Zev Gotkin

The establishment of Israel wasn’t a gift handed down by the British or the UN. Yes, the British issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and yes, the UN voted on a partition plan in 1947. But by 1948, both were politically irrelevant. The British abandoned their Mandate under sustained pressure, not just from Jewish resistance (Haganah, Irgun, Leḥi), but also from Arab insurgent groups like the Arab Higher Committee and Fawzi al-Qawuqji’s Arab Liberation Army. Both sides were done with the Mandate. Britain walked away and dumped the problem on the UN. The League of Nations Mandate (1922) had already recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine.” But when the Mandate collapsed, statehood depended not on recognition, but on survival. The Jews accepted the 1947 UN partition plan. The Arab League rejected it and launched a war. In May 1948, five armies, 🇪🇬 Egypt 🇯🇴 Transjordan (Jordan) 🇸🇾 Syria 🇮🇶 Iraq 🇱🇧 Lebanon, invaded the newly-declared State of Israel: These were not symbolic gestures. They were full-scale invasions. During the war, Jews were ethnically cleansed from Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and East Jerusalem, including the destruction of synagogues in the Old City. No UN outcry. No humanitarian commissions. Yes, Palestinian displacement was real. Some were expelled in battle. Some fled in fear. Some left because Arab leaders told them to evacuate. Some stayed. Some returned. War, as always, is ugly and not one-sided. Let’s drop the mythology of 'Western Support.' 🇺🇸 America imposed an arms embargo on both sides. 🇬🇧 Britain supported Jordan’s Arab Legion, which was commanded by British officers like Glubb Pasha. 🇫🇷 France played no significant role. Israel fought alone. The weapons it used were purchased from Czechoslovakia using funds raised by diaspora Jews. They were not donated. Jews already in Israel and the incoming Holocaust survivors who had just stepped off the boat were handed rifles and sent into battle. The 1949 Armistice lines were not negotiated in comfort. They were earned on the battlefield. As for “Palestine,” it was never declared in 1948. 🪖 After the war: 🇯🇴 Jordan annexed the West Bank following the Jericho Conference in December 1948, and amended its Nationality Law in 1949 to naturalize West Bank Palestinians. 🇪🇬 Egypt occupied Ghaza but refused to annex it. Nasser’s focus was not on Palestinian independence but on unifying Arab countries under the banner of Pan-Arabism. This culminated in the short-lived United Arab Republic between 1958 and 1961. There was no Palestinian state because no Arab country intended to create one. It was only after Israel’s defensive victory in 1967, when it reclaimed Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, that the modern Palestinian national movement began to take shape. The PLO, created in 1964, made no claims to Gaza or the West Bank. These territories were under Arab rule at the time. The shift in narrative only came once those lands were lost to Israel. So let’s be honest. If Israel had lost in 1948, there would be no UN campaigns for Palestinian recognition, no Palestinian Authority, and likely no “Palestine” at all. What exists now, however painful and contested, exists only because Israel survived.

I ran for office when I was 24. Today I am 38. Time flies.

No

If it wasn’t obvious before, the mask finally comes off with Candace Owens holding up The Talmudic Jew by August Rohling as proof for her claims about so-called Talmudic Judaism. At that point, there is no ambiguity about where this is going. The Talmudic Jew was published in 1871, at the height of European racialized 'Scientific' Anti-semitism. Just eight years later, in 1879, Wilhelm Marr would coin the term Anti-semitism itself. Jews were being emancipated legally while being demonized culturally, and this moment demanded a pseudo-academic justification for hostility toward them, something that could pass as research rather than prejudice. Rohling’s book served that function. Rohling was a Catholic priest and polemicist and not competent in Rabbinic Hebrew or Aramaic. The Talmud is not a book you quote for doctrine. It is a legal corpus built from arguments, disagreements, hypotheticals, and minority opinions, preserved precisely because disagreement is central to how Jewish law works (more on this below). In 1883, Rohling sued Joseph Samuel Bloch for libel after Bloch publicly accused him of scholarly fraud. Bloch challenged him to defend his citations. Rohling could not even translate a single page of Talmud selected at random. Between 1884 and 1885, independent scholars examined his work and demonstrated that his quotations were fabricated or mistranslated and that his entire framework rested on misrepresentation. In 1885, Rohling withdrew the case rather than face full proceedings. He never recovered academically. Rohling’s method was simple and dishonest. He invented quotations, mistranslated selectively, ripped lines from legal hypotheticals, erased context, and recycled medieval blood-libel accusations as if they were rabbinic law. From the opening pages, he presents Judaism as morally depraved and treats the Talmud as a single corrupt ideology rather than a record of debate. He announced his conclusions first and then retrofitted citations to support them (I recommend reading the intro) It is the same method Candace Owens is now operating under. The Talmudic Jew had zero standing in serious scholarship. Its survival was confined to places where truth was not the point, including Nazi propaganda in the 1930s, Soviet Anti-semitic tactics, Arab nationalist polemics, and later conspiracy culture. That is the lineage Owens draws from when she presents this book as evidence. This is not just asking questions. It is reviving a framework that has already been tested, exposed, and discarded. Texts like this resurface during periods of political stress and social realignment because they offer a ready-made moral culprit. First comes the claim that a group is morally alien. Then the insistence that criticism is being silenced. Then the rehabilitation of language that once would have been disqualifying. None of this is new. Only the packaging changes. People like to imagine that history repeats itself only in obvious ways, with uniforms and slogans. It doesn’t. It rhymes, and the couplets are getting closer. I don’t pretend to know exactly what the inflection point will look like, but I’m confident there will be one in the next 2 years. Pointing this out now is not alarmism, it’s pattern recognition.