Antisemitism, Israel and the Hidden History

This editorial does not take a side in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. It does not adjudicate the war in Gaza, the question of Palestinian statehood, or the policy decisions of any government. Those are legitimate and serious debates to which this publication will return. What this editorial does is something different and, in our assessment, more necessary at this moment. It asks fourteen questions that the current public conversation is not asking. It presents the verified historical and empirical record. And it asks the reader, wherever they stand on the politics of the Middle East, to sit with what the data actually shows before reaching for a conclusion.

The reason this editorial is necessary is that the data has become too clear to ignore. In the United Kingdom alone, the Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the second highest annual total ever documented, representing a 4 percent rise from the 3,556 incidents recorded in 2024. In the same year, a man drove a car into worshippers and stabbed congregants outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, killing two people. In April 2026, two Jewish men aged 76 and 34 were stabbed in Golders Green in North London, in an attack linked to a group believed to have connections to the Iranian regime. In Germany, antisemitic incidents numbered 5,729 in 2025, against 2,811 in 2022, more than doubling in three years. These are not incidents at the margins of society. They are a documented, measurable, accelerating trend in some of the world's most liberal democracies. The fourteen questions below are addressed to that trend.

The most common framing of the Arab-Jewish conflict places its origin in 1948, the year the State of Israel was established. The historical record does not support this framing. On April 4, 1920, twenty-eight years before Israeli independence, Arab mobs attacked Jewish residents in the Old City of Jerusalem during the Nebi Musa festival. Five Jews were killed and more than 200 were wounded. Rioters chanted slogans that have been documented by multiple historical sources, among them the phrase "Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs." The violence was incited by speeches from Arab nationalist leaders including Haj Amin al-Husseini, who would become the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The British military administration was criticised in the subsequent Palin Report for withdrawing troops from inside Jerusalem before the riots began and being slow to restore order.

In May 1921, Arab rioters attacked Jewish communities in Jaffa and surrounding areas. Twenty-seven Jews were killed and 150 were wounded. In August 1929, organised violence against Jewish communities in Hebron resulted in the massacre of 67 Jews, with hundreds wounded. These attacks preceded the existence of the State of Israel by nearly three decades. They preceded the displacement of Palestinians that accompanied the 1948 war. They preceded any Israeli military occupation. They preceded, by many years, every grievance that is today cited as justification for violence against Jewish people. The question this history raises is simple: if the violence against Jews in Palestine predated Israel by nearly thirty years, what was it a response to? The record suggests the answer is Jewish presence itself, which is a categorically different claim than resistance to a specific political condition.

The phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" has become among the most visible slogans at pro-Palestinian demonstrations across Europe, North America and Australia. It is presented by its users as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people and an aspiration for their freedom and dignity. That aspiration is legitimate. The geographic content of the phrase, however, is not ambiguous. The river in question is the Jordan River, which forms the eastern boundary of present-day Israel and the West Bank. The sea is the Mediterranean. The territory between them is the entirety of present-day Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, the land in which approximately 7 million Jewish Israelis currently live as citizens of an established state.

The phrase does not specify what happens to those 7 million people in a Palestine that is "free" from the river to the sea. It does not propose their relocation. It does not propose coexistence. It proposes a Palestinian state across the entirety of the territory, which by mathematical and geographic necessity eliminates the State of Israel and the nationality of every person currently living in it. Those who use the phrase and intend it only as a call for Palestinian rights and dignity are entitled to that interpretation. But they are also required to account for its literal content, which does not distinguish between the Israeli government whose policies they oppose and the Israeli citizens whose existence occupies the same land. When a slogan's literal meaning calls for the elimination of a state in which 7 million people live, and those people are predominantly Jewish, the question of whether it constitutes an antisemitic statement rather than a political one is not a rhetorical question. It is a serious one that requires a serious answer.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and several other Palestinian armed groups launched a coordinated attack on southern Israel by land, sea and air. At least 4,300 rockets were fired into Israeli territory in the opening hours. Approximately 6,000 militants breached the Gaza-Israel barrier at 119 locations. The attack killed 1,195 people. Of those, 828 were civilians, including 36 children and 71 foreign nationals. 364 civilians were killed at the Nova music festival, a youth event in an open field, where they were shot while dancing, hiding or trying to flee. 251 people were taken hostage to Gaza, including infants, elderly people and foreign nationals from more than a dozen countries. As of October 2025, 48 hostages remained in captivity. Amnesty International, which has been consistently critical of Israeli military conduct in Gaza, investigated the October 7 attack and concluded that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, enforced disappearance and sexual violence. Human Rights Watch reached the same conclusion. Both organisations also documented serious violations of international law by Israeli forces in Gaza.

October 7 was the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. That sentence appears in no major protest banner. It is not chanted at demonstrations. It is rarely read from podiums at universities. The same campuses that declared themselves in solidarity with Palestine within days of the attack did not, in most cases, hold vigils for the 1,195 people killed that morning, or for the 364 young people shot at a music festival, or for the 251 people taken underground into tunnels in Gaza. The question is not whether Palestinian suffering deserves attention. It does, and it is documented and serious. The question is why the documented suffering of Jewish victims on October 7 was, in so much of the public discourse, treated as context for Israeli behaviour rather than as an event of primary moral significance in itself.

Between 1901 and 2025, 220 of the 965 individual Nobel Prize recipients have been Jewish or of Jewish descent. That is 22 percent of all Nobel Prize winners in history. Jews represent 0.2 percent of the world's population, meaning their share of Nobel laureates is 110 times their proportion of humanity. In the sciences alone: 25 percent of Nobel prizes in medicine, 27 percent in physics, 19 percent in chemistry. In economics, 40 percent of all Nobel Memorial Prize winners have been Jewish. Since the year 2000, 24 percent of all Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Jewish recipients. The State of Israel, founded in 1948 by Holocaust survivors, refugees and a diaspora gathered from across the world into a territory the size of Wales, ranks 11th globally in Nobel Prizes per capita. It has more Nobel laureates in total than India, China and Spain. A country of 9 million people, which has been in a continuous state of conflict since its founding, has contributed more to human knowledge per head of population than the United States, Germany and France.

Beyond the Nobel record, the contribution of Jewish scientists, writers, thinkers and physicians to modern civilisation is documented across every field. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Sigmund Freud's founding of psychoanalysis. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine. Paul Ehrlich's chemotherapy. Karl Marx's political philosophy. Franz Kafka's literature. Gustav Mahler's music. Emile Durkheim's sociology. Milton Friedman's economics. The list does not prove that Jewish people are superior. No group is. What it demonstrates is the scale of what systematic persecution has consistently tried to eliminate from the world, and what the world has consistently lost when it succeeded. The question the editorial poses is not about gratitude. It is about proportion. When a population of 15 million people, scattered across the world without a state for nearly two thousand years, produces this record under conditions of persistent hostility, the question of what drives the hostility toward them is not answered by pointing to their record. It is made more urgent by it.

There are approximately 15.3 million Jewish people in the world today. The global Jewish population before the Second World War was approximately 16.6 million. The Holocaust killed 6 million, reducing that number by more than a third. That the Jewish population has recovered only to approximately its pre-war level, nearly eighty years after the Holocaust ended, tells a precise statistical story about what sustained persecution does to a people over centuries. For comparison, the global population has grown from approximately 2.3 billion in 1940 to 8.2 billion today, a more than threefold increase. The Jewish population, starting from a lower base after the Holocaust, has grown back to roughly where it was. The mathematical implication is that without the expulsions, pogroms, inquisitions, forced conversions, ghetto confinements and industrial extermination of the preceding millennium, the Jewish population might today number in the hundreds of millions.

The relevant history includes: the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290, from France repeatedly between 1182 and 1394, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1497, from cities across the Holy Roman Empire throughout the medieval period, from Russia through repeated waves of pogroms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Arab and Muslim majority countries in the mid-twentieth century, where approximately 850,000 Jews were expelled or fled after Israeli independence. When Hitler began the systematic murder of European Jews in the early 1940s, the world knew within years. The Allied governments received detailed reports of the extermination camps from 1942 onward. The response was, with exceptions, silence and inaction. The question this history poses in 2026, when Jewish people in the liberal democracies of Europe are hiding their Stars of David, changing their names on ride-sharing apps, and being stabbed outside synagogues, is whether the pattern of the world's silence has genuinely ended or simply paused between its most visible expressions.

Israel is not above criticism. No state is. Its military operations in Gaza have caused enormous civilian suffering that is documented, serious and deserving of scrutiny. The International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court have both initiated proceedings relevant to the conflict. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented serious violations of international humanitarian law by Israeli forces. This editorial does not dispute those findings. It stands by them.

The question this section asks is different. It is whether the standard applied to Israel, and by extension to Jewish people globally, is the same standard applied to other actors in comparable situations. Hamas has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007. Under its governance, it has diverted international aid, including concrete intended for civilian infrastructure, to construct tunnels used for military operations. It has executed political opponents within Gaza. It has fired rockets from within civilian areas, using the civilian population as a tactical shield in a manner that international law explicitly prohibits. It has held civilian hostages, including children and elderly people, for more than two years in conditions that Amnesty International described as including torture and sexual violence. The protests across European and American cities that followed October 7 have largely focused on Israeli military operations in Gaza. The same cities have not, to any comparable degree, produced demonstrations demanding Hamas release its hostages, condemning Hamas's documented crimes against humanity, or calling for accountability from the Iranian government that has financed and armed Hamas for decades. This editorial does not suggest that protesting Israeli operations is wrong. It asks whether the asymmetry of attention is itself a form of the double standard that antisemitism has historically involved.

In 2025, the United Kingdom recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents, double the rate of 2022, in years when Israel was not conducting military operations in Gaza. Two Jewish men were stabbed in London in April 2026. A synagogue in Manchester was attacked on Yom Kippur. A Jewish couple were shot dead outside a museum in Washington. A flamethrower was used to attack a hostage vigil in Colorado. These attacks are not responses to Israeli government policy. They are attacks on Jewish people for being Jewish. The Community Security Trust notes that many of the perpetrators of antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom hold radical Islamist ideology. Christopher Browning, a leading American Holocaust historian, wrote in 2025 that when conspiracy theory, racism and authoritarianism combine, the result is almost always antisemitism. The question is not whether that pattern is recognisable to anyone who has read twentieth-century history. It is whether enough people are willing to say so.

When someone picks up their phone to search Google, they are using a platform co-founded by Sergey Brin, born in Moscow to Russian-Jewish parents who fled Soviet antisemitism in 1979, and Larry Page, whose maternal grandfather made aliyah and settled in Israel. When they open Facebook or Instagram, they are using platforms built by Mark Zuckerberg, who grew up in a Jewish family in New York. When they send a message on WhatsApp, they are using an application co-founded by Jan Koum, who grew up Jewish in Kyiv. When they store a file on Dropbox, the company was built by Drew Houston, who grew up in a Jewish family. When they book a flight on Expedia or search for a job on LinkedIn, they are using platforms co-founded by Jewish entrepreneurs. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI whose technology has become one of the most discussed tools of 2024 and 2025, has Jewish heritage. These are not marginal contributions to the digital world. They are the digital world.

The medical record is older and deeper. Jonas Salk, the son of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Poland, developed the polio vaccine in 1955 and chose not to patent it, estimating that doing so would have cost him approximately 7 billion dollars. His decision made the vaccine freely available and has saved an estimated 650,000 lives annually in the decades since. Paul Ehrlich, a German Jewish physician, founded chemotherapy. Selman Waksman, a Ukrainian Jewish biochemist, discovered streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis, and coined the word antibiotic. Gertrude Elion, a Jewish American biochemist, developed acyclovir, still the most effective treatment against herpes viruses, as well as drugs for leukaemia and drugs that made organ transplants possible by preventing rejection. Karl Landsteiner, an Austrian Jewish physician, discovered the ABO blood groups, without which blood transfusion would be impossible. Paul Zoll, a Jewish American cardiologist, developed the cardiac pacemaker and the defibrillator. Baruch Blumberg, a Jewish American physician, discovered the hepatitis B antigen and developed the first hepatitis B vaccine.

Beyond medicine and technology: Albert Einstein's theory of relativity underpins GPS navigation, used daily by billions. Emile Durkheim founded modern sociology. Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis, which shaped the entire field of mental health. Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust and Primo Levi reshaped what literature could do. Gustav Mahler and Leonard Bernstein shaped classical and popular music. Claude Levi-Strauss founded structural anthropology. Milton Friedman shaped modern economic policy. The laser was developed with foundational contributions from Jewish physicists. Optical fibre cable, which carries the internet itself, was developed with key contributions by Jewish scientists. The microprocessing chip that runs every computer, phone and digital device draws on mathematical and engineering advances in which Jewish scientists played central roles.

The question this section poses is not designed to produce gratitude. It is designed to produce proportionality. The same civilisation that uses these tools, that calls Google to find information, that receives the hepatitis B vaccine, that has GPS in its car, that reads Kafka and listens to Mahler, that lives longer because of penicillin era antibiotics pioneered by Jewish scientists, has in various forms and at various moments decided that the people who contributed these things to humanity should be expelled, murdered or silenced. The editorial does not say this to produce guilt. It says it to produce a question that the reader may not have asked: what exactly does the world think it is protecting when it tolerates or ignores the persecution of the people responsible for so much of what makes modern life liveable?

Understanding where antisemitism comes from is not the same as justifying it. The editorial makes this distinction explicitly. There are no legitimate reasons to hate Jewish people. There are, however, documented historical mechanisms that explain how that hatred was manufactured, sustained and transmitted across centuries and continents. Naming those mechanisms is the necessary precondition for recognising them when they reappear, which the data in this article suggests they are doing.

The argument that Israel must return to its pre-1967 borders to enable Palestinian statehood contains a historical problem that is rarely examined in public debate. Those borders existed for nineteen years before 1967. During that entire period, the territories now described as the future Palestinian state were in Arab hands. Egypt administered the Gaza Strip from 1948 until Israel captured it in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950 and governed it until the same war. Neither Egypt nor Jordan used those nineteen years to establish a Palestinian state. The question of why they did not is the most important question in the entire conflict that almost no one is asking.

The verified record, confirmed by the United Nations itself, is unambiguous. According to UNCTAD, the official UN body: "While the State of Israel was established on May 15, 1948 and admitted to the United Nations, a Palestinian State was not established. The remaining territories of pre-1948 Palestine, the West Bank including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, were administered from 1948 until 1967 by Jordan and Egypt respectively." Egypt never annexed the Gaza Strip. It treated it as a controlled territory administered through a military governor. Palestinians in Gaza were not given Egyptian citizenship. Egypt dissolved the nominal All-Palestine Government in 1959 and merged the territory into the United Arab Republic, a political union with Syria. It was governed as an Egyptian military zone, not as a Palestinian homeland in development.

Jordan's treatment of the West Bank was different in form but equally revealing. Jordan formally annexed the West Bank in 1950 and extended Jordanian citizenship to Palestinian Arabs there. Palestinians in the West Bank received Jordanian passports, Jordanian identity documents and seats in the Jordanian parliament. Jordan's annexation was not recognised internationally, with the exception of the United Kingdom and Iraq. Critically, Jordan's annexation of the West Bank was opposed not only by Israel but by the Arab League itself and by Palestinian Arab political leaders including Haj Amin al-Husseini. Jordan held the West Bank not as a trustee preparing Palestinian sovereignty but as an annexing power incorporating the territory into its own state.

The political question this record raises is precise. If the Palestinian cause is defined by the demand for a state in the West Bank and Gaza, and if those territories were under Arab governance for nineteen years between 1948 and 1967, why was no such state established? The answer that the historical record supports is that the Palestinian cause as it existed before 1967 was not primarily a demand for a state in the West Bank and Gaza. The PLO was founded in 1964, three years before the Israeli occupation of those territories began. Its founding charter called for the liberation of all of historic Palestine, meaning the elimination of the State of Israel entirely, not for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israel. The pre-1967 Arab political consensus, as expressed in the Khartoum Resolution of September 1967 adopted by eight Arab heads of state after Israel captured the territories, was the three nos: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel.

This historical record does not resolve the question of Palestinian rights, which are real and require a political solution. It does resolve a specific question. The argument that the Palestinian cause is exclusively a response to the 1967 occupation, and that Israel simply returning to the 1967 lines would end the conflict, is not supported by the pre-1967 record. During the nineteen years when Gaza was Egyptian and the West Bank was Jordanian, the Palestinian cause was the elimination of Israel, not the establishment of a state in those territories. The 1967 occupation changed the territorial frame of the conflict. It did not create the conflict. The conflict preceded the occupation by nineteen years. And the pre-1967 record of what Arab states did with the territories they controlled provides no evidence that Palestinian statehood was the operational objective of anyone holding those lands.

On November 28, 1941, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the most prominent Palestinian Arab political leader of his era, was officially received by Adolf Hitler at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The meeting is documented in the official German diplomatic record, published in Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918 to 1945, Series D, Volume XIII, London, 1964, and is extensively documented by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem and every serious Holocaust research institution. It is not contested by any credible historian. The question this section asks is not whether the meeting happened. It happened. The question is why it is almost entirely absent from the public conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The context requires understanding. Al-Husseini was the same man who incited the 1920 Nebi Musa riots in Jerusalem in which five Jews were killed, and who organised the 1936 to 1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. Facing a British arrest warrant in 1937, he fled Palestine, took refuge first in Lebanon, then in Iraq where he participated in a pro-Axis coup in April 1941, and then escaped to Fascist Italy, where he met Mussolini and secured an Axis declaration supporting the elimination of the Jewish national home in Palestine. He arrived in Berlin in November 1941. He had previously written to Hitler in January 1941 requesting German recognition of Arab independence and the right of independent Arab authorities in Palestine to eliminate the proposed Jewish homeland there. Germany financed him and began paying him to foment an uprising in Palestine in May 1941.

At the November 28 meeting, the official German record shows that al-Husseini opened by declaring that the Arabs were Germany's natural friends because they had the same enemies, specifically the English, the Jews and the Communists. He offered to raise an Arab Legion to fight alongside Germany. He assured Hitler that the Arabs would wait patiently for the right moment and only strike upon an order from Berlin. Hitler replied that Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews and that this naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine. He promised that once German forces reached the southern exit of Caucasia, the only German objective would be the destruction of the Jews living in the Arab sphere. The Fuehrer confirmed that the struggle against a Jewish homeland in Palestine would be part of the wider struggle against the Jews globally.

Following the meeting, al-Husseini's collaboration with Nazi Germany continued and deepened across every dimension available to him. He broadcast anti-Jewish and anti-Allied propaganda by radio to the Arab world and to Muslim communities under German influence. On March 1, 1944, speaking on Radio Berlin, he declared: "Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them." The USHMM classifies this broadcast as incitement to genocide. He was paid 50,000 Reichsmarks per month by the Nazi regime, more than twice the annual salary of a German Field Marshal, equivalent to approximately 12 million dollars a year in today's money.

Between March and April 1943, the SS sent al-Husseini personally to Zagreb, Sarajevo and Banja Luka to recruit Bosnian Muslims into the Waffen-SS. The largest unit he helped recruit was the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar, composed primarily of Bosnian Muslims. The SS general Gottlob Berger reported on April 29, 1943 that 24,000 to 27,000 recruits had signed up, noting that the visit of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had had an extraordinarily successful impact. Sir Martin Gilbert, one of Britain's foremost historians of the Second World War and the Holocaust, documented in his Routledge Atlas of the Second World War that al-Husseini helped recruit 28,000 Bosnian Muslims into the Handschar Division. Total enlistments into the division reached approximately 20,000 to 21,000 by mid-1944. The Handschar Division was declared a criminal organisation at the Nuremberg Trials due to its involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Al-Husseini met Heinrich Himmler in July 1943 to advocate for Muslim SS interests, by which point the extermination of European Jews was well advanced. Photographic evidence documented by Tablet Magazine shows al-Husseini visiting a Nazi concentration camp. He performed the Nazi salute in documented photographs from his time in Berlin.

The record goes further. In May 1943, al-Husseini wrote to the Bulgarian, German, Italian, Hungarian and Romanian governments demanding they not transfer Jewish children from Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to Palestine. He suggested those children be sent to Poland, which meant sending them to the extermination camps. Sir Martin Gilbert documented that al-Husseini successfully intervened with Hitler on May 12, 1943 to prevent the rescue of 6,700 Jewish children and 800 accompanying adults from Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. He also sent five parachutists to Palestine with containers of a toxin intended to poison Tel Aviv's water supply, sufficient according to the Jericho district police commander to kill 250,000 people. They were caught near Jericho. He was never tried for any of this. He was never held accountable. General Charles de Gaulle personally intervened to prevent his indictment at Nuremberg. He fled to Cairo in 1946, was welcomed as a hero, and died in 1974.

Two important scholarly distinctions must be made. First, Yad Vashem, the world's leading Holocaust research institution, concludes that al-Husseini did not convince Hitler to undertake the Final Solution. The mass murder of European Jews had already begun before their November 1941 meeting, with the Einsatzgruppen shooting Jews by the thousands in the Soviet Union from June 1941, and the first extermination camp at Chelmno beginning operations in December 1941, days after the meeting. Al-Husseini arrived in the middle of the play. Second, not all Palestinian Arabs supported al-Husseini or the Axis. Some Palestinian Arabs actively worked against the Axis powers during the war. The editorial does not hold the Palestinian people collectively responsible for the actions of their most prominent political leader of that era.

What the editorial does note is this. Al-Husseini was the founding figure of Palestinian Arab nationalism in its modern form. He is the man who incited the violence against Jews in Palestine in 1920, who organised the 1936 revolt, who fled to Berlin and offered an Arab Legion to Hitler, who recruited Muslims for the SS, who visited a concentration camp, and who returned after the war to lead opposition to the 1947 UN partition plan that would have established both a Jewish and a Palestinian Arab state. He died in 1974. He was never tried for war crimes. He was never held accountable by the international community. This man, whose record is documented in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is the same man who appears as a historical progenitor of the Palestinian nationalist movement. That fact is in the historical record. It is not in the public conversation. The editorial simply asks why.

There has not been a free election in the Gaza Strip since January 2006. Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections that year, formed a government, then seized full military control of Gaza in June 2007 by defeating Fatah in violent clashes in which approximately 500 Fatah members were killed or thrown from buildings. Since that day, Hamas has governed Gaza as a single-party authoritarian administration with no electoral mandate renewed by the population it governs. Freedom House rates Gaza as Not Free, the lowest possible classification, in every annual report since 2007. The US State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices document the following for Hamas governance in Gaza: unlawful or arbitrary killings, systematic torture, arbitrary detention, political prisoners, restrictions on free expression and the press, violence against journalists, censorship, interference with freedom of assembly, restrictions on political participation, acts of corruption, violence against LGBT persons, criminalisation of consensual same-sex conduct, and forced child labour. These are not Israeli government allegations. They are the findings of Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the United States Department of State, the same institutions whose findings on Israeli military conduct are accepted without question in the public conversation.

Human Rights Watch's landmark 2018 report, based on 147 interviews, concluded that the systematic and routine use of torture in Hamas detention facilities in Gaza constitutes governmental policy. The report documents practices including forcing detainees to hold painful stress positions for long periods, beating, punching and flogging. Hamas security forces have carried out summary executions of Palestinians accused of collaboration with Israel without any judicial process meeting minimum fair trial standards. Amnesty International documented in its 2024 annual report that Hamas-run forces executed at least 39 civilians accused of collaboration, abducted, tortured and killed 12 Palestinians accused of working with a US-Israeli humanitarian organisation, and beat and detained protesters at peaceful demonstrations. These are executions without court process, of the organisation's own civilian population, during a war in which the civilian population is already suffering enormously.

The tunnel network beneath Gaza, described by Israel as a military infrastructure, represents one of the most significant documented cases of deliberate resource diversion in modern history. UN reporting and independent journalism have documented that Hamas diverted cement, steel and other construction materials intended for civilian infrastructure, including housing and schools, into tunnel construction. The tunnel network, estimated at approximately 500 kilometres in total length by Israeli military assessments, required billions of dollars of investment over years of construction. That investment was made while Gaza's civilian population had among the highest youth unemployment rates in the world, among the lowest caloric intake levels in the region, and among the highest population densities on earth. Not a single one of the tunnels contained a civilian shelter. When Israeli airstrikes began, Hamas leadership retreated underground. The civilian population retreated to UNRWA schools and tent camps. The tunnels were not built for the people of Gaza. They were built for Hamas.

Hamas's founding charter of 1988 is explicit about its ideology. Article 7 cites the hadith, a statement attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, calling for the killing of Jews: "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say 'O Moslems, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'" Article 22 claims that Jews were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution in Russia and both World Wars. The charter was amended in 2017 to drop the explicit denial of Israel's right to exist, while maintaining the call for a Palestinian state from the river to the sea and refusing to recognise Israel. The 2017 document accepted the 1967 borders as a frame for a Palestinian state but explicitly stated this did not constitute recognition of Israel. Hamas's founding ideology is not anti-Zionist. It is antisemitic by the definition applied to any other movement that calls for the killing of Jews on religious grounds and attributes to them conspiratorial control of world history.

The question this section poses is the same question that runs through this entire editorial. The world holds demonstrations demanding accountability for Israeli military operations in Gaza. Those demonstrations are a legitimate exercise of political expression. The same world has not, to any comparable degree, held demonstrations demanding that Hamas release its hostages, hold elections, stop torturing its own civilian population, account for the diversion of aid into tunnel construction, or acknowledge that its founding document calls for the killing of Jews. The asymmetry of attention is not explained by the relative severity of the documented abuses. It is explained by something else. The editorial invites the reader to name what that something else is.

The argument most commonly made in Western public discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that Israel must return to the pre-1967 borders to achieve peace. It is a reasonable argument on its face. UN Resolution 242, adopted after the 1967 Six-Day War, calls for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territories. The international consensus broadly supports a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines. The editorial does not dispute any of this. What it does is ask a question that the pre-1967 borders argument does not answer: if those borders were the objective, why did Egypt and Syria go to war in 1973 to recover them rather than negotiate for them? And why do Hamas and the Iranian government refuse to accept those same borders as the basis for a Palestinian state today?

On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack on Israel during Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, crossing their respective ceasefire lines and advancing into the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. The attack was chosen deliberately for Yom Kippur, when Israeli soldiers were at prayer and the country was at its most vulnerable. It was not a defensive act. It was an offensive war launched against a country at prayer on its holiest day, by states that had spent the previous six years refusing to recognise that country's existence under the Khartoum Resolution of no peace, no recognition and no negotiation.

What happened after 1973 is the most instructive part of the entire story. Anwar Sadat, who led Egypt into the 1973 war, made a decision that no Arab leader had made before him. In 1977 he travelled to Jerusalem, spoke at the Knesset, and recognised Israel's right to exist. He negotiated. The Camp David Accords of 1978 and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty of 1979 followed. Egypt recovered the entire Sinai Peninsula, every square kilometre of the territory it had lost in 1967. The peace treaty has held for 46 years and counting. Jordan made peace with Israel in 1994 and recovered its land. The Abraham Accords of 2020 brought the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco into normalisation with Israel. Every Arab government that chose recognition and negotiation recovered its territory and kept it. The pattern is not ambiguous.

The contrast with Hamas and Iran could not be more complete. Hamas's founding charter of 1988 calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews on religious grounds. Its 2017 revised document accepts the 1967 borders as a frame for a Palestinian state but explicitly refuses to recognise Israel's right to exist, making negotiation on those terms impossible. On October 7, 2023, Hamas did not attack Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are the specific territories whose status is disputed under the 1967 borders argument. It attacked Israeli civilians inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, at a music festival in the Negev and in kibbutzim that have existed since before 1967. The attack was not about the 1967 borders. It was about the existence of Israel within any borders. Yahya Sinwar's own documents, recovered after his death in October 2024, showed he calculated that a massive attack would produce enormous civilian suffering in Gaza and that this suffering would generate international pressure on Israel. He used the population of Gaza as strategic material in a calculation whose objective was not Palestinian statehood. It was Israeli elimination.

Iran's position is stated without ambiguity by its Supreme Leader, who has called for the elimination of Israel repeatedly and publicly. Iran finances Hamas with an estimated one billion dollars annually, finances Hezbollah in Lebanon, and finances the Houthi movement in Yemen, all of which have attacked Israel or Israeli interests since October 7. Iran does not want a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It wants the elimination of Israel, and it is willing to fund the deaths of Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza as the price of that objective. The Palestinian civilians of Gaza are not Iran's concern. They are Iran's instrument.

The answer to the question this section poses is this. The 1967 borders were never the actual objective of the rejectionist movements. They were a frame that some leaders, Sadat, King Hussein of Jordan, the Gulf states of the Abraham Accords, used to achieve peace and recover their territory. They were rejected by others, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, because for those actors the objective was never a border adjustment. It was the elimination of a state. The evidence for this is not Israeli government propaganda. It is the founding charter of Hamas, the stated position of the Iranian Supreme Leader, and the geographic target of the October 7 attack, which struck inside Israel's pre-1967 borders. A movement whose founding document calls for killing Jews, whose political objective is the elimination of Israel within any borders, and whose military action targets civilians inside pre-1967 Israel, is not a movement pursuing the 1967 borders. It is a movement pursuing what al-Husseini pursued in 1920, in 1929, and in Berlin in 1941. The borders have changed across a century of this conflict. The underlying objective of the rejectionist position has not.

The Arab Republic of Egypt shares a border with the Gaza Strip. Egypt and Gaza share language, religion, history and geography. Egypt administered Gaza for nineteen years between 1948 and 1967. Egypt has a population of 105 million people. Egypt has, since 2020, been building a system of walls, electronic fences, a 20-metre-wide moat and a miles-wide military buffer zone along its border with Gaza to ensure that no significant number of Palestinian civilians crosses into Egyptian territory. This is the verified record and it is almost entirely absent from the public conversation about Gaza.

In February 2020, Egypt began building a new concrete wall along its border with Gaza, 7 metres high, equipped with electronic sensors, positioned no more than 8 metres from the existing wall. Both walls are within Egyptian territory. In June 2015, Egypt completed a ditch at the Rafah crossing point, 20 metres wide and 10 metres deep. In September 2015, the Egyptian army began pumping water from the Mediterranean Sea into the smuggling tunnels beneath the border. The flooding collapsed homes in Gaza near the border, contaminated agricultural soil with salt water, and according to Palestinian sources caused tunnels to collapse on nearly a daily basis killing operators. In February 2024, satellite images from Maxar Technologies confirmed Egypt was constructing an additional miles-wide buffer zone stretching from the end of the Gaza border to the Mediterranean Sea, with multiple cranes laying new sections of wall and bulldozers clearing Egyptian territory. The Rafah border crossing, the only crossing between Egypt and Gaza, has been completely closed to Palestinian civilians since May 2024. Egypt has taken no significant number of Palestinian refugees.

Egypt's stated justification is national security. Egypt has its own history with the Muslim Brotherhood, from which Hamas emerged. President Sisi has argued that mass Palestinian displacement into Sinai would destabilise the region, bring Hamas into Egyptian territory and potentially threaten the Egyptian state. These are not frivolous arguments. They are the same arguments that every sovereign state makes when deciding who crosses its borders. They are the arguments that, when made by Israel, produce mass demonstrations in European capitals. When made by Egypt, they produce silence.

Jordan administered the West Bank for nineteen years between 1948 and 1967 and did not establish a Palestinian state. Jordan made peace with Israel in 1994 and has maintained that peace for 31 years. Jordan has taken Palestinian refugees over decades and currently hosts approximately 2.4 million registered Palestinian refugees, the largest Palestinian refugee population outside Gaza and the West Bank. Jordan has also, since 2023, declined to accept mass new Palestinian displacement from Gaza, citing the same destabilisation concerns as Egypt. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, all majority Arab Muslim states with significant financial capacity, have not offered to permanently resettle Palestinian civilians from Gaza in any significant number. The Gulf states have funded Hamas, directly or through intermediary channels, while building their own gleaming cities and refusing resettlement.

In London, two Jewish men were stabbed outside a synagogue in April 2026 in the name of Palestinian solidarity. In Paris, Jewish-owned businesses have been attacked. In Berlin, antisemitic incidents doubled in three years. In Amsterdam, Israeli football supporters were hunted through the streets by mobs. These acts are committed in the name of a Palestinian people whose Arab neighbours, who share everything with them except a wall, have collectively declined to take them in. The states that demand Israel's elimination as the solution to the Palestinian question are the same states that have built walls to ensure the Palestinian question does not arrive at their own borders.

The editorial does not argue that Palestinian civilians deserve less international concern because Arab states have failed them. They deserve more. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is real, documented and requires urgent political resolution. What the editorial argues is that the distribution of moral responsibility in this conflict is radically different from the distribution of moral attention in the public conversation. Egypt built walls and flooded tunnels. The world protested in front of Israeli embassies. Jordan declined resettlement. The world held vigils outside synagogues in the other direction. The Gulf states funded Hamas for decades. The world stabbed Jewish men in London. The question is not only what Israel should do differently. The question is why the entirety of the moral demand in this conflict falls on the one party that the rejectionist movements have been trying to eliminate since 1920, while the parties that share language, religion, culture and geography with the civilian population they claim to support have built walls, flooded tunnels and declined to open their borders. That question is not being asked. This editorial asks it.

The narrative most commonly presented in the public conversation about Israel frames its founding as a consequence of the Holocaust: European Jews, traumatised by the Second World War, displaced by genocide, arrived in Palestine and displaced the Arab population that was living there. This narrative contains elements of historical truth. It omits three things that the complete record requires. First, the international legal foundation for a Jewish homeland in Palestine was established in 1917, thirty-one years before the Holocaust ended and thirty-one years before the State of Israel was founded. Second, the Jewish historical, religious and continuous presence in the land of Israel spans more than three thousand years, predating Islam by approximately two thousand years and predating Arab settlement of the region by a similar period. Third, Jews never fully left. A continuous Jewish presence in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, Tiberias and other historic sites persisted through the Roman diaspora, through the Byzantine period, through the Islamic conquests, through the Crusades, through the Ottoman Empire, and into the modern era. The people who founded Israel in 1948 were not arriving for the first time. Many of them were returning. Some of them had never left.

On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour sent a letter of 67 words to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community and president of the Zionist Federation. The letter stated that His Majesty's Government viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and would use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object. It stipulated that nothing should be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. This was not a secret document. It was published in the press on November 9, 1917. It was endorsed by the principal Allied powers. It was incorporated into the British Mandate over Palestine, formally approved by the League of Nations on July 24, 1922. The League of Nations mandate preamble specifically recognised the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine as the basis for reconstituting their national home there. This is the foundation of the international legal framework for the State of Israel. It precedes the Holocaust by twenty-five years. It precedes the Second World War by twenty-two years. It was not created in response to the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the final, catastrophic demonstration of what the absence of that state meant for the Jewish people. But the international legal and political foundation was already established.

Why did the international community in 1917 recognise the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine? Because the historical record is unambiguous. The Jewish people's connection to the land of Israel, then called Canaan, begins approximately four thousand years ago with the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. By approximately 1000 BCE, King David established Jerusalem as the capital of a united Israelite monarchy. His son Solomon built the First Temple in Jerusalem around 960 BCE. The Babylonian exile began in 586 BCE when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Temple and deported the Jewish population to Babylon. The majority returned when Cyrus the Great of Persia permitted it in 538 BCE. The Second Temple was built and the Jewish presence in the land continued through the Persian, Greek and Hasmonean periods. When Rome destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE and expelled much of the Jewish population into exile, dispersed communities spread across the Mediterranean, North Africa, Europe and the Middle East. But Jews never entirely left. A continuous, documented Jewish presence in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias persisted through every subsequent century. The Ottoman census records of the 16th and 17th centuries document Jewish communities in Jerusalem and other historic cities. By 1914, before the Balfour Declaration, before the Holocaust, before the Zionist immigration waves of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had reached their peak, approximately 60,000 Jews, representing about 8 percent of the population, were already living in Palestine.

The Zionist movement that produced the Balfour Declaration was not created in response to the Holocaust. It was created in response to the nineteenth century's wave of pogroms and antisemitism in Eastern Europe, particularly in Tsarist Russia. Theodor Herzl founded political Zionism in 1896, forty-nine years before the Holocaust ended, publishing Der Judenstaat, the Jewish State, in which he argued that the only solution to centuries of persecution was a state of their own. Herzl's argument was not that Jewish people had no connection to the land of Palestine. It was that this ancient historical connection, combined with the documented impossibility of permanent safety in Europe, made Palestine the only viable national home. He was right about the danger, as the Holocaust demonstrated. The first Zionist Congress was held in Basel in 1897. The Balfour Declaration followed twenty years later. The Holocaust followed twenty-five years after that. The State of Israel was founded three years after the Holocaust ended.

The argument that Israel is a colonial project imposed on Palestine by European Jews in response to the Holocaust is incomplete on its own historical terms. The international legal foundation was established in 1917. The historical connection spans three thousand years. The continuous presence was never broken. The Jewish immigration that preceded the state began in the 1880s with people fleeing Russian pogroms, not European colonialism. And the Holocaust, which the narrative uses as its primary causal explanation, was not the cause of the Jewish claim to the land. It was the catastrophic proof of what happens to a people without a state, a proof that had already been made in 1920, in 1929, in 1938, across two thousand years of exile, expulsion and massacre, before the full scale of the Final Solution was revealed to the world. The State of Israel was not created by the Holocaust. It was created by a three-thousand-year historical connection, a century of political organisation, an international legal framework established in 1917, and the final catastrophic demonstration of what the absence of that state costs. The Holocaust emphasised the necessity. It did not create the right. The right had been in the historical record for three thousand years.

The fourteen questions in this article draw on a historical record that spans four thousand years. The timeline below presents that record in sequence so the reader can follow it as a single unbroken story rather than a collection of isolated events. Each entry is verified and sourced. The reader is invited to read it from beginning to end and then to consider whether the framing of the conflict that dominates public debate, which typically begins in 1947 or 1967, reflects the complete historical record or a selected portion of it.