Jeremy Ginges

הרג ארבעת בני המשפחה בטמון היום - אמא, אבא ושני ילדים - החזירה אותי למקרים הרבים שסקרתי בתור כתבת שטחים בהם חיילים הרגו ילדים צעירים. הדבר הזה נורמל לחלוטין בגדה, נבלע בין דיווחים של תקשורת אדישה, דבר שכמובן סייע למערכת ״אכיפת החוק״ של הצבא להמשיך ולא לעשות כלום. ספציפית באיזור צפון הגדה מה שסייע לזה זו גם מדיניות על פיה מקרי מוות שם הם חלק מאירוע לחימתי, כלומר, לא נפתחת חקירה (עקרה ממילא) באופן אוטומטי כפי שהיה בעבר. הפרקליטה הצבאית הראשית (לשעבר), שבאופן מחמיא יחסית להתנהלותה בפועל ידועה בציבוריות הישראלית כמי שפעלה במקרה שדה תימן, בפועל נתנה יד חופשית לחיילים להתייחס לחיי פלסטינים כאילו הם לא שווים שום דבר. התחקירים הצבאיים משמשים לתיאום עדויות והעדר כל ענישה או חקירה הביאה אותנו למצב של היום, כשהתקווה היחידה היא שלחץ מסנקציות בין לאומיות ואולי לחץ תקשורתי ילחיץ מספיק את האנשים במערכות כדי לעשות משהו.

The Medieval Logic Behind Modern Antizionism Something a lot of people still seem not to fully understand, especially when reacting to mainstream media coverage like this, is that contemporary antizionism as a political hate movement operates much closer, in practice, to medieval anti-Judaism and blood libels than to what many people imagine when they think of classical modern antisemitism. Classical modern antisemitism, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often framed Jews through racial theories, conspiracies about financial or political control, or pseudo scientific ideas about ethnicity. The structure of the accusation was racial and conspiratorial. Anti-Judaism, by contrast, functioned differently. In the medieval period, Jews were not merely disliked or stereotyped. They were cast as the moral culprits behind broader social suffering. Jews were accused of poisoning wells, spreading disease, murdering Christian children, or bringing catastrophe upon society. These accusations were rarely about evidence. They were narratives used to explain violence against Jews by attributing to them a form of collective guilt. Modern antizionism frequently operates through a similar mechanism. Rather than portraying Jews as racially inferior, it constructs a moral framework in which Jews, through the idea of “Zionism,” become the explanation for violence directed at them. Harm done to Jews is implicitly framed as the downstream consequence of something Israel did somewhere else. That dynamic is visible in coverage like this. A synagogue is attacked in the United States. Instead of the event being presented first and foremost as violence against a Jewish institution, the interpretive frame immediately shifts to the attacker’s grievance connected to Israel. The narrative becomes: this happened because of something Israel did. This framing is not simply background information. It subtly introduces the idea that violence against Jews exists within a chain of causation that begins with Israel. The attack is therefore situated within a political context that implicitly explains the perpetrator’s anger. Functionally, this mirrors the logic of earlier anti-Jewish accusations. In medieval Europe, Jews were blamed for the plague. In modern discourse, Jews or “Zionists” become the explanation for geopolitical grievances. The structure of the accusation is remarkably similar: Jews are treated as the collective vessel for broader anger. The result is that attacks on Jewish institutions are repeatedly interpreted through the lens of Israeli policy rather than through the lens of anti-Jewish hatred itself. This is precisely why many observers continue to underestimate the nature of contemporary antizionism as a hate movement. They are looking for the familiar markers of twentieth century antisemitism. What they are actually encountering is a much older pattern, one that attributes collective blame to Jews and then treats violence against them as the predictable outcome of that blame. An old pattern in a new vocabulary.

The Israeli Army confirms that Israeli commando forces raided Nabi Chit in the Bekaa last night seeking the remains of Ron Arad there, but failed to find them. 26 Lebanese were killed in the Israeli "belts of fire" to keep anyone from approaching the forces as they dug in the cemetery of the Shukr family in Nabi Chit. No Israeli soldiers were harmed. Ron Arad was a weapons operator whose plane crashed in Lebanon in 1986 and was killed subsequently. In December 2025, a member of the Shukr family was kidnapped from Zahle, likely by Israel, seeking to find the location of Arad's remains. It is possible that the incorrect information based on which this op was carried out came from this intelligence. Tami Arad, Ron's widow, has asked that no soldiers risk their lives to retrieve Ron's remains. Despite this, Israel carried out at least 4 kidnappings to locate his remains or obtain "trading cards" to exchange for Arad, utilizing commando forces (twice in 1989 and 1994 in Lebanon) and intelligence assets (in Syria in 2021 and in Lebanon in 2025)

I say this as gently as I know how, because it seems to me unforgivably obvious. You cannot simultaneously build a strong international law system while also hating the West. International law is a Western idea born of a particular Western historical, cultural and political experience. And because God loves irony, no one exemplifies this fact more than the evil regime whose travails since yesterday have sparked so much legalistic hand-wringing. Both Khamenei himself and his teacher and predecessor Khomeini consistently and explicitly rejected international law as a tool of "global arrogance" (estekbar-e jahani) — i.e., of powerful secularist, individualistic democracies. Khamenei was even more explicit, routinely declaring legal frameworks like UN conventions as "colonial" traps. These declarations weren’t marginal to their ideology. They were fundamental planks of the regime’s political theology. I’ll say this, again, as gently as I can: The fact that international law and international institutions have transformed in practice into a system that more often than not runs defense for the most virulent and explicit enemies of said law might have something to do with their decline as an organizing framework of international affairs. For example, when UN agencies and international institutions target Israel more than Iran, or more than China, Iran and Russia put together, or more than all the dictatorships and wars in the world combined — they’re doing more harm to the law than to Israel. Similarly, it matters that so many of international law’s loudest spokespeople had nothing to say about Khamenei’s crimes just six weeks ago, but swung into action only when Khamenei’s long reign of terror was finally brought to an end. That’s not law. It’s the opposite of law. International law can be saved, but only if its scholars and practitioners grow up and shed the instinctive anti-Westernism and racist paternalism of the present-day academy. When international law is no longer seen by its own practitioners primarily as an instrument for containing, weakening and delegitimizing the West, but becomes genuinely about actual law, it will once again have a claim on us. If you fail to see in Khamenei the bitter foe of international law that he was, if in the midst of your legitimate critique of a war you can’t summon at least a little joy that this avowed enemy of your purported moral system is dead and gone, then you haven’t actually been fighting for international law.

Antizionist accounts of “transfer,” “planned expulsion,” and “Plan Dalet”—whether in the work of Fayez Sayegh, Nur Masalha, Ilan Pappé, or Patrick Wolfe—reconstruct classical antisemitic conspiracy theories of secret, malevolent plans devised by Jewish leaders to commit evil. In these narratives, Palestinian displacement and suffering are not treated as the outcome of war, contingency, or multi-agent conflict. They are presented instead as the unfolding of an intentional and malicious design. Demographic change becomes not the chaotic consequence of conflict, but the execution of a concerted program of “replacement,” and thus of genocide. These alleged “plans” are then projected collectively onto “the Zionists,” imagined as a unified and coordinated agent acting with shared malevolent purpose. Antizionism is a distinct symbolic and ideological complex from classical antisemitism, but it is often built through the inheritance of its conspiratorial dimension. It produces an account of an imagined collective of “Zionists” who secretly plan, coordinate, and carry out evil—including the so-called “Zionist programme” that culminates in the malevolent creation of Israel.