Division Without Difference

In a previous article, I examined the skewed reporting of the latest Israeli parliamentary elections by parts of the Western press. I showed how journalists failed to portray the elections as democracy in action, preferring instead to present them as evidence of deep societal divisions.

But while peaceful political dissension may not be the most remarkable aspect of free and fair elections in the Middle East, it is still worth examining.

Democratic elections are, by their very nature, an adversarial process; in a healthy democracy, people should argue passionately about their country’s future. Yet much of the media appears convinced that the latest elections exposed seemingly unbridgeable divisions within Israeli society.

A Guardian piece suggested that

“Blocs, camps and tribes have never been more irreconcilable.”

Associated Press asserted that

“Israel’s divisions are deeper than ever.”

 

Divided we agree

Is this really so?  Certainly the heated partisan rhetoric – before and after the elections – would seem to support that view.  But there has been heated rhetoric many times in the past; and rhetoric isn’t reality.  So let’s look a little deeper.

The main issue in Israeli politics has always been national security. Today, that means primarily Iran, Gaza and Lebanon.

We know what Netanyahu wants: at a minimum, no uranium enrichment in Iran and a sharp curtailment of its regional influence; Hamas defeated, disarmed and politically defanged; and Hezbollah kept well away from Israel’s border – if not completely incapacitated.

But what about the opposition – the self-described ‘Change Bloc’?

Retired general Gadi Eisenkot is the Bloc’s candidate for premiership and Netanyahu’s main challenger.

On 23 September 2026, presenting his Yashar party's programme in Haifa, he declared that the campaign against Iran must culminate in the dismantling of its nuclear programme.  He has repeatedly identified military operations as one of the ways to achieve that aim.

On Gaza, Eisenkot has stressed Hamas disarmament as a pre-condition for restoring civilian governance, introducing an international stabilisation force and beginning reconstruction.

On Lebanon, he has set three objectives: the demilitarisation of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah's disarmament and lasting security for northern Israel.

The preliminary conclusion is striking – for some perhaps shocking:  on the major issues of security, one would have to dive into the realm of minute details to find meaningful differences between the leader of the opposition and that of the current coalition.

And it’s not just Eisenkot. Naftali Bennett and, especially, Avigdor Lieberman have advocated positions that are, in some respects, even more uncompromising than Netanyahu’s. Yair Lapid and Yair Golan also share broadly similar strategic goals; both favour diplomatic solutions where possible, without excluding military operations where necessary to achieve those goals.

Think about what this means.  Netanyahu’s bloc won 53 seats in the 120-strong parliament – Israel’s Knesset.  The Change Bloc garnered 48.  So parties representing 84% of Israeli voters broadly agree on Israel’s major imperatives in terms of national security – the cardinal issue on the country’s political agenda.

Of course, this is a simplification.  In reality, Israel probably has as many opinions as it has voters.  You know… two Jews, three opinions and all that jazz.  But simplification is justified here: where, exactly, are those “irreconcilable” divisions?

 

Relations with the neighbours are probably Israel’s second most important issue.

Netanyahu has long pursued a normalisation agreement with Saudi Arabia, which he views as a watershed in terms of Israel’s acceptance in the region.  On the Palestinian front, he currently rules out the establishment of a Palestinian state, although he may still be amenable to a demilitarised ‘state-minus’, with Palestinians governing themselves under overriding Israeli security control.  He supports the continuation of Israel’s settlement project in the West Bank – although he is hardly an enthusiastic champion of that project.  He is on record condemning violent acts by Judea & Samaria settlers, although he has also downplayed the extent of the phenomenon and ascribed its news prominence to hostile propaganda.

Netanyahu’s current positions have no doubt been hardened not only by the events of 7 October, but also by the need to keep his coalition partners reasonably happy. In a more centrist coalition, those positions might well soften somewhat.

Which brings us to the Change Bloc. Its leaders share broad support for bringing Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords. As for a Palestinian state, the ‘Change’ leadership embraces a wider range of positions, from outright rejection (Lieberman and Bennett) to acceptance in principle, but ‘not in the coming years’ (Lapid), and qualified agreement (Golan: a demilitarised Palestinian state within a regional settlement, subject to Israel’s security requirements).

As for Eisenkot, the Bloc’s candidate for prime minister has described the two-state solution as “a grave mistake” and anyone contemplating it after 7 October as “delusional”.  Yet he, too, has envisaged the possibility of a demilitarised ‘state-minus’, with Palestinian self-government under overriding Israeli security control – a formula remarkably similar to Netanyahu’s own earlier position.

Crucially, none of the Change leaders – not even Golan – is advocating the establishment of a Palestinian state under current conditions.

Let’s translate this into numbers: Netanyahu’s bloc 53 mandates; Eisenkot – 21; Lieberman – 7; Bennett’s contingent within the joint list with Lapid – another 7.  That’s 88 mandates – nearly three quarters of the Knesset.  And that’s on an issue that’s supposed to be one of the most controversial!

Nor is there any brick wall separating Lapid and even Golan from this broad consensus: while both support the idea of a Palestinian state in principle, neither advocates agreeing to one under present circumstances.

 

A description of the conscription

But there are also domestic areas of disagreement – such as the conscription of Haredi (the so-called ultra-Orthodox) men into military service.

On this issue, the gap does seem unbridgeable. The two Haredi parties (United Torah Judaism and Shas) are fiercely opposed to the compulsory enlistment of yeshiva students. Their leaders – both rabbis and full-time politicians – fear that prolonged service in the army would accustom their youngsters to a different way of life, causing many of them to leave the community.

The Change Bloc is just as adamant that Haredi men should serve, like everybody else. Its leaders point to repeated warnings from military commanders that, given the security challenges Israel faces, the IDF desperately needs more manpower.

With so many Israelis having to serve months on end in the reserves, and in view of the losses sustained in life and limb, there is a widespread sense that the Haredi are enjoying cost-free security that others pay for in blood.

Haredi leaders counter with a religious argument: fervent study of the Torah and Talmud is what protects Israel, they say; hence, that sacred endeavour should be recognised as a form of national service.

The Change Bloc made universal conscription into one of its central electoral issues. But the demand is hardly confined to the opposition: even within Netanyahu’s governing coalition, including his own Likud party, there are vocal advocates of substantially increasing Haredi conscription.

As so often in Israel, the Supreme Court has been drawn into the dispute. In June 2024, it ruled that, in the absence of legislation authorising exemptions, the government was legally obliged to begin conscripting eligible Haredi men. But under Netanyahu – whose premiership depended on the votes of the two Haredi parties – progress was painfully slow and enforcement feeble.

 

But even in this bitter area of dissension, positions are more complex than some would have us believe.

Historically, Shas has represented Israelis of Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African) extraction. Some are Haredi, but many identify themselves as ‘traditional’ from a religious point of view: they value Jewish heritage without adopting the Haredi community’s insular way of life. Shas’s electoral success has long depended on attracting both groups, extending its reach well beyond the Haredi electorate. At the previous election, it won no fewer than 11 Knesset seats.

In this year’s election, Shas slumped to just six seats. Much of that decline has been attributed to the conscription issue.

Shas’s leaders – both religious and political, and themselves Haredi – have been uncompromising in their opposition to compulsory enlistment. But that position has alienated many of the party’s traditional Mizrahi voters, who tend to be strongly Zionist and patriotic, and whose own sons serve in the army.

An October 2023 survey by the Israel Democracy Institute revealed a striking difference: while 82% of United Torah Judaism voters supported exempting all Haredi men from military service, only about half of Shas voters shared that position.

Shas now faces a dilemma: will it continue opposing compulsory Haredi conscription – and lose more of its ‘traditional’ voters – or will it change course and risk alienating its Haredi constituency?

Or perhaps there is a middle way, some sweet spot that could satisfy both communities?

Haredi leaders understand only too well that political power – measured in Knesset mandates – is an existential necessity. Among other things, it provides the financial means to sustain the community’s way of life, including the intensive study of religious texts. Losing some of that political leverage may be seen as an even greater threat than military service itself.

Already, some of Shas’s longstanding leaders are facing fierce criticism over the party’s electoral collapse.  A change of leadership is now a distinct possibility – perhaps opening the door to a more moderate approach.

But other changes are also taking place – albeit slowly – within the Haredi community. The younger generation of Haredim is much more connected to the rest of the country. They tend to speak Hebrew rather than Yiddish or Judeo-Arabic; and they are distinctly more patriotic, much less inclined to view themselves as anti- or non-Zionists.

These recent elections have seen the emergence of a third – and different – Haredi party, dubbed Haredi Public. Unlike the established Haredi parties, it supports military service for men who are not studying full-time in yeshivas, greater participation in the workforce, broader secular education and the inclusion of women in politics.

True, it fell far short of the electoral threshold and will therefore not be represented in the Knesset. But its very emergence and continued campaign – despite enormous pressure brought against it within a tightly knit community – tell an interesting story.

And it’s not merely anecdotal.  A survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute in January 2024 found that 54% of Haredi respondents would support a family member or friend enlisting in the IDF, at least under certain circumstances. Only 26% would oppose such a decision. Evidently, the views of the Haredi community are considerably more varied than the uncompromising pronouncements of its religious and political leaders might suggest.

So even on this bitterly contested issue, the divisions among Israelis are less “irreconcilable” than the likes of The Guardian would have us believe.

 

Rising Arabs, Crouching Tigers

But what about the chasm between Israeli Jews and Arabs? The dramatic increase in the parliamentary representation of Arab parties – from 10 seats in the previous elections to 19 this time – could be interpreted as evidence of a widening political gap between these two populations.

However, that would be judging by appearances. In the past, Arab Israelis’ relatively low levels of electoral participation were generally seen as expressing a lack of trust in the country’s political system – and, in some cases, a deliberate refusal to ‘recognise’ it through participation.

This time, close to 80% of the Arab Israeli electorate voted. As many commentators have observed, this could be seen – perhaps should be seen – as a growing willingness to participate in the country’s political life.

But it’s worth taking a closer look.

Two electoral lists vied for the Arab vote. The Joint List is an alliance of three different parties. The largest of them – Hadash – has its roots in communism, while the other two, Ta’al and Balad, represent different strands of Arab and Palestinian nationalism. All three prioritise Palestinian national aspirations, with Arab Israelis viewed as a branch of the larger Palestinian people. In contrast, the other Arab contender – Ra’am, or the United Arab List – has in recent years focused increasingly on the everyday issues facing Arab Israelis, with the Palestinian question taking a back seat.

The distinction is rooted in deeper ideological, geographical, ethnic and even linguistic differences. With its progressive, secular ideology, Hadash has traditionally drawn much of its support from the Arab communities of northern and central Israel, who speak Levantine varieties of Arabic. Ra’am, on the other hand, has its roots in Islamism and draws particularly strong support from the more conservative Bedouin communities of the Negev and Galilee, who speak distinct Bedouin dialects of Arabic.

Palestinian national identity has traditionally been more prominent among the Levantine Arab communities, whereas the Bedouin have tended to place greater emphasis on their distinct tribal heritage, broader Arab identity and conservative Muslim faith.

The depth of the Joint List’s identification with the Palestinian cause was illustrated by the controversy surrounding Sami Abu Shehadeh, one of its leaders. He was forced to withdraw from the election over an article describing Hamas’s 7 October attack as an “important historical event”.

In contrast, under its leader Mansour Abbas, Ra’am has sought to distance itself from its Islamist roots and embrace a form of Israeli civic politics focused much more on the immediate interests of its constituents than on the Palestinian cause.

Both Ra’am and Hadash have chosen to stress Jewish–Arab collaboration, each by including an Israeli Jew in a prominent position on its electoral list. But the similarity ends there: Hadash’s Jewish representative, Ofer Cassif, is an avowed anti-Zionist and hard-left activist supporting the Palestinian cause. Ra’am’s Jewish representative, Yoav Segalovitz, is a former senior police commander and an outspoken Zionist.

Ra’am has already participated in an Israeli governing coalition and has openly declared its readiness to do so again. The Joint List, by contrast, has rejected joining a coalition with Zionist parties, although it has signalled its willingness to provide conditional parliamentary support for a prospective Change Bloc government.

With eight Knesset mandates, Ra’am is now the largest individual Arab party. The Joint List won 11 seats, but these are divided among its three constituent parties.

In summary: far from signalling deeper divisions, the Arab parties’ current positions – and the electoral support those positions received – appear to mark a certain political rapprochement, albeit a very partial and incremental one, between Jews and Arabs.

 

The Netanyahu Effect

But if – contrary to The Guardian’s claim – political divisions in Israel are not “irreconcilable,” why did Israel have to have five elections between 2019 and 2022?  And why is it so difficult to form a stable governing coalition?

There are two reasons.

The primary reason is Netanyahu.  Not so much what he does, but who he is: a long-serving, wily politician who has accumulated more personal enemies than political opponents.

Consider two of the Change Bloc leaders: Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman. Both were once close allies and trusted aides of Netanyahu. Both are right-wing politicians whose worldviews differ little from his. Yet both fell out with Netanyahu and have now categorically ruled out joining a coalition led by him.  Neither objects to working with Likud, provided Netanyahu is no longer its leader.

Both politicians cite ethical objections: Netanyahu has been indicted on corruption charges and is standing trial.

Yet neither has always displayed such uncompromising moral standards. Lieberman was himself tried on corruption charges – and acquitted – while Bennett was fined for breaches of campaign-finance rules. More tellingly, both previously supported Netanyahu despite the corruption allegations against him.

Netanyahu is standing trial in three separate corruption cases, but only one poses a serious threat to his political future: Case 4000, in which he is accused of bribery. Prosecutors allege that Netanyahu granted regulatory advantages to Bezeq, a telecommunications company controlled by businessman Shaul Elovitch, in return for more favourable coverage of himself by Walla, a news website owned by the same magnate.

Bribery is a grave offence – all the more so when committed by a prime minister. But there is a problem: the judges hearing the case have expressed serious doubts about whether the prosecution can actually prove it.

In June 2023, the three judges declared that there were “difficulties in providing an evidential basis for the offence of bribery” and suggested that the prosecution withdraw the charge. The prosecution refused, arguing that the court had not yet heard all the evidence.

But three years later, in June 2026, after hearing extensive testimony from Netanyahu himself, including his cross-examination by the prosecution, the judges reiterated their recommendation. Their assessment, they explicitly stated, “remains unchanged.”

Let's put this in layman's terms: after years of litigation, the judges clearly don't believe that the prosecution has proven that Netanyahu committed bribery. Moreover, they are doubtful that a conviction for bribery remains a realistic prospect – otherwise, why recommend dropping the charge? And their doubts must be very substantial – substantial enough for them to take the highly unusual step of recommending, not once but twice, that the prosecution abandon that serious charge mid-trial.

This does not amount to an acquittal, of course.  It is still possible – theoretically at least – that the prosecution might pull a legal rabbit out of their hat, causing the judges to exclaim ‘Aha!’ and raise their hands to convict.  It’s possible… but how likely is it?  And does that very low likelihood warrant a complete ‘ethical’ boycott of the man?

 

Israeli Palestinians, American Blacks and Stupid Comparisons

But, besides Netanyahu, there’s another reason for Israel’s political stalemate: the reluctance of most other Israeli parties to include Arab parties in a governing coalition – or even to rely on their parliamentary support from without.

But why is that? Left-wing pundits have a ready-made answer: anti-Arab racism, long entrenched among Jewish Israelis, they say, and further inflamed by Netanyahu and his far-right allies.

Writing on this topic for the Jerusalem Post, Tova Herzl laments:

“Jews can be every bit as racist as anyone else”.

She goes on to urge the opposition to

“reject the disgraceful racism that is eating away at every decent part of Israeli society.”

There is, of course, an ocean of mistrust, resentment, occasionally even animosity between Jews and Arabs in Israel.  And – although Ms. Herzl prefers to only look at one side – it goes both ways.

But is it racism, or is it the rather inevitable result of 100 years of bitter conflict?  Anti-Arab racism exists in Israel – no doubt about it – as does Arab antisemitism.  But is anti-Arab racism so widespread that it “is eating away at every decent part of Israeli society”?

Consider what happened once the UAE joined the Abraham Accords: Jewish Israelis flocked to Dubai in their hundreds of thousands, enthusiastically choosing to spend their holidays among Arabs they are supposed to dislike simply for being Arabs.

Writing for The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland portrays Israeli politics largely as a conflict between left and right.  The former, he says, is a minority among Israeli Jews – and hence can only win if it collaborates with the Arab parties.  He even resorts to a comparison with US politics:

“The only way the opposition can succeed is by making common cause with their Palestinian fellow citizens, just as Democrats in the US [...] could never win the presidency without the support of Black Americans.”

Freedland’s parallel may seem clever; but it is also utterly false.

It is rather revealing that Freedland refers to ‘Palestinian fellow citizens’.  Therein lies the problem: Israel and Palestine are at war.  This isn’t my opinion; it’s the legal determination of a forum that Freedland – not me – holds in high regard: the International Criminal Court.

Of course, being ethnically Arab or Palestinian does not in itself imply lack of loyalty towards the State of Israel.  After all, many Arab Israelis serve in the IDF, some even as senior officers.

But the Joint List goes considerably further than merely identifying as Arab or Palestinian. It openly champions the Palestinian cause and makes Palestinian national aspirations the central pillar of its political programme.

This is where Freedland’s comparison falls flat on its face: we’re not talking about a racial minority – like in the case of African Americans, but about political parties whose agenda is incompatible with that of most other Israeli political parties.

Here’s a more apt analogy: although Jonathan Freedland never seems to write about them, historically a substantial minority of Ukrainian voters – almost one in five in the 2019 parliamentary elections – supported pro-Russian parties. Can you imagine the Ukrainian government, in the midst of its war with Russia, including such a party? Or even relying on its parliamentary support – effectively allowing that party to decide when to keep the government in power, and when to topple it?  In reality, far from entertaining such a possibility, following the Russian invasion Ukraine banned pro-Russian parties.

 

The upshot of all this is that pundits – including Israeli commentators – who interpret the post-elections deadlock as evidence of “irreconcilable” divisions are dead wrong.  Far from resulting from deep differences on strategic goals, the stalemate is mainly caused by personal rancour and personal ambitions among top politicians.  And then there is the difficulty of collaborating with Arab parties – particularly the Joint List – not necessarily because they are Arab, but because their political agenda makes them unacceptable as partners to the vast majority of Jewish Israelis.

 

A kingdom for a solution

‘That’s all very nice’, you may say, ‘but how can we break the deadlock?’ Well, here’s what I think.

First, there are various proposals for changing Israel’s electoral system. Some would revive direct elections for the prime minister – a system tried and abandoned two decades ago. Others would move away from proportional representation.

I oppose such proposals. Changing the electoral rules in order to engineer a more desirable political result – desirable for whom, exactly? Who decides what the country actually needs? – would establish a very bad precedent.

The system is fine.  It worked for more than seven decades.  The problem is not the system – it’s Netanyahu.  Take this one person out of the equation and the problem goes away.  Coalition negotiations would still be acerbic, of course; but we would be talking political horse-trading, not slaughtering sacred cows.

Don’t get me wrong: I think that Netanyahu has been – for a while, at least – a good leader for Israel.  True, he bears ‘prime ministerial responsibility’ for 7 October; he is rightly criticised for failing to prevent that awful massacre.  But then, if he started a war with Hamas on 6 October, he would’ve been criticised for warmongering.

A good leader he might have been, overall; but he has been in power too long.  And power corrupts – not necessarily by causing prime ministers to break the law, but by blurring the boundaries between personal, political and national interest.

There’s another issue, as well: with the Democrats ‘conquering’ the US Congress (likely for the next 4 years, if not longer), Israel is badly in need of a different leader.  Whether the Democratic party’s demonisation of Netanyahu is fair or not – that’s not the point.  The point is to give pro-Israel Democrats support, rather than undermining them.

So the solution is simple – at least in principle: Israel needs to wean itself of Benjamin Netanyahu and he needs to be persuaded to let go.  Which means granting him an honourable way to bow out.  I appreciate that there are Israelis – both politicians and voters – who would dearly want to see him in prison.  But is this worth dealing more damage to the country?

A presidential pardon?  A president-brokered deal including dropping the bribery charge and – perhaps – a final 12 months of ‘honorary’ premiership?  I don’t know what it would take.  But creativity is an Israeli national characteristic and negotiations are a national skill.  Put them to work.  Note that I mentioned the President twice.  He has a key role to play.  This – not cutting ribbons and smiling photogenically – is the reason his office exists.

Israel is a small country, but it’s bigger than any one leader – be he David Ben Gurion or Benjamin Netanyahu.

The BBC's problem with Jews

The Economist Intelligence Unit and Freedom House come with divergent, if not opposite ideological baggage: the former is UK-based and liberal-leaning; the latter US-based and distinctly more conservative.  Yet they agree on one thing: the Middle East is the world’s most unfree region.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, based on 60 indicators, awards the Middle East and North Africa an average score of just 3.16 out of 10 – lower even than sub-Saharan Africa. Exclude Israel, with its score of 7.80, and the regional average drops to a mere 2.92.

Freedom House, which assesses political rights and civil liberties using 25 indicators, tells much the same story. On its 100-point scale, the Middle East and North Africa averages just 23.9. Take out Israel, with its score of 73, and the figure falls to 21.3.

By both measures, Israel sticks out – no, not like a sore thumb, but like a lighthouse in a sea of darkness. It is the only country in the Middle East that Freedom House classifies as ‘Free’ and that the Economist Intelligence Unit rates as a democracy – albeit a ‘flawed’ one.

So, when free and fair elections are held in the Jewish state, one would expect Western journalists to applaud – perhaps even to hold them up as an example for the rest of the region to follow.

Especially since – despite the usual prophecies of doom – the elections took place peacefully, with vanishingly few incidents of violence, and relatively minor ones at that.

But some of those Western journalists would sooner bite their tongues off than say anything positive about the Jewish state.

True to its chronic obsession with Israel, the BBC News website devoted ‘live coverage’ to the elections. It even went as far as to place Israel’s parliamentary elections (population 10 million, GDP $720 billion) on a par with elections to the US Congress (population 343 million, GDP $32,400 billion). Both elections – the BBC declared – could have

“profound consequences for the world”.

Yet, throughout its coverage, the BBC seemed rather less interested in celebrating the peaceful exercise of democracy than in dwelling on “polarisation” and portraying Israeli society as “split”.

In an article entitled “Israel's election deadlock is a sign of the country's deep divisions”, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent James Landale offered this rather undiplomatic assessment:

“The risk is that this election, instead of putting Israel on a new path, has instead raised further doubts about what it is that unites its citizens. What are the common factors that bind this complex, varied collection of peoples into one polity?”

So there we are: in the Jewish state, the BBC views elections not as an opportunity, but as a risk.

And then comes this:

“Autocratic governments, which are growing in number, have long criticised democracies for producing weak and temporary governments, often fragile coalitions that struggle to hold together, let alone deliver what the people wanted.”

Is autocracy, I wonder, the BBC’s institutional recommendation for managing the ‘risk’ posed by democratic elections?  Or are these just the idle philosophical ruminations of a fifth-rate journalist – which, incredibly, a BBC editor has deemed fit to publish?

James Landale, BBC diplomatic correspondent, reporting on the elections in Israel.

Of course, in a democracy journalists are free to write whatever they wish – even to disparage the very democracy that grants them that freedom.  But BBC journalists are not mere journalists: they are – in a sense – public servants, paid largely out of the public purse.

The Royal Charter requires the BBC to reflect British culture and values in its output. One would have thought that those values include freedom and democracy…

Indeed, it seems that the BBC thought so too: its own Editorial Guidelines explicitly state that

“Impartiality does not mean detachment from fundamental democratic values.”

In other words, the BBC is not required to maintain a pretence of ‘impartiality’ between democracy and tyranny – presenting the shortcomings of the former alongside the supposed ‘advantages’ of the latter, as though the two were morally equivalent.

Elsewhere in its various rules and regulations, the BBC further clarifies that

“the democratic path is better than repression, corruption, discrimination and the restriction of these rights.”

Someone should perhaps tell James Landale – he obviously did not get that memo.

Or perhaps he thinks that it doesn’t apply to Jews.

Democratic processes, Jim dear, are by definition adversarial.  People argue – passionately – about what is best for their country.  That’s not a flaw of democracy; it’s the very essence and strength of democracy.

You wish to see division and split societies? Look at France, where political protests have degenerated into violent street clashes and looting – leaving dozens injured and more than a thousand arrested.

The BBC has reported extensively on these incidents. Yet, even confronted with such outbursts of violence, its journalists do not describe France as a deeply divided society with no national glue.

Nor does the BBC make such assessments about its own country – the United Kingdom – even when Scotland and Wales are flirting with secession and Northern Ireland with constitutional overhaul.

But peaceful elections in Israel? Apparently, those are a sign of deep ‘polarisation’ and societal division!

When it comes to the Jewish state, not just elections, but even diversity – another purported British and democratic value – becomes a flaw. It gives the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent reason to express “further [!!!] doubts about what it is that unites its citizens”.  For the BBC, Israel – unlike France or the UK – may not even be a nation, but merely a “complex, varied collection of peoples”.  Who, hence, may not be worthy of a “polity” – i.e. a state.

Unlike the Palestinians, of course.  While Arab opposition to Zionism has a longer history, the Palestinian Arabs’ claim to distinct peoplehood and their demand for a separate nation-state only crystallised into their present political form in the second half of the 20^th century.  Even then, those claims were less than crystal clear: while the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence proclaims the rights of the Palestinian people, it also describes Palestine as “an integral and indivisible part of the Arab nation, at one with that nation in heritage and civilization”; it calls the other Arabs “compatriots“.

Needless to say, the Palestinian claims of peoplehood are not without opponents (past and present), including among Arabs and Palestinians themselves.

And if we are to talk about political division… among Palestinians, political differences between the ‘secular’ Fatah and the Islamist Hamas have boiled over into civil war followed by political and territorial separation.

Yet this has never caused the BBC to question Palestinian peoplehood or their entitlement to a nation-state of their own. In fact, contesting those claims is, in the Corporation’s view, the hallmark of extremism – if not of sheer heresy.

In contrast, the State of Israel has a track record of nearly 80 years of uninterrupted, stable democratic governance, complete with free and fair elections, lively but largely non-violent public political debate and peaceful transitions of power.

And yet, the BBC has, apparently, no qualms about questioning the very identity of its people and their entitlement to a nation-state.

The Palestinians are just one example.  In Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, sectarian wars have caused hundreds of thousands of casualties and millions of refugees.  I.e., a bit more than inconclusive elections in Israel.  Yet never has the BBC suggested that the Lebanese, Syrians and Iraqis are not real nations but “complex, varied collection of peoples” who perhaps should not share “one polity”.

Simply put, the BBC is not in the habit of casting such aspersions on any people or any state – except in the case of Jews and the Jewish state.

So this isn’t a complaint about lack of impartiality. The BBC isn’t guilty of pro-Palestinian bias or merely of imbalance in its reporting. Nor should we call this ‘double standards’.

James Landale’s article is an attempt at ‘soft’ denial of Jewish peoplehood and of the Jewish right to self-determination. But we should not allow the BBC to get away with confining the problem to one article and one journalist: this isn’t a marginal blog, but a large news organisation with strong editorial controls.

Nor is this the only problematic article; the entire BBC coverage is discriminatory. There isn’t much difference between the output of the various BBC journalists on Israel – because this is an institutional issue, deeply embedded in the Corporation’s culture, in its current organisational DNA.

Nor is this confined to Israel. In November 2021, Jewish children celebrating Chanukah were subjected to an antisemitic attack on a London bus. The BBC was the only media outlet that somehow ‘heard’ an ‘anti-Muslim slur’ coming from the victims. Even when evidence emerged that the supposed slur might actually have been a Hebrew cry for help, the BBC doubled down on its accusation. It even employed professional translators – at considerable cost to the public – to try to ‘demonstrate’ (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) that its version was correct.  Ofcom subsequently found significant editorial failings.

Earlier that year, BBC Politics Live invited four non-Jewish panellists to debate whether Jews should count as an ethnic minority – or whether their successful integration into British public life meant they no longer needed the protection afforded to other minorities. Apparently, Jewish minority status – and only Jewish minority status – is a matter for the BBC to dispute.

BBC Politics Live, 1 March 2021: 4 non-Jewish panellists discussing whether Jews should be considered an ethnic minority

And just days ago, the BBC itself reported that it had paid £400,000 to Lucie Kon, an Oscar-winning former BBC producer who alleged that colleagues had described Zionists as ‘evil’ and questioned her ability to exercise impartial judgement because she was Jewish. The BBC rejected her allegations of antisemitism, while acknowledging unspecified ‘shortcomings’ in its treatment of her.

From its reporting of antisemitic attacks, through questioning Jewish minority status, to its treatment of Jewish employees – the BBC clearly has a problem with Jews.

The BBC rejects the vast majority of complaints about impartiality. It will ignore and – if forced to take a position – reject my accusation. But prejudice and discrimination do not have to be intentional or even conscious; indeed, they are often subliminal.

In the words of the Macpherson Report:

“[Institutional racism] can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping…”

Written in 1999 about the Metropolitan Police, these words fit today’s BBC like a glove.

The BBC is institutionally antisemitic.

The Jew, the Jew, shalt thou pursue?

In a statement to the House of Commons on 8 September 2026, UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced that His Majesty’s Government would introduce a ban on imports into Britain of goods produced in Israeli settlements in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria.

Much has already been said about this new measure.  The Palestinian Ambassador expressed satisfaction, while implying also that it was too little, too late.

Critics of the ban have generally focused on its effectiveness and its potential consequences for the United Kingdom.

Former Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel wrote that the measures were “counter-productive to achieving peace and a two-state solution”.

Current Shadow Foreign Secretary Tom Tugendhat, on the other hand, focused on their potential consequences for Britain’s national security, pointing to the importance of Israeli intelligence cooperation in preventing terrorist attacks in the UK.

Of course, the UK is a sovereign country, and its Government is entitled to propose legislation governing its foreign trade — even legislation that may prove ineffective, unwise or harmful to Britain’s security or economic interests.

But there is a fundamental problem with the proposed legislation: it is profoundly and blatantly discriminatory.

Consider a simple parable.

The legal speed limit on British motorways is 70 miles per hour. It is widely understood, however, that exceeding it by two or three miles per hour will not normally result in enforcement action.

Imagine that one day the Government announces new regulations requiring the police to fine black drivers whenever they exceed 70 mph — even by a single mile per hour — while leaving enforcement against everybody else unchanged.

The Government could defend the measure by pointing out that, according to its understanding of the law, driving at 71 mph is illegal. It could cite road-safety evidence.  It could remind us that black drivers have no legal right to exceed the speed limit.

Those claims may all be true.  But they are also beside the point.

The problem would not be that the Government’s measure was ineffective, difficult to enforce or potentially harmful in its consequences. It would be that the Government had selected one category of offender for punishment while declining to apply the same rule to others committing the same offence in similar circumstances.

 

Now let’s go back to ‘the settlements’.

The UK Government views the West Bank as Palestinian territory ‘occupied’ by Israel; consequently, it regards ‘Jewish settlements’ in that territory, including East Jerusalem, as illegal under international law.  It points at international courts, organisations and other states sharing that position.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with those views is immaterial for the purpose of this analysis.  The issue is that the West Bank is not the only territory which the UK Government regards as ‘occupied’.  And ‘Jewish settlers’ are not the only ‘settlers’.

Take Northern Cyprus.

Britain recognises the Republic of Cyprus as sovereign over the entire island.  Including the northern 40%, which it views as occupied by Turkey since 1974.  The European Court of Human Rights has likewise expressly referred to Turkey’s ‘occupation’ of Northern Cyprus.

It is a widely acknowledged fact that – encouraged by government incentives – tens of thousands of settlers from mainland Turkey have since moved there.

The European Parliament has explicitly condemned Turkey’s attempts to alter the demographic balance of Cyprus (an EU member state) through what it called a policy of ‘illegal settlement’.

In a resolution supported by the UK, the UN Security Council described attempts to settle an area of Northern Cyprus as ‘inadmissible’.

Yet Britain’s new ‘ban on settlement goods’ does not apply to those settlers.  Why not?

 

Then there’s Western Sahara.

In 1975, the International Court of Justice ruled that the former Spanish colony was not part of sovereign Moroccan territory.  Nevertheless – and in defiance of that ruling – Morocco occupied Western Sahara later that year.

Since then, tens of thousands of Moroccans have settled in Western Sahara, drawn by the prospect of higher salaries, tax advantages, subsidies and other government benefits.

Motivated by political interests – rather than truth or morals – the UK refrains from officially calling Western Sahara ‘occupied’, preferring to refer to it as ‘de facto administered’ by Morocco. Still, it does not recognise Morocco’s sovereignty over the territory – and ‘de facto’ is the opposite of ‘de jure’. In other words, Morocco’s ‘administration’ is a reality, but not one based on legal rights.

Political euphemisms notwithstanding, International Law knows no halfway house called ‘de facto administration’. It defines any territory effectively controlled by a state outside its sovereignty and without consent as ‘occupied’.  By default, it assigns the sovereign rights over that territory to its inhabitants – in this case the Sahrawis, whose representatives demand independence.

Yet far from trying to punish or deter the Moroccan settlement enterprise in Western Sahara, the UK Government has quietly facilitated it.

Under the UK–Morocco Association Agreement, products originating in Western Sahara and passing through Moroccan customs benefit from the same preferential trade terms as products from Morocco itself.  The Government confirmed this explicitly in Parliament in May 2025.

So while Britain is now preparing to ban imports from ‘Jewish settlers’ in one ‘occupied territory’, it expressly gives preferential tariff treatment to goods produced by Moroccan settlers in another occupied territory.

The contrast could hardly be starker.

 

Israel often complains of bias and double standards.  But in this instance, the term ‘double standards’ masks the gravity of the facts: this is not merely a biased policy; it is discrimination inscribed in law.

That such a law can even be contemplated in 2026 by the government of a democratic country is deeply concerning.  It is a widely accepted principle of ‘rule of law’ that laws should proscribe offences, not offenders defined by ethnic, religious, national, or even ideological identity.  For instance, anti-terrorism legislation rightly refers to ‘terror acts’ in general – not to ‘Islamic’ or even ‘Islamist’ terrorism – even though some of that legislation had been triggered by acts of Islamist terror.

Yet the law proposed by the new Labour Government targets a particular ‘offender’, not a general offence: it is not a law against ‘settlements in occupied territory’, but one targeting only ‘Jewish settlements in the West Bank’. To return to the earlier analogy, it does not punish speeding on the motorway; it punishes black drivers speeding on the motorway.  This is the epitome of an unjust, discriminatory law.

Of course, the British Government will claim that the West Bank is different from Northern Cyprus and Western Sahara. And of course it is, just as far-right terrorism is different from Islamist terror.  They are all different; no two situations are ever identical.

But that is no excuse for enacting a law against one named offender.  A just law defines the offence, so that anyone who commits it – now or in the future – can be judged by the same rule.

A law that defines who should be punished, rather than what is unlawful, crosses a dangerous line.  The Nuremberg Laws – the infamous epitome of ‘legal’ discrimination – did not appear out of nowhere; they emerged from a process in which discrimination based on identity had been progressively normalised in law.

 

So why make a law against ‘Jewish settlements’ rather than just ‘settlements’?

Firstly, while no two cases of ‘settlement’ are exactly the same, it would be very difficult to claim that West Bank ‘settlements’ are materially different from those in Northern Cyprus or Western Sahara. Unless the Government can demonstrate such a fundamental difference, why should the former be punished, while the latter are ignored – or even (as in the case of Morocco) rewarded?

Enacting a just law – one defining the offence, not the offender – might get the UK into trouble with Turkey and Morocco – and potentially with other countries, as well – because judicial review could determine that the same law applies also to their ‘settlements’.

Secondly, for the new Labour Government, Israel is a politically convenient punching bag.

Starmer was virulently attacked by Labour’s hard Left for being ‘too soft’ on Israel. Gaza turned that grievance into raging anger and an electoral threat: Labour lost votes and seats to the ‘Gaza Independents’, while the Greens are increasingly crowding Labour from the Left. In 2024, five independents campaigning prominently on Gaza took seats in which Labour finished second, and subsequent polling shows Gaza has been an important factor among former Labour voters defecting to further-left alternatives.

The current Labour government is neither extreme nor naïve: it understands that the effect of the new ban in the Middle East will be minor at best and harmful most likely.  But it is interested in Middle England, not the Middle East.  So let us be clear: this is not about virtue, but about votes.

 

But why should a ‘tough stance on Israel’ buy British votes?  In fact, why would any foreign policy issue, especially one that is geographically remote and economically inconsequential?

It’s not like the UK Government does not (or should not) have more burning concerns: economic growth is sluggish, competitiveness degrading, public debt bulging, national security weakening – and the list could go on and on.

So why Israel?

To some, the answer is obvious. Britain has nearly three million Muslim voters, many concentrated in Labour constituencies; Gaza matters intensely to a substantial proportion of them. Then there is Labour’s hard Left, for which hostility towards Israel has become an article of faith.

Yes, all that matters.  But it cannot be the whole answer. Muslim voters are still only around six per cent of the electorate, and to most of them Gaza is not even the overriding concern. Nor does the hard Left remotely represent British public opinion as a whole.

The real question is why hostility towards Israel is so widespread beyond those constituencies.  Why does the Jewish state excite passions that Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran or Morocco simply do not? Why can events in a tiny country thousands of miles away dominate British politics for years, while wars and occupations elsewhere barely disturb the national conversation?

The answer is uncomfortable: anti-Jewish prejudice is far more deeply embedded in British society than most Britons care to admit.

I deliberately say prejudice, rather than ‘antisemitism’. The two are not synonymous. A person need not hate Jews, vandalise a synagogue or subscribe to some lunatic conspiracy theory to harbour prejudicial ideas about Jews. A major 2017 study found that roughly one Briton in three held at least one recognisably anti-Jewish belief. That does not make one Briton in three an antisemite. But it does mean that anti-Jewish stereotypes find remarkably fertile soil.

And prejudice matters precisely because it often operates below the level of conscious hatred. It affects what seems plausible, whose motives we instinctively distrust, whose wrongdoing excites us most – and, crucially, what discrimination we notice and what discrimination we fail to see.

That, I believe, is what makes Israel such a politically convenient punching bag. Electoral convenience is the effect. The deeper prejudice is the cause.

That’s what explains the fascination with Gazan children killed by Israeli bombs or starved by Israeli blockade.  There is always the suggestion – and often even the accusation – that the Jewish state kills, maims and tortures children deliberately.  There’s very rarely a similar suggestion when Iranian schoolchildren are killed by American missiles; or when Yemeni children are killed by Saudi bombs or by Saudi blockades; or when Sudanese children are butchered or simply waste away.

Jews killing children… hmmm… isn’t there something rather ‘classical’ about that accusation?

There is, of course, an often-heard objection to the charge of anti-Jewish prejudice: how can a policy promoted by Ed Miliband possibly be anti-Jewish when Miliband is himself Jewish?

An exchange on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme was revealing. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee had accused the British Government of ‘Jew-hatred’.  Presenter Anna Foster challenged him: did he realise that Ed Miliband was himself Jewish?

Huckabee confirmed that he did. He pointed out, by analogy, that there are Americans who despise America, burn the American flag and campaign against their own country. Foster appeared not to hear the point. Incredulously, she asked him again whether he knew that Miliband was Jewish. Again, Huckabee said yes. It was a dialogue of the deaf.

Foster’s question rested on a remarkably weak assumption: that because Ed Miliband is Jewish, a measure promoted by him cannot possibly be motivated by anti-Jewish prejudice.

Of course it can. A woman can support a law discriminatory towards women; a member of an ethnic minority can harbour prejudices about that minority. There were Africans who collaborated in the transatlantic slave trade; there were black slave masters who owned black slaves. Identity is no inoculation against prejudice – or against its poisonous fruits.

But Foster’s question also smuggles in another assumption: that Ed Miliband is ‘Jewish’ simply because his ancestry is Jewish.

Well, is he?

Unless one is a Nazi, Jewishness cannot be reduced to a blood test. As I have argued elsewhere, it is a rather peculiar mixture of ethnicity, religion, culture and national identity. One need not believe in God to be Jewish; plenty of Jews don’t. But Jewishness does imply some palpable manifestation of that identity – whether religious, cultural, national, or (very often) some untidy mixture of all three.

Miliband’s ‘bloodline’ is unquestionably Jewish. So was Karl Marx’s – and Marx managed to write things about Jews that most Jews today would regard as blatantly antisemitic.

Both Miliband’s parents were Jews by birth. But they were also committed, ardent Marxists.  He grew up in a household steeped in socialist politics and, by his own admission, outside Jewish communal life.

Miliband now calls himself a “proud British Jew”. That’s great. But politicians call themselves many things, particularly when those things are politically useful. So, since he brought it up himself in support of his policies, it is hardly outrageous to ask: what, exactly, makes Ed Miliband a ‘proud Jew’ in practice?

What has he done as a Jew – other than harshly criticising the Jewish state? What part has Jewish religion, culture, peoplehood or attachment to Israel played in his public identity? And how does that identity sit alongside another one he has proclaimed rather more consistently – socialism?

I don’t pretend to know the answer. Perhaps Miliband feels profoundly Jewish. Or perhaps socialism is his main identity. Perhaps both are. I do not know. But Anna Foster does not know either.

And that is the point. Saying ‘But Ed Miliband is Jewish!’ does not answer charges of anti-Jewish discrimination. It merely replaces a substantive argument with a Nazi-style ancestry test.

 

Political bigotry is ugly enough. Bias and double standards are worse. But once discrimination is written into law, something much more dangerous occurs: prejudice becomes state policy.  The law itself is turned into an instrument of persecution.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham rather pompously declared that “Britain must stand for something”.  Well, perhaps.  But must it stand on the neck of the Jewish state – and only of the Jewish state?

Because no amount of sanctimonious talk about ‘international law’ can disguise the fundamental issue: like the laws of the Russian tsars, this new ban does not target ‘settlements’ – just ‘Jewish settlements’.  

It does not pursue justice – it pursues the Jew.

Let's talk about genocide(s)!

Storm over The Hague

We’ve all – at some point in our lives – heard the saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”  But have we stopped to think why that should be so?  Why would good intentions produce bad outcomes?  I suggest the answer is “because those good intentions are taken to extremes”.  We tend to fall in love with those intentions, to the extent of suspending our critical thinking.

Take the biblical injunction “justice, justice thou shalt pursue”: what can be wrong with bringing more justice to the world?

Quite a lot, potentially.  Because the blind pursuit of justice can actually produce injustice.  When justice becomes an ideological project – something to be maximised at all costs – rather than a principle to be applied with reason and restraint, it can ultimately undermine both the rule of law it is supposed to serve and the peace it is meant to bring.

We are beginning to see precisely this problem in the almost fanatical drive to criminalise conflict and expand the role of international courts.

More than eight decades ago, as the Holocaust was unfolding (around 63% of Europe’s Jews would eventually be murdered), a Polish Jew called Rafał Lemkin coined the term ‘genocide’.  Linguistically, it derived from the Greek ‘genos’ (people or ‘race’) and the Latin ‘cidium’ (killing).  Lemkin’s moral sensitivity had identified that what the Nazis were doing was worse even than mass murder: what they intended to kill was not just ‘a very large number of people,’ but a people as such: they were attempting to erase a particular flavour of humanity.  No wonder that this was soon labelled “the crime of crimes”.

The term resonated.  By 1948, in response to the Holocaust, the governments of UN member states formulated and adopted an international treaty meant to criminalise it and prevent it from recurring: the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

At the heart of its definition were the words:

"acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group"

As we have seen, the essential idea behind ‘genocide’ is the intention to destroy a people.  So why “in whole or in part”?

That phrase was proposed by the Norwegian delegate, Finn Moe Wikborg.  His explanation could hardly have been simpler:

"it was not necessary to kill all the members of a group in order to commit genocide."

Of course not.  Otherwise, Hitler could theoretically have argued that the Holocaust was not genocide because he talked only about exterminating European Jewry: Jews in America might have survived.  Or a genocidaire intent on exterminating an entire people could claim that no genocide had occurred if he were stopped after murdering ‘just’ half of them.

In other words, “in part” appears to address the extent of the destruction, not to change the object of the intention.  The intended target remains a people as such.

Though in many ways different from the Holocaust, Rwanda provides another unequivocal example of genocide.  In 1994, Hutu extremists set out to destroy the Tutsi population of Rwanda.  The methods were different from those of the Nazis and the killing was compressed into little more than three months, but the essential intention was the same: the target was not ‘simply’ a large number of Tutsis because they were Tutsis, but the Tutsi as a people. Hundreds of thousands were murdered as the perpetrators sought a Rwanda in which that particular flavour of humanity no longer existed.  This was genocide according to the Convention, but also in the original, intuitive sense of the word.  The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), a UN criminal tribunal created by the Security Council, had no problem ruling this was a genocide.

Then came Srebrenica.  In July 1995, towards the end of the Bosnian war, Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić captured Srebrenica, a predominantly Muslim enclave that had been declared a UN ‘safe area’.  They forcibly removed some 30,000 women, children and elderly people.  Over the following days, Bosnian Serb forces systematically killed between 7,000 and 8,000 Muslim men and boys, the overwhelming majority executed in cold blood after capture rather than in combat.

Srebrenica Genocide Memorial

There is no question that this was a horrendous war crime.  But was this an attempt to exterminate the Bosnian Muslim people as such?  The murders were horrific, but they were localised; even within Srebrenica, the women, children and elderly were expelled rather than killed.

Yet the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) eventually ruled that the Srebrenica massacre was genocide, even though Srebrenica’s Muslims represented a relatively small proportion of Bosnia’s entire Muslim population.  With the world shocked by the enormity of the crime and demanding justice, the judges must surely have felt considerable pressure not to appear timid by withholding the label of genocide.

To get there, the judges interpreted “in part” literally: the intention did not have to be to destroy the Bosnian Muslim people as such; it could be to destroy a part of that people – in this case, the Muslim community of Srebrenica, through the killing of its men and boys.

However, the literal interpretation creates an obvious problem: every community is “part” of a larger “whole”.  What if antisemites attempted to murder all five Jewish families living in a particular village?  This would be a horrific pogrom; but is every pogrom a genocide?  Taken to its extreme, “in part” could make any racially motivated murder a genocide.

The judges recognised the problem. Their solution was to introduce a term that does not appear anywhere in the Convention: in order to qualify as genocide, the targeted “part” had to be “substantial”.

But what is “substantial”?  The judges established no numerical threshold.  Instead, they created an ad hoc test: numbers were the necessary starting point, but they could also consider the prominence of the “part” within the larger group, whether it was “emblematic” of that group or “essential to its survival”, and even the geographical reach of the perpetrators.  None of these considerations was decisive; they were merely “useful guidelines”, to be considered according to the circumstances of each case.

So what’s wrong with that? Well, for starters, the judges may have misinterpreted the original intention behind the Convention’s “in whole or in part”: that phrase may have referred to how much of the group was actually destroyed, rather than how much of it the perpetrators intended to destroy.

There is a wider problem with the overly ‘literal’ interpretation of law.  Laws are made of words, and words cannot anticipate every circumstance.  Take theft.  Most of us have a pretty clear idea of what theft means: taking something that belongs to somebody else with the intention of keeping it.  But suppose I find a wallet containing £100 in a park.  I look around for its owner and ask the people nearby, but nobody can identify it.  Eventually I pocket the money.

Have I “appropriated property belonging to another”?  Literally, yes.  Does that make me a thief?  Most people would instinctively say no.  Yet an excessively literal reading of the law could produce precisely that result.  The definition would have perverted the concept it was intended to define.

Words matter, but the meaning of law cannot be reduced to textual dissection. Definitions must be interpreted in the light of the thing they were intended to describe and the purpose for which they were enacted.  The common law must not replace common sense.

By interpreting the genocide definition literally rather than logically, the Srebrenica ruling created a legal concept of ‘genocide’ that was different from – and arguably at odds with – the common understanding of the term.

Remember that ‘genocide’ fundamentally means the attempt to erase a people, an entire flavour of humanity.  In other words, the ultimate victim is not just the people targeted, but humanity itself.  Genocide is a ‘crime against humanity’ in common understanding, not merely in legal terminology.

Ironically, the judges themselves understood this perfectly well.  In the appeal judgment, they explained that genocidaires “identify entire human groups for extinction” and attempt to “deprive humanity of the richness” provided by its different peoples.

That profound description aligns both with the common meaning of the term and with the original intention of the Convention.  But it sits uneasily with the legal test they had constructed and with the Srebrenica ruling itself.  If humanity is the ultimate victim because one of its constituent peoples is marked for extinction, how can the destruction of a relatively small local community – let alone one whose women, children and elderly were deliberately allowed to survive – be construed as the same crime?

Srebrenica was far from the end of this process.  On the contrary, it established a precedent: genocide no longer necessarily meant an attempt to erase a people as such. Once the concept had been detached from that intuitive meaning, the door was open to applying the “crime of crimes” label to conflicts that looked very different from either the Holocaust or Rwanda.

Which brings us to Gaza.  According to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 73,000 Palestinians (civilians and combatants) were killed during nearly three years of war with Israel.  This represents circa 3.3% of Gaza’s population and 0.5% of the global Palestinian population.

But it didn’t take three years for the ‘genocide’ accusations to surface – they did so already in October 2023.  By 29 December, when the reported death toll stood at around 21,500 – approximately 1% of Gaza’s population and 0.14% of Palestinians worldwide – South Africa had already applied to the International Court of Justice, alleging that Israel was committing genocide and demanding that the Court make it stop.

Ultimately, the Court did not satisfy South Africa’s demands – but nor did it throw out the case.  It found that the Palestinians in Gaza had a “plausible” right to be protected from acts of genocide and that there was a real and imminent risk of irreparable harm to that right. It therefore ordered a series of “provisional measures”.

Crucially, however, it did not rule that genocide was taking place.  Deciding on the actual merits of South Africa’s claim – in other words, whether Israel had indeed committed genocide – will take years.  Meanwhile, South Africa has requested – and received – another 18 months to prepare its next submission. As a result, the written proceedings alone will now stretch at least into 2029.

But court proceedings are one thing and political activism quite another: for many, that the Jewish state is guilty of genocide has already become an article of faith and an incontrovertible ‘social media truth’.

Nor is Gaza unique. Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine has likewise generated widespread accusations that Russia itself is committing genocide against Ukrainians – although the existence of Ukrainians as a people does not appear to be at risk; not even at ‘plausible’ risk.

One can imagine a future – and not a remote one – in which every military conflict will be accompanied by accusations of genocide, with one or both sides being dragged before an international court to litigate the matter for years.

A certain category of political activists would like nothing better: they see this as strengthening international institutions and an end to impunity.  Many may even believe that this would eventually make war itself a much more costly – and therefore much less appealing – proposition.

But they are wrong: moral value, like monetary value, is subject to inflation. Printing more of the highest-denomination notes does not make us richer; it merely devalues that currency.  Calling ever more conflicts ‘genocides’ does not make war less likely – it makes genocide less exceptional.  It trivialises ‘the crime of crimes’ into the crime of many.

Worse, the relentless criminalisation of conflict may actually make disputes more difficult to resolve.  Why would Armenia and Azerbaijan negotiate in good faith and seek to resolve their differences through accommodation when they can both take the other to the ICJ, seeking legal vindication from above?  And how could any Palestinian leader make peace  with the Jewish state – a peace that necessarily involves mutual concessions – when it's become an article of faith that Israel committed genocide against his people?

And it’s not ‘just’ about war and genocide.  Since the ICJ ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is unlawful and must unconditionally end – why would Palestinians offer Israel any concessions merely for fulfilling what they now see as a legal obligation?

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”  Even when pursued with the best of intentions, the relentless drive to expand the reach and power of international institutions (especially the courts) may lead to very bad outcomes.

But what is the alternative?  Restraining that drive may sound suspiciously like granting impunity.  If international courts cannot hold dictators, generals and governments to account, who will? Should we simply accept that terrible crimes will go unpunished because the international machinery capable of punishing them is imperfect?

No. The way forward is neither impunity nor ‘international’ moral inflation; it is enhanced national justice. After all, why do dictators so often escape justice – as in the case of Omar al-Bashir? Not because they’re not prosecuted internationally (they often are); but because they’re never held accountable at home.

And why is that?  Because dictatorships, almost by definition, start by emasculating the very institutions that might hold tyrants accountable.

Now imagine a world in which every national court is independent; the press is free, the public debate unfettered; rulers are all accountable to law and to the voter.  Why would we even need international courts?

You want a fairer world?  Fight for power to the people, not power over peoples.  Independent national institutions, not politicised international courts.  Democracy in every nation, not international judicial oversight. Just and judicious politics, not politics by judicial means.

Justice, justice thou shalt pursue!

Farmisht about Gaza?

In Yiddish, פאַרמישט (farmisht, pronounced almost exactly like 'famished' in English) means 'confused'.  So, is Gaza famished, or are we farmisht?

On 22 August 2025, the IPC Global Partnership – a coalition of charities, governmental and UN agencies – classified the situation in one of Gaza’s 5 governorates as ‘Famine’.  Now let’s unpack that label.

The shifting shifty definition

Famine isn’t a new phenomenon. What’s new in our modern world is an institutionalised effort to combat it.  This gave birth to a plethora of charities and aid agencies, each with its own priorities, standards, procedures and methods of providing relief.

Faced with recurring famine in Africa, by 2004 a UN agency sponsored the creation of a unified, scientifically rigorous methodology for quantifying food insecurity.  Dubbed ‘the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’ and eventually codified in a Technical Manual, it defined 5 degrees of severity, with ‘Famine’ being the worst level.  To assess that, it quantified 3 different criteria:

1. Household food consumption;
2. Acute malnutrition;
3. Mortality.

Thresholds were established for each of these, with ‘Famine’ requiring “[e]vidence that all three criteria” exceed their respective thresholds.

By 2009, a bureaucratic apparatus called IPC Global Partnership (backed by the UN, charities and aid agencies) was established to apply the IPC methodology.  In practice, this put the process in the hands of a small army of eager activists and activist scientists.  They’re typically keen to find ‘Famine’: it justifies their own existence, but also finds favour in the eyes of their stakeholders – charities and agencies whose role is to deliver aid.  That's where Science meets Politics.

In October 2024, as the conflict in Gaza entered its second year, the IPC produced a ‘Famine Factsheet,’ introducing a new concept: ‘Famine with Reasonable Evidence’:

“An area is classified in Famine with reasonable evidence if there is clear evidence that two of the three thresholds . . . have been reached, and analysts reasonably assess [that] . . . the third outcome has likely been reached.”

So instead of “all three criteria”, this new classification required just two, with the third left at the discretion of ‘analysts’ – rather than based on evidence.  But, at least, “clear evidence” was seemingly required for the other two criteria.

Yet in May 2025 – while Israel and the US promoted Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as an alternative to the UN aid apparatus – the IPC issued a Technical Note, this time claiming:

“An area is classified in Famine with reasonable evidence if minimally adequate evidence is available on two out of the three . . . to support the classification.”

To summarise: in 2019, the IPC required reliable evidence over all 3 criteria; by 2024, this was reduced in practice to “clear evidence” for 2 out of 3; and by 2025, the requirement was just “minimally adequate evidence,” again for 2 out of 3…

The Technical Manual has not been updated: that would require agreement from too many stakeholders.  Yet the goalposts were surreptitiously shifted by means of ‘factsheets’ and ‘notes’.  So much for ‘scientific integrity’!

Getting in vs. getting there

IPC assessments are entirely based on outcomes, not inputs.  I.e., they classify famine in an area only by looking at population data (food consumption, physical signs of malnutrition, mortality), not at the amounts of food going in.

This is justified: the fact that food enters a territory doesn’t mean it reaches everybody in sufficient quantities.  But, unlike the IPC, we may be interested in food input data, as well – if not to rebut the claim of Famine, then certainly to analyse its causes.

Fortunately, such data is available.  To preclude argument about its reliability, I’ll only use data from the IPC itself and from UN sources.  Israel claims that these numbers are understated, but let’s not get hung up on that; they’re certainly not overstated.

Firstly, however: how much food is needed in Gaza?  You may have heard or read (from the BBC and others) that the UN says ‘600 truckloads a day’.  Well, forget that number.  It’s a lie based on a misrepresentation.  UN’s own World Food Program (WFP) requires:

“At least 100 aid trucks per day to be allowed through northern, central and southern border points in a sustained and predictable manner.”

The IPC itself says:

“Estimates from the FAO21 and the WFP22 converge around 60,000 – 62,000 metric tonnes (MT) needed each month to meet minimum daily caloric requirements.”

Which boils down to the same number: 100 truckloads a day, given that a truckload of emergency food is equivalent to c. 20 metric tonnes.

So how much food is being delivered?  Again from the IPC itself:

“55,600 metric tonnes of food entered Gaza in the first half of August…”

That’s in excess of 3,700 metric tonnes (more than 185 truckloads) a day.

So how can there be famine?  The IPC, of course, blames Israel.  Even 185 truckloads daily, they say,

“remains largely insufficient to offset the prolonged deficits.”

But talking about “accumulated deficits” is utterly dishonest.  Yes, people may eat more in August, because they lived on lower rations in July.  But they cannot eat 85% more than normal; nor should they, even if they could.

In fact, in its own report, the IPC claims that, to recover the deficit

“can take months with 25% more calories than typically needed, depending on the severity of malnutrition.”

That's because eating 25% more than normal is the feasible and safe way to recover past deficits.  But in the 1^st half of August what entered the Strip was not 25%, but 85% more than needed.  And, by the way, it did not stop: truckloads continued to enter at pace.  According to COGAT (but not expressly contested by the UN) 320 truckloads entered on 17 August, 250 on 20 August, 220 on 21 August…  In total, 1,600 truckloads during the week 18-24 August alone – though some of them carried non-food aid.

Eventually, the IPC gets to the crux of the matter:

“In addition, security and operational challenges have prevented much of the incoming food from reaching the population. Aid deliveries have been severely disrupted—with 87 percent of UN trucks reportedly intercepted—reflecting the extreme desperation of the population.”

In other words, the food got into Gaza – but it didn’t reach the hungry people, because the vast majority was “intercepted” (read: looted or taken over) en-route.  IPC rather spuriously attributes this to “the extreme desperation of the population”.  But one would expect those most in need to also be the most desperate.  On the other hand, it is also claimed that those most in need were not the ones getting the food.

It's impossible to accurately determine who are the looters – whether hungry and angry people, criminal gangs or Hamas operatives (or a combination thereof): none of those groups is in the habit of issuing membership cards – and they all consist primarily of males aged of 12 to 60, who are dressed in civilian clothes and look exactly the same.  What’s clear is that Hamas and fellow travellers continue to fire their weapons for nigh on 2 years now – and they haven't subsisted all that time just on fervent prayer!

August 2025: Gazan men taking over a truck transporting aid

The point is that, if Gazans don’t get the food, it’s not because Israel doesn’t allow it in – but because it gets stolen by other Gazans.

Assessing the assessments

But, as mentioned, all this is of little relevance to the IPC: they make their determinations based on outcomes, not inputs.

Except that, in the case of Gaza, it’s not easy to reliably determine those outcomes.  Take for instance the first criterion, which assesses household food consumption.  In the Gaza Governorate, this was based mostly on surveying a sample of respondents: 504 were interviewed over the phone.  A second survey, involving 350 respondents, was apparently also conducted among the same population, but the IPC report does not make it clear how they were interviewed and whether the two samples overlapped.

Respondents are asked: “How many times, in the last 7 days have you eaten meat, fish or eggs?  Beans, lentils and peas?  Vegetables?  Fruit?  Milk/yoghurt/cheese?  Sugar?  etc.” 

Also “In the past 7 days, how many times did you have to eat less preferred/less expensive food?  How many times did you have to reduce portions?  To skip meals?  To borrow food from relatives?”

And finally “In the past 30 days, was there ever a time when there was no food in the house?  When you had to go to bed hungry?  When you went for an entire day with no food?” (answers: “Never”, “Rarely”, “Sometimes”, “Often”).

Responses are distilled into numeric scores which (after some additional ‘expert manipulation’), are compared to IPC thresholds – resulting in an assessment of food consumption.  For ‘Famine’ classification, at least 20% of households must experience ‘extremely poor food consumption’.

The second criterion is ‘Acute Malnutrition’.  This is normally assessed by surveying children aged 6-59 months.  Their weight and height are measured and compared with age-specific thresholds.  A famine classification requires at least 30% of children below norm.

But, says the IPC, performing such measurements in a conflict area is difficult.  Surveyors would have to visit remaining neighbourhoods and tent cities, armed with scales and measuring boards…  Which is why the IPC instituted a shortcut: instead of performing rigorous height-and-weight surveys, it makes do with measuring the children’s upper arm circumference.  And instead of representative population samples, they measure children who are ‘normally’ brought to medical facilities (clinics and hospitals), usually because they need treatment – either for malnutrition or for any other illness.  The age is considered irrelevant, as long as it’s within range (6-59 months).  All that’s needed is a special measuring tape, one available anyway in most such facilities.  The measurement itself takes seconds and is part of the child’s routine examination.  The ‘Famine’ threshold in this case is 15%, rather than 30%, since the method is supposedly less sensitive.

Measuring a child's upper arm circumference. Red means 'below threshold'. Obviously younger children have smaller arms - but in a representative sample age is supposed to 'even out' statistically.

The main issue here is response/result bias.  This is a known problem in all such surveys and the IPC claims that it knows how to deal with it.  But their tendency is to see under-, rather than overstating.  Not necessarily wrong: in some cultures, people hide malnutrition, out of a sense of social shame.  But Gaza is surely different.  Firstly, many inhabitants have been publicly receiving aid – for many years.  Secondly, there’s not just a political, but also a huge practical incentive to exaggerate: given the unusually high ‘interest’ that ‘the international community’ manifests in this particular conflict, reports of catastrophic famine are seen as more likely to bring not just more aid, but also an end to the war.  If you were a Gazan responding to such a survey (after 22 months of hardship, displacement, bombardments and generally shitty life – how likely would you be to ‘embellish a bit’ when answering those questions?

And how likely would you be, if you were a Palestinian nurse or doctor, to deliberately report lower arm circumferences?  All you’d need to do is ‘steal’ a few millimetres by tightening the tape a tad more; or just skew the results by preferentially measuring younger children (say, more 2-year-olds and fewer 4 year olds…)

The IPC says it ‘validates’ the data by ‘triangulation’ – meaning they look not just at one parameter, but at several; they point at the convergence of that data.  The problem with that is we’re talking about sets of unreliable data, which should all be expected to err in the same direction.

The raw data, by the way, is not published – just IPC's 'expert interpretation' thereof.  Like medieval catholic priests, the IPC 'experts' want to ensure that the Bi... err... the data are 'correctly' interpreted.

Uncounted or undead?

This should make the third criterion (malnutrition-related mortality) even more important: deaths are more difficult to manipulate.  After all, dead people have identities, families and eventually graves.

IPC’s daily mortality threshold for famine is 2 deaths per 10,000 people.  According to the IPC, more than 500,000 people live in Famine in the Gaza Governorate.  This means over 100 deaths a day.  Since the IPC classification refers to the period 1 July – 15 August 2025, the deaths add up to over 4,600.

But even the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry only claimed c. 200 deaths in that period (see here and here).

The IPC report admits that “[t]he analysis team could not conclude on mortality evidence”.  Meaning: there wasn’t even “minimally adequate evidence” for that.

Hence, this was referred to ‘assessment by experts’ – who promptly performed a sleight-of-hand: they simply claimed that Hamas was under-counting deaths.

“Different analyses indicate that MoH [Minister of Health] data systematically underestimate overall mortality, highlighting structural limitations in mortality surveillance.”

The Hamas-run Gaza Minister of Health is – let’s recall – the same ‘source’ that the UN and most journalists proclaim as ‘reliable’ in terms of counting Palestinian victims of the ‘Israeli aggression’…  And 200 instead of 4,600 is one hell of an underestimate!

As for the “[d]ifferent analyses” mentioned above, none of them is directly relevant – or even refers to the same time period that the IPC deals with!

Conclusion

IPC’s analysis is not just flawed, but fundamentally dishonest: based on moving the goalposts, on unreliable surveys and on unreasonable ‘assessments’.  It’s a betrayal of IPC’s role, of their principles and of the people they’re supposed to help.  There’s no ‘Famine’ in Gaza – not in the way they themselves defined it.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t hunger.  The fact that more than enough calories get in doesn’t mean they reach all those who need them.  Not just because Hamas steals them; nor because ‘people are desperate’.  But because in Gaza – as elsewhere – the powerful (be they Hamas, criminals or just those with big elbows) take more than their fair share; some will even profit from the plight of their fellow men. 

Whatever the cause, there’s hardship and human suffering in Gaza.  But lying ain’t the way to end it.

Let’s stop fantasizing that civilians can lead quasi-normal lives, while trapped in war zones.  Let’s stop pretending that ‘a permanent ceasefire’ isn’t crowning terrorists as victors.  The only way to defeat Hamas without starving, hurting and killing innocents is allowing the latter to flee Gaza.

For those who wave the flag of 'international law' at every opportunity, here's a provision of the 4th Geneva Convention (Art. 35):

"All protected persons who may desire to leave the territory at the outset of, or during a conflict, shall be entitled to do so, unless their departure is contrary to the national interests of the State."

The UN proclaims that Palestinian civilians in Gaza are "protected persons" and requires Israel ("the State") to treat them as such.  But they oppose allowing the former to escape.

Via its refugee protection agency (UNHCR), the UN also proclaims that a neutral neighbouring state cannot legally close its border to those in danger:

"Denying access to territory and asylum procedure . . . blatantly contradicts international law and . . . provisions of the . . . Convention relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 and its Additional Protocol of 1967."

Egypt is a signatory to both the Convention and its Additional Protocol.  It has accepted more than one million refugees – mostly from war-torn Sudan and Syria; but not from Gaza.

EU member countries are also signatories.  They have accepted more than 4.3 million refugees from Ukraine; but not from Gaza.

The UK (another signatory) has instituted a special visa category for Ukrainians – 274,000 visas were issued to asylum-seekers from Ukraine; but not from Gaza.

Egypt, EU, UK... these are all countries that preach to Israel about international law and humanitarianism.

If IPC and their UN masters had any integrity, that’s what they’d advocate: for Gazans to be offered (at least temporarily) refuge – both among their Arab brethren and in the West.  Anyone not recognising the Gazans' right, in the midst of a war, to seek asylum in neutral countries is being driven by base hypocrisy and ugly antisemitism, not by noble ‘humanitarian’ concerns!