national memory precisely because no foreign flag flew over the battlefield. When the smoke disappeared, Menachem Begin spoke words that were less a speech than a covenant.

“Milchemet achim—le’olam lo.”

A war between brothers—never.

He was not promising that Jews would never disagree. He was pleading that they would never again forget who stood on the other side of the argument. Because Begin understood something older than Zionism itself.

Every civilization is eventually tested. The Jewish people are always tested in the same way.

Not merely by enemies outside the walls...
But by what happens inside them.

That test has returned.

Not with artillery but with politics, not with burning ships but burning trust. Today the first fracture bears the name of the Haredi draft.

One Israel buries sons returning from Gaza and asks how sacrifice can remain unequal forever. Another Israel fears that compelling Torah scholars into military service risks weakening the spiritual inheritance that preserved the Jewish people long before the IDF existed.

Neither concern is imaginary.
Neither emerges from hatred.

Both emerge from love.

Love of country.
Love of Torah.
Love of survival.

Yet something tragic happens when love loses perspective.

Brothers slowly become opponents.
Opponents slowly become threats.

Meanwhile, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and every organization devoted to Israel’s destruction have never troubled themselves over whether a Jew wears black trousers or an IDF uniform.

The second fracture runs through Israel’s judiciary.

A constitutional debate became an emotional one, then a national one.

Eventually a civilizational one.

Supporters of reform believed they were rescuing democracy from unelected power. Opponents believed they were rescuing democracy from elected power. Each side spoke the language of salvation. Each increasingly described the other in the language once reserved for enemies.

History has seen this pattern before.
It begins with constitutional arguments.

It ends with societies forgetting that constitutions exist to preserve nations—not replace them.

Then October 7 arrived.
For one unbearable morning...
Politics disappeared.

The terrorists did not sort families by voting records; they did not ask which they did not separate kibbutznik from settler, religious from secular nor coalition from opposition.

To them there existed only one category.

Jew.

The oldest hatred in history has always possessed remarkable clarity. It is often Jews themselves who forget it. Yet even after October 7 another argument emerged.

Who failed?
Who should investigate?
Who should answer?
An independent commission?
A government panel?
Political accountability?
Institutional accountability?

Necessary questions all. Necessary in every democracy.

But democracies, like families, must remember the order in which certain duties belong. There is a time to assign responsibility, and there’s a time to remember whose grave everyone is standing beside. Too often those boundaries have blurred. The dead have become witnesses in political trials they never asked to attend.

Seen individually, these are difficult disputes.
Seen together...

They resemble something much older.

The names change.
The pattern does not.

The rabbis gave it a name nearly two thousand years ago.

Sinat chinam.
Baseless hatred.

When the Second Temple fell, Rome received the credit. Jewish memory assigned responsibility elsewhere. Rome destroyed the walls.

Division had already weakened the foundations.

The Altalena repeated the lesson.
October 7 repeated it again.

History has become almost embarrassingly repetitive; Israel’s enemies rarely invent Jewish fractures. They simply arrive when the cracks are already visible. None of this argues against disagreement; in fact Jewish civilization would scarcely exist without it.

Open a page of Talmud, and you will find arguments stretching across centuries.

Question after question.
Voice answering voice.

The greatness of Jewish civilization was never that everyone thought alike. It was that every argument began with an assumption that both voices belonged to the same, and that assumption feels increasingly fragile. Perhaps that is why Begin’s sentence feels less like history today and more like prophecy.

He was not asking future generations to become politically identical but for them to remain recognizably related. Because the greatest tragedy is not that brothers disagree; brothers have always disagreed. The tragedy begins when they stop recognizing one another as brothers at all.

Every generation receives the Jewish state.
Not every generation remembers how easily it can be wounded from within.

That is why Begin’s words continue to echo long after the smoke above the Altalena disappeared.

They were never instructions for 1948.

They were instructions for every generation fortunate enough to inherit what previous generations only dreamed of.

Milchemet achim—le’olam lo.

Not because disagreement is dangerous, but because forgetting that disagreement exists within a family has always been. History has never demanded that Jews agree, only that they remember who they are before deciding who is right.

Everything else...

History has already written before.

When October 7 ended, one might have expected the story to follow a familiar script.

The largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust had just unfolded. Families were butchered in their homes, and entire communities vanished before the smoke had cleared.

Surely, this would be the moment when the civilized world rediscovered the difference between those who deliberately hunted civilians and those now forced to defend them.

Instead, the story wandered somewhere altogether unexpected.

If Hamas were ever inclined to publish a letter of appreciation to those who most advanced its cause after October 7, conventional wisdom would suggest addressing it to Tehran. Perhaps Beirut. Maybe even Sanaa.

The past two years suggest otherwise.

It would be mailed instead to New York, Geneva, London, Ottawa, Canberra, Paris, and a surprising collection of university campuses, courtrooms, editorial boards, and humanitarian offices. Not because these institutions intended to strengthen Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis, but because history has a habit of caring far more about consequences than intentions.

One can almost picture the letter beginning there.

The first envelope would arrive at the United Nations.

There was every reason to believe that an institution created in the shadow of the Second World War would speak with uncommon clarity after October 7. If ever there existed a moment to distinguish barbarism from civilization, this was surely it.

Instead, the distinction grew increasingly blurred.

UNRWA facilities supported Hamas infrastructure. Records identified hundreds of employees—including educators and administrators—as members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Yet before long, the international conversation shifted away from those revelations and toward restoring confidence in the agency itself. Funding resumed. Reviews narrowed. Humanitarian language increasingly floated above institutions whose neutrality had become deeply contested.

Dramatic humanitarian claims often circled the globe before careful verification could catch them. Corrections, as always, travelled more slowly than headlines. Without anyone formally declaring it, the central question quietly changed. The world spent less time asking why Hamas built command centers beneath hospitals.

It spent considerably more asking whether Israel had gone too far trying to dismantle them.

Somewhere, one imagines, another sentence is being added to the letter.

“Thank you for making moral ambiguity our most effective weapon.”

The next recipient required no less gratitude.

For decades, Western governments had repeated the same lesson.

Statehood follows negotiations.
Recognition demands abandoning terrorism.

October 7 should have reinforced those principles.

Instead, recognitions of a Palestinian state accelerated.

Britain.
Canada.
Australia.
France.
Portugal.

Others prepared to follow.

One does not need to speculate how this looked. Movements devoted to terror pay close attention to incentives. After decades of being told that diplomacy alone unlocked political legitimacy, they watched diplomacy arrive in the immediate aftermath of unprecedented violence.

This was a reward for terrorism.

Whatever one chooses to call it, the lesson did not require interpretation.

Another paragraph quietly found its way into the letter.

“Thanks for demonstrating that spectacular violence can accomplish what negotiation never could.”

Then the scene shifted.

Not to another battlefield.

To Columbia.
Then UCLA.
Then Harvard.

The rubble disappeared, the slogans did not.

Encampments spread across campuses. The “Al-Aqsa Flood” became a symbol of resistance rather than horror. Calls to “globalize the intifada” echoed through institutions whose entrance halls proudly displayed commitments to tolerance, inclusion, and intellectual inquiry.

For years, Hamas had invested enormous effort attempting to export its worldview beyond Gaza.

The West accomplished much of the distribution itself. The West spent two years constructing narrative tunnels beneath its own institutions, quietly carrying ideas once confined to jihadist propaganda into lecture halls, student unions, newsrooms, and cultural life.

Concrete can eventually be destroyed.
Narratives are considerably harder to excavate.

The letter, by now, had become rather long. Its next destination was The Hague.

Once leaders of a democratic state defending itself after October 7 appear alongside those responsible for October 7 within the same international legal drama, something begins dissolving in the public imagination.

The legal arguments remain separate.
The moral photograph does not.

One imagines Hamas reading the rulings and headlines with understandable satisfaction. Because others had begun speaking the language it had spent decades trying to teach.

Israel has always stood on the front lines of a much larger conflict. The ideology driving Hamas does not merely reject Jewish sovereignty. It rejects the civilization that made Jewish sovereignty possible.

Pluralism.
Religious liberty.
Liberal democracy.
Individual freedom.

Israel is not the destination; it is the nearest obstacle. The tragedy, then, is not simply that so many institutions weakened Israel’s position.

History has witnessed that before.

The greater tragedy is that, in attempting to isolate one democracy, they quietly weakened the moral vocabulary with which liberal societies defend themselves. The road many believed ended in Jerusalem has an unsettling habit of continuing through London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Toronto, Sydney, and every society persuaded that hatred can be safely confined to Jews.

Perhaps Hamas will never write this letter.

It won’t have to.

History has already written most of it, and too many respectable institutions have already signed their names beneath it. The tragedy is not that terrorists found unexpected allies. Terrorist movements always do. The tragedy is that so many of those allies still believe they stand on the opposite side.

The standards abandoned for Israel will not remain abandoned only for Israel.

Barbarism has never respected borders.

It merely begins with the Jews.

There are things whose value becomes visible only after they are gone.

A language spoken for the last time.
A family photograph rescued from a fire.
The sound of children playing in streets that later fall silent.

For nearly two thousand years, Jewish sovereignty belonged to that category. It existed not as a political reality but as a memory carried through prayer, exile, and hope. Generation after generation ended the Passover Seder with the same quiet promise—Next year in Jerusalem—not because they believed it was imminent, but because some truths are too precious to surrender, even when they seem impossibly distant.

Then, against every historical expectation, it happened.

The Jewish people had spent two thousand years being told, by emperors, inquisitors, caliphs, commissars, and dictators, that they were uniquely unfit to govern themselves. After finally re-establishing sovereignty in the one place they had prayed to return to for millennia, they discovered something unexpected: some of the most eloquent advocates for that ancient proposition now carry Israeli passports.

Every democracy tolerates dissent. Healthy ones even encourage it.

But democracies also depend on something less often discussed: the distinction between criticism intended to strengthen a country and criticism that gradually lends credibility to those who deny the country’s right to exist in the first place.

That distinction has become increasingly blurred in Israel.

The Jewish state wakes each morning to an unusual combination of realities. Hezbollah points thousands of rockets toward its cities. Iran openly speaks of its elimination. Hamas has demonstrated, with horrifying clarity, what “liberation” means in practice. Across much of the international arena, Israel is accused not merely of making mistakes but of existing illegitimately.

One might imagine that such relentless external hostility would produce an unusual degree of internal solidarity. Instead, Israel has cultivated an equally remarkable phenomenon: some of the most influential material used to prosecute the Jewish state abroad originates from Israelis themselves.

Take Breaking the Silence.

Its very name contains a peculiar assumption—that the great silence demanding to be broken concerns the conduct of Israeli soldiers rather than the intentions of those trying to murder them. Israel’s young men and women serve in one of the world’s most morally complicated battlefields, confronting enemies who hide beneath hospitals, launch rockets from schools, celebrate civilian massacres, and proudly announce that October 7 should happen again and again.

A democracy confident enough to examine itself is healthier than one terrified of introspection.

Yet Breaking the Silence rarely confines that introspection to Israel itself.

Instead, anonymous testimonies become international exhibits. Foreign tours follow. Reports circulate precisely where they will be received, not as evidence that Israeli democracy scrutinizes itself, but as confirmation that Israel itself is the crime.

The distinction matters.
Self-examination strengthens a democracy.
Self-denunciation marketed abroad serves rather different consumers.

Then comes B’Tselem.

Named after the biblical declaration that every human being is created in the image of God, the organization wraps itself in one of Judaism’s noblest moral ideas.

Yet somewhere between Genesis and modern activism, something curious happened.

The region’s only democracy somehow emerged as the Middle East’s defining human rights problem.

Iran hangs dissidents from cranes.
Hamas livestreams massacres.
Hezbollah stores missiles beneath apartment blocks.
The Houthis revive slavery.
The Syrian regime murdered hundreds of thousands of its own citizens.

But somehow the moral spotlight never seems brighter than when pointed toward Jerusalem.

B’Tselem’s reports travel widely because they satisfy an international appetite that long predates the organization itself: the desire to hear that the Jewish state occupies a uniquely criminal place among nations. Their findings are quoted in international courts, NGO reports, diplomatic briefings, and activist campaigns with predictable enthusiasm.

One notices something curious.

The people most eager to cite B’Tselem are seldom those interested in improving Israel. They are usually interested in replacing it. Haaretz performs a different but equally fascinating function. There exists a difference between scrutinizing your country and becoming internationally synonymous with explaining why your country deserves exceptional condemnation.

Read foreign campaigns against Israel long enough, and one develops a strange sense of déjà vu.

The phrases feel familiar.
The framing sounds oddly recognizable.
Eventually, one realizes why.

The Islamic Republic invests billions in broadcasting anti-Israel propaganda across the globe. Israel occasionally manages to achieve similar international circulation at a fraction of the cost.

Israel’s enemies do not distinguish between Tel Aviv and Hebron, between Haifa and Judea and Samaria. Hamas does not object to Jewish sovereignty beyond the Green Line; it objects to Jewish sovereignty itself. Hezbollah’s missiles are not programmed according to disputed borders. The Iranian regime does not call for the destruction of settlements. It calls for the destruction of Israel.

That is the uncomfortable asymmetry.

If Britain had spent 1940 explaining to the world that Churchill represented the greatest threat to Europe while the Luftwaffe flew overhead, history might have remembered such courage rather differently.

If Ukrainian intellectuals devoted their energies primarily to documenting Kyiv’s moral failures while Russian missiles fell around them, the world would probably question not their freedom but their priorities.

History will not remember whether Israel argued passionately with itself. Every democracy worthy of the name does.

It will remember whether those arguments ultimately fortified the only Jewish state in history—or furnished its oldest enemies with new vocabulary for one of history’s oldest hatreds.

For decades, Israel has been accused of three great crimes. It supposedly occupies because it cannot let go. It expands because it cannot stop. And it wages war because peace is somehow contrary to its nature.

These accusations have become so familiar that they now pass for established fact. They require no evidence, only repetition. Every Israeli military operation is immediately presented as proof of militarism. Every defensive action becomes evidence of aggression. Every war begins, conveniently enough, when Israeli aircraft appear overhead, not when rockets fall on Israeli towns and certainly not when another movement once again declares that the Jewish state has no right to exist.

It is a curious version of history, one in which causes are erased while consequences are endlessly televised.

The remarkable thing is not merely that these accusations are inaccurate. It is that history has spent nearly a century disproving them, only for the same charges to be recycled every few years under fresh political branding.

Take the allegation of “occupation.”

Long before there was a single Israeli soldier in Judea and Samaria, before the Six-Day War, before checkpoints, before settlements became the international obsession they are today, the Arab leadership had already rejected the existence of any Jewish state whatsoever. In 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed partition. The Jewish leadership accepted the principle despite receiving only a fragment of the land they had hoped for. The Arab Higher Committee rejected it outright.

A decade later came the 1947 UN Partition Plan.

Again, the Jews accepted.
Again, the Arab leadership refused.

The uncomfortable implication is difficult to avoid: if opposition to Israel predates the so-called occupation, then perhaps the occupation was never the real objection. The slogan changed. The objective did not. That same pattern survived every generation.

Yasser Arafat inherited rejectionism and elevated it into political doctrine. Oslo promised mutual recognition and gradual coexistence. Instead, Israelis received buses exploding in city centers and cafés transformed into crime scenes.

Then came Camp David in 2000.

PM Ehud Barak placed before Arafat one of the most generous proposals ever offered: a Palestinian state across nearly all of Gaza and the West Bank, territorial exchanges, and unprecedented arrangements regarding Jerusalem.

Arafat did not negotiate.
He walked away.

President Bill Clinton, hardly known as an Israeli propagandist, later concluded that Arafat had squandered the opportunity. The Second Intifada followed. The pattern could hardly have been clearer if history had written it in fluorescent ink: compromise was answered not with peace, but with terrorism.

The accusation of expansionism fares no better. Expansionist powers generally have one peculiar habit. They expand. Israel has displayed the opposite instinct with almost frustrating consistency.

After signing peace with Egypt, it surrendered the entire Sinai Peninsula, an area larger than the State of Israel itself. It dismantled Yamit, evacuated families who had spent years building communities there, and abandoned strategic depth purchased through war. Empires rarely demolish their own frontier towns in pursuit of peace.

Israel did.
Then came Gaza.

In 2005, Israel dismantled every settlement, removed more than 8,000 of its own citizens, withdrew every soldier, and handed over the territory without demanding reciprocal concessions. If territorial expansion had truly been the Zionist project, Gaza would have remained permanently under Israeli control.

Instead, Israel surrendered it entirely.
The territory did not become Singapore on the Mediterranean.
It became something far closer to an Iranian forward operating base.

Greenhouses were transformed into rocket factories, schools into weapons depots, hospitals into military infrastructure, and residential neighborhoods into launch sites.

The lesson was devastating.
Israel gave away land.
Concession was interpreted as weakness.

Even then, the offers continued.

In 2008, PM Ehud Olmert presented Mahmoud Abbas with perhaps the most far-reaching proposal ever placed before a Palestinian leader: nearly the entire West Bank, territorial exchanges, a land corridor connecting Gaza, and substantial concessions over Jerusalem.

Abbas rejected it.
Later, he acknowledged as much.

Subsequent initiatives met similar fates, dismissed before negotiations could meaningfully begin. By this stage, one begins to notice a recurring feature of Middle Eastern diplomacy.

Israel keeps arriving with maps.
Its adversaries keep arriving with vetoes.

This brings us to the third accusation, that Israel somehow prefers war.

No nation that truly loves war repeatedly trades strategic territory for uncertain promises. No nation addicted to conquest repeatedly dismantles its own settlements. No country seeking endless conflict signs peace with Egypt, peace with Jordan, normalization agreements with Arab neighbors, and still continues searching for further accommodation.

Hezbollah launches rockets. Israel responds. Hamas invades Israeli communities on October 7, murders civilians, kidnaps children and grandparents alike.
Israel responds. Iran surrounds Israel with armed proxies while openly pursuing capabilities that threaten Israel’s existence. Israel responds.

One need not celebrate war to understand causality.
Self-defense is not evidence of bloodlust.
It is often evidence that someone else preferred violence over coexistence.

None of this renders Israel perfect.

But the record shows Israel as the party that has repeatedly tested the proposition of peace through painful compromise—Sinai for a treaty, Gaza for a chance, offer after offer at the negotiating table. The other side has chosen, time and again, the path of “from the river to the sea.” Hezbollah attacks precipitate responses in Lebanon; Hamas rockets and October 7-style atrocities trigger war in Gaza; Iranian nuclear ambitions and proxy encirclement invite preemption. Context is not an excuse, it is the inconvenient truth the slogans omit.

One is left wondering what an actual peace-seeking Israel would look like to its critics—perhaps total disappearance? For the crime of defending itself while offering ever-greater concessions, the Jewish state stands uniquely condemned. It is the war-monger that keeps saying yes, the expansionist that keeps contracting, the occupier whose Arab citizens refuse to flee.

History’s ledger is clear for those willing to read it: Israel has tested the proposition of peace with painful sincerity. The rejectionists have failed that test spectacularly. The fashionable chants may comfort the ideologically pure, but they cannot erase the receipts. There comes a point when repeating a falsehood is no longer ignorance. It becomes a decision.

When every Israeli concession is remembered as aggression and every rejection remembered as resistance, history itself becomes occupied.

In 1948, after two thousand years of exile, centuries of persecution, and the ashes of the Holocaust still warm across Europe, the Jewish people re-established sovereignty in their ancestral homeland. For Israelis, it became Independence Day. For Palestinians, it became the Nakba—the “catastrophe.”

That was the first great inversion. Jewish survival itself was recast as someone else’s tragedy. The mere existence of a Jewish state became the original offense, not the repeated attempts to destroy it.

That moral inversion did not end in 1948. It became the operating system of Palestinian nationalism.

Every Israeli holiday requires a Palestinian counter-narrative. Every Israeli achievement must be diminished. Every Israeli funeral demands a competing victimhood. Israelis are not permitted the ordinary privilege of celebrating their victories or burying their dead without Palestinians insisting that the spotlight belongs to them.

The suffering of Israelis is considered incomplete until it has been rewritten as Palestinian victimhood.

That familiar script unfolded once again on July 2, 2026.

Israelis marked one thousand days since the October 7 massacre. Across the country, families remembered murdered relatives and prayed for hostages who remain in Gaza—alive or dead. For once, ideology should have yielded to simple human decency. Instead, Palestinians declared the occasion “one thousand days of genocide.”

Even Jewish mourning had to become Palestinian theatre.

Imagine arriving at a shiva only to insist the bereaved family vacate the mourning tent because your grievance deserves the chairs. That is the logic on display. Israeli grief is never allowed to remain Israeli grief. It must be annexed into the Palestinian narrative.

Shiri Bibas was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz alongside her two sons—Ariel, aged four, and Kfir, just nine months old. The images of the terrified mother clutching her red-haired children became among the defining images of October 7. The children were later confirmed to have been murdered in captivity.

Not killed in crossfire.
Not victims of some unfortunate battlefield accident.
Murdered.

Hamas first blamed Israeli airstrikes before quietly abandoning the story once forensic evidence destroyed it. But admitting responsibility was never really the objective. Narrative management was. Almost immediately the accusation was inverted. Israel, somehow, became the regime that murders babies.

The same script reappeared over sexual violence.

On October 7, Palestinian militants committed rapes, gang rapes and acts of sexual torture documented by eyewitnesses, forensic evidence, survivors, first responders, and later corroborated by the United Nations. The evidence was sufficient for Hamas to be blacklisted by the UN for systematic conflict-related sexual violence.

Yet almost before the evidence had settled, another campaign emerged.

Articles, activists and advocacy groups redirected attention toward allegations that Israel was the systematic sexual predator. Pieces such as Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times essay amplified those claims internationally. Eventually, Israel itself found its way onto the UN’s sexual violence blacklist.

Observe how elegantly the inversion works.

The perpetrators become victims.
The victims become perpetrators.
Reality itself becomes negotiable.

None of this exists in isolation.

The PA continues rewarding terrorists through its notorious “pay-for-slay” programme, where financial stipends increase according to the severity of attacks against Israelis. Schoolchildren continue learning maps in which Israel simply does not exist. Generation after generation is taught not coexistence but elimination. Every rejected peace proposal becomes further evidence that Israel refuses peace.

They overturned every negotiating table on which a Palestinian state was offered, only to spend decades claiming no table ever existed.

The origins of this psychology are hardly mysterious.

The Arab leadership rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan, rejecting a Palestinian state because accepting one would also have meant accepting a Jewish one. War followed. Defeat followed. Displacement followed. Even early Arab intellectuals such as Constantine Zurayk described the Nakba less as an injustice inflicted by Zionists than as an Arab failure—a humiliation born of losing a war intended to prevent Jewish independence.

That uncomfortable truth gradually gave way to something politically more useful.

Failure became victimhood.
Aggression became resistance.
Responsibility became oppression.

The catastrophe was no longer the decision to wage war. It became the existence of the Jews who survived it.

Ever since, Israelis have never been permitted a day that belongs solely to them.

Independence Day becomes the Nakba.
Jerusalem Day becomes another grievance.
One thousand days since October 7 becomes another opportunity to erase October 7.

There is something almost comic about the predictability of it all—were the consequences not so deadly.

A society that glorifies “martyrs,” broadcasts children’s programmes celebrating jihad, stores rockets beneath civilian neighbourhoods, and counts casualties with greater enthusiasm than peace proposals somehow cannot tolerate Israelis quietly remembering murdered families without staging a competing spectacle of grievance.

The obsession says far more about Palestinian politics than it does about Israel.

A healthy society does not construct its identity around sabotaging another nation’s moments of joy and grief. It builds institutions. It accepts responsibility. It prepares its people for compromise instead of permanent resentment.

Palestinian politics has largely chosen the opposite path.

By insisting that every Israeli celebration is an insult and every Israeli tragedy is somehow about Palestinians, it traps its own people inside a perpetual hall of mirrors where accountability never appears and history endlessly repeats itself.

Israelis should be allowed to celebrate their independence without apology.
They should be allowed to commemorate their murdered children without interruption.
They should even be allowed the remarkably modest privilege of mourning in peace.

But that would require abandoning the central doctrine that has animated Palestinian politics for generations, that Jewish happiness is illegitimate, Jewish suffering is insufficient, and Jewish existence itself remains the original crime.

Until that changes, the inversion will continue.
Every Israeli wedding will require a protest.
Every Israeli funeral will require a slogan.

In twelfth-century Norwich, a young boy was found dead in the woods. No evidence pointed to the local Jews. None was needed. Truth was still knocking on the city gates while the accusation was already collecting believers. Jews had murdered a Christian child for ritual purposes. Facts eventually surfaced, but accountability never followed.

Today the mechanism hums with far greater efficiency, wearing blue badges instead of monastic robes. The United Nations has become the grand distributor of updated libels against the Jewish state, accusations that ignite diplomatic tempests, pressure governments, and isolate Israel while the true architects of suffering—jihadist strongholds embedded among civilians—operate with relative impunity. The pattern repeats with mechanical precision: sensational claim, global panic, quiet correction buried beneath the next headline. No sackcloth, no reckoning.

The oldest libel in history has simply received institutional branding.

Consider what happened during the Gaza war.

Tom Fletcher, the UN’s humanitarian chief, appeared on BBC Radio 4 and declared that 14,000 babies could die within forty-eight hours unless aid entered Gaza immediately. Fletcher never had to say, “Israel is murdering babies.” The headline-writing class kindly completed the sentence for him. Israel was supposedly standing between thousands of infants and certain death. Predictably, outrage erupted across capitals. Editorials were written. Demonstrators filled the streets. Diplomats discovered fresh reserves of moral indignation.

There was only one inconvenience.
The claim was fiction.

The underlying IPC assessment never said that 14,000 babies would die within forty-eight hours. It projected expected cases of acute malnutrition among children between six months and five years over an entire year—from April 2025 through March 2026. It was a projection of possible malnutrition cases, not an imminent death sentence, not infants exclusively, and certainly not a countdown to mass starvation over a single weekend.

In other words, the headline that raced around the globe existed only because the UN’s own humanitarian chief transformed a statistical projection into political theater.

The correction eventually arrived.
Naturally, almost nobody noticed.
That is how modern blood libels operate.
The medieval version claimed Jews drank children’s blood.
The modern version merely suggests they starve children by the thousands.

The medieval libels needed no central secretariat; rumors traveled on foot and by pulpit. Today the UN provides the infrastructure: the platforms, the rapporteurs, the permanent agenda items, the blue-helmeted legitimacy that transforms exaggeration into apparent consensus. It has assumed the role of ambassador for the oldest hatred in new robes, laundering regional animosities and institutional inadequacy through the language of humanitarian concern and international law.

The boy in Norwich was not ritually murdered for blood. The projected malnutrition cases were not 14,000 babies facing execution by starvation in 48 hours. Yet in both eras, the accusation itself becomes the event, shaping policy, stirring fury, and demanding gestures of appeasement that conveniently distract from uncomfortable domestic truths. Israel remains the inconvenient sentinel, guarding its narrow strip against forces that view its very existence as provocation.

This reflects an institution whose obsession has become almost comical were its consequences not so serious. Between 2012 and 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted ninety-seven country-specific resolutions. Eighty-three condemned Israel. The Human Rights Council spent much of its first decade directing more country-specific condemnations at Israel than at regimes whose combined record includes industrial-scale torture and public executions.

Across the Middle East, dictators butcher their own people while jihadists dream of global caliphates. Meanwhile, international diplomacy remains stubbornly fascinated by Israeli zoning permits and military operations.

If hypocrisy were renewable energy, the United Nations could solve Europe’s electricity crisis.

But international organizations are not unique in discovering the political usefulness of Israel. Western governments have learned the same lesson medieval monarchs mastered centuries ago. When domestic politics become uncomfortable, Israel often becomes remarkably convenient. Facing economic stagnation, immigration failures, integration crises, rising extremism, and increasingly restless electorates, governments across Britain, Canada, France, Australia and elsewhere have rushed toward recognition of a Palestinian state.

The gesture was marketed as courageous diplomacy.
Its political utility is rather more obvious.
Nothing changes on the ground.
Nothing restrains Hamas.
Nothing weakens Iran’s regional network.

But politicians acquire flattering headlines, activist pressure temporarily subsides, and public frustration finds a foreign target instead of a domestic one. The strategy is as old as the bazaars of Damascus. When the caravan is robbed, blame the Jew selling spices rather than the governor collecting taxes.

The scenery changes.
The politics never do.
The United Nations follows precisely the same instinct.

Having struggled to prevent wars, watched conflicts multiply, and presided over countless humanitarian catastrophes, it has discovered one remarkably dependable source of institutional relevance: perpetual condemnation of Israel. Every resolution creates the comforting illusion that someone, somewhere, is courageously confronting evil.

It simply happens to be the wrong evil.

Meanwhile, the organizations openly dedicated to Israel’s destruction continue operating from schools, hospitals, mosques, apartment blocks, and tunnel networks beneath civilian neighborhoods.

The defenders become defendants.
The aggressors become humanitarian exhibits.

The institution born from humanity’s promise of “Never Again” has become remarkably busy explaining why “Again” is apparently negotiable when the target is Israel. The verdict was written before the evidence was collected. It usually is. Because the accusation was never designed to discover the truth but to manufacture a culprit.

The medieval mob needed rumors. Today’s guardians of international virtue have something infinitely more respectable: the United Nations.