aoav

 

Action on Armed Violence presents itself as an independent, non-partisan research organization, and the world treats it accordingly. Its Explosive Violence Monitoring Project has run for over a decade, its annual figures are cited by wire services and human-rights groups, and its data now feeds the United Nations: the Secretary-General's May 2026 report on the protection of civilians draws on AOAV's monitor, and the 2025 edition opens with a Guterres quotation calling on states to act on its findings. That standing is the reason the monitor's flaws matter. A partisan pamphlet that overstated civilian harm would persuade no one; a trusted, UN-cited, self-described neutral dataset that does the same thing launders the overstatement into the official record.

AOAV's stated methodology is structurally flawed in a way that inflates civilian counts. Worse, it suspends its own rules in the cases where applying them would have produced a figure unfavorable to the narrative the reports advance. 

Here's the methodology: AOAV records casualties from explosive weapons "as reported in English-language media," logging incidents that caused at least one casualty within a 24-hour period. Two rules govern how casualties are classified. The first, stated in the methodology: "All casualties are assumed to be civilians unless otherwise stated." A casualty becomes an armed actor only when a news report explicitly identifies the dead or wounded as a soldier, militant, or armed security official. The second concerns attribution: responsibility is assigned to whoever the news report names. The project then totals these media-derived entries and publishes them under the word "civilian," flat and unqualified, across fifty-odd pages of findings, country profiles, and recommendations. The qualifier that would make the count honest — that "civilian" means "not reported as armed," not "confirmed noncombatant" — sits in a single methodology paragraph the headline reader never reaches.

One of AOAV's headline 2023 incidents shows both rules failing at once. AOAV's third-worst explosive incident of 2023 is listed as "Israeli air strike on an evacuation convoy fleeing north Gaza, 13 October," 270 civilian casualties were attributed to Israel. The footnote sources it to a Sky News article, whose headline reads: "Women and children among 70 killed in Israeli airstrike on fleeing Gaza convoy, Hamas says." The attribution to Hamas is in the title. The body went further: Sky News reported the blast was "blamed on" Israel, quoted an IDF spokesperson saying he was "not aware of any IDF strikes at this time at that location," and stated that "it was not immediately clear who the target was, or whether insurgents were among the passengers." The Associated Press wire carried the same qualification verbatim. The reporting did what responsible reporting does with an unverifiable battlefield claim — it named the source, recorded the denial, and flagged that fighters might be among the dead.

AOAV erased all three caveats. The Hamas claim became a fact of an Israeli airstrike; the denial vanished; the possibility of combatants among the passengers dissolved into a flat count of 270 civilians. And the Israeli account was not a one-line "no comment." Within two days, IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus argued publicly that the strike "appears to have been a false flag operation carried out by Hamas," asked who would benefit from images of dead evacuees and answered "only one organization: Hamas," and said Israel "did not try to strike anybody, any civilians in that area." The surrounding facts fit that reading at least as well as the alternative: Israel had ordered the evacuation and designated the route, Hamas had told Gazans to defy the order and was reported blocking the southern roads, and Hamas held the clearer motive to manufacture atrocity footage from a convoy of fleeing civilians. There was no evidence of an actual airstrike beyond Hamas's assertion of one. The cause remains formally unresolved; reference works still list the attack type as airstrike or possible IED. AOAV recorded it as settled Israeli strike of 270 civilian casualties, third-worst in the world that year. The media's attribution — "Hamas says" — is the qualifier that made the claim publishable, and AOAV's method strips precisely that qualifier, converting "a party to the war alleges" into "AOAV records."

The civilian-by-default rule produces an even stranger result across Gaza as a whole. In the 2024 monitor, AOAV records 23,432 civilian casualties in Gaza against 612 armed actors — a civilian share of 97.5%, with combatants making up 2.5% of the total and roughly 3% of the dead. If that isn't insane enough, the military casualties it recorded were apparently all IDF soldiers! In other words, Hamas never admits any of its terrorists were killed until years later, Israel admits its soldiers are killed within hours of the incident, so AOAV thinks virtually the only militants killed in Gaza are Israeli. QEDumb. 

The same selection problem corrupts AOAV's most quotable Gaza statistic. The 2024 monitor reports that Israel's recorded aerial attacks in Gaza caused, on average, "8 civilians harmed per recorded Israeli air strike, and 5 killed," and the 2023 edition builds a comparable per-airstrike figure. Read the methodology and the number dissolves. An incident enters the dataset only if "at least one casualty from an explosive weapon" was reported; a strike that hit an empty structure, or killed only fighters the media did not count, or fell where no English-language reporter was watching, never appears. The denominator is therefore not "Israeli air strikes" but "Israeli air strikes that produced reported casualties," and AOAV divides the casualties by that pre-filtered set to announce a casualty rate. The strikes that would pull the average down were excluded before the division.

It excluded a huge number of airstrikes. AOAV's 2023 dataset logs a few hundred air-launched incidents in Gaza; the Israeli military, by contrast, said it had struck over 11,000 targets in Gaza by 1 November 2023 and more than 22,000 by mid-December, with independent reporting putting the four-month total near 29,000 targets, roughly 228 a day. Whatever the precise count of distinct air operations, it dwarfs the few hundred AOAV recorded by orders of magnitude. The "civilians per air strike" figure does not describe Israeli targeting; it describes the handful of strikes that left a reportable civilian trail, which is the only kind the method can see. A monitor that counts only the strikes that killed civilians and then reports how many civilians strikes kill has not measured lethality. It has measured its own selection rule.

The absurdity reaches its peak with Lebanon, where the method collides with a fact pattern it cannot survive. AOAV's single worst explosive incidents of 2024 were the September pager operation and the next day's walkie-talkie operation. The explosives were concealed inside pagers and radios that Hezbollah itself had purchased and distributed to its members; the only people physically carrying them were Hezbollah personnel. Hezbollah acknowledged that hundreds of its fighters carried the devices, and a Hezbollah official said the operation took 1,500 fighters out of action through injury. Hezbollah's own leadership has long rejected the premise that there is any line between its political and military sides; as leader Naim Qassem put it, "we don't have a military wing and a political wing... one Hezbollah." A weapon that by physical design could only injure members of the organization, in an operation the organization says wounded 1,500 of its fighters, produced in AOAV's ledger a 97% civilian casualty rate. The monitor even concedes, in its own text, that "armed actors are likely included among these casualties." Here the method does not merely risk error. Its output is contradicted by the admitted facts of the event it is describing, including the facts AOAV itself records.

If the story ended with a flawed method honestly applied, AOAV could fairly answer that open-source monitoring is imperfect and its limitations are disclosed. The defense collapses on the evidence that the method is not applied when it would point away from blaming Israel.  The proof is an absence: the al-Ahli hospital explosion of 17 October 2023.

Al-Ahli was the most heavily reported explosive event of the early war. Within hours, Gaza's Ministry of Health announced 471 killed and blamed an Israeli airstrike, and the figure led news bulletins worldwide. Two findings then emerged from exactly the English-language sources AOAV scans. On the toll: the Anglican diocese that runs the hospital estimated around 200 dead, the director of al-Shifa Hospital put it near 250, and US intelligence assessed 100 to 300, likely at the low end. On the cause: US, British, Canadian, and French intelligence, along with Human Rights Watch, concluded the explosion came from a misfired Palestinian rocket that struck the courtyard rather than an Israeli strike on the building.

Now apply AOAV's own rules and watch the contradiction close around the report. AOAV publishes a table of the ten worst explosive incidents of 2023, ranked by civilian casualties; the smallest entry on it is a Pakistani suicide bombing at 193. Al-Ahli is not on the table. It is not anywhere else in the report either: across the entire document, the single most-reported explosive event of the early Gaza war goes unmentioned. There are only two ways AOAV could have reached that result, and each indicts a different rule.

If AOAV applied its standard practice — take the casualty figure reported in the first 24 hours, assume all civilian, attribute to the named party — then al-Ahli enters as 471 killed and 314 injured, attributed to Israel. That is 785 casualties, the single deadliest incident of 2023 by AOAV's stated criteria. 

If instead AOAV declined the day-one figure because it was disputed and the misfire finding undercut the attribution — exercising judgment its 24-hour rule does not provide for — then it accepted a corrected toll of roughly 100 to 300 dead and several hundred injured. Even at the floor of that range, killed-plus-injured clears the 193 threshold several times over. It still belongs in the top ten. There is no version of AOAV's methodology under which al-Ahli is correctly absent. Recorded by the rules, it tops the table. Corrected against the rules, it still ranks. Omitted entirely, it reveals a choice.

That choice is the whole case. To leave al-Ahli out, AOAV had to do the one thing it tells the world it does not do: look past the day-one wire copy, weigh the later corrections, and decide the incident did not belong. An event missing from a top-ten ranking might be an editorial judgment about where a line falls. An event missing from the entire report — when AOAV names, profiles, and tallies every other major Gaza incident of 2023, and builds its headline Gaza total from them — is not a line-drawing problem. It is a removal. The capacity to follow up and verify plainly exists; the report's own caveats about Gaza undercounting show AOAV reading the sources closely. That capacity was exercised on the one 2023 Gaza incident almost everyone agrees a Palestinian faction caused and that pointed away from Israel, and it was switched off for the convoy strike Israel denied, for the thousands of unlabeled Gaza dead booked as civilians, and for the Hezbollah fighters counted as bystanders to their own pagers. The verification machinery runs in exactly one direction.

Set the two 2023 incidents side by side and the pattern is unmistakable. The blast that pointed away from Israel — disputed attribution, a toll its own sourcing showed was inflated — was dropped from the ranking despite belonging at or near the top of it. The blast that pointed at Israel — a Hamas claim the IDF denied, with no evidence of a strike beyond the accusation — was elevated to settled fact and placed third. A monitor genuinely indifferent to which side a headline blamed could not sort two events so cleanly along that line.

This is why AOAV's standing is the heart of the problem rather than a footnote to it. The organization's authority rests entirely on the claim that it neutrally records what the media reports. The convoy entry shows it discarding the media's own caveats when they protect Israel. The Gaza and Lebanon totals show the civilian-by-default rule manufacturing combatant-free wars out of conflicts against armed organizations. And al-Ahli shows that the rule can be suspended at will, exercised precisely when suspension serves the narrative. Each example points the same way, and the cumulative weight is hard to read as accident. An organization with this method, applied this selectively, is not producing a flawed measurement of civilian harm. It is producing an argument, and dressing it as data — then handing it to the United Nations, which cites it as the considered judgment of an independent observer.

In short, the only consistency that AOAV shows in its methodology in the Middle East is whatever makes Israel look as bad as possible. 

(h/t Irene)

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amnesty nakba

 Amnesty-UK writes:

Over 800,000 Palestinians displaced in 1948?

In 1997, Amnesty wrote in a report that "Between 600,000 and 780,000 Arabs fled from the territory

controlled by Israel, becoming refugees in neighbouring territories. "  At that time, Amnesty agreed that there were wide disputes as to the real figures, and it used the language of "fleeing" rather than forcibly displaced. 

Since then, Ephraim Karsh has persuasively argued that the actual figure is between 583,000 and 609,000, giving village by village numbers, and showing that most of the Arabs fled out of fear, not from any expulsion policy.

Amnesty was not persuaded.

In 2019, Amnesty said "2019 marks 71 years since the expulsion and displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, villages and cities"

In 2023, Amnesty said "more than 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced."

And today we are at 800,000.

That is a 33% inflation from Amnesty's own 1997 floor, with roughly 15% of that coming in the last seven years alone. More significant than the number is the mechanism: "fled" became "expulsion and displacement," which became "forcibly displaced" — a progression that collapses the distinction between flight, fear-driven departure, localized expulsions, and centrally directed ethnic cleansing into a single undifferentiated category.

There are no new facts. There is no new research cited. Amnesty's language has evolved in one ideological direction without any new evidentiary basis. Uncertainty became certainty; a disputed range became a fixed number; complex wartime displacement became unilateral forced expulsion. Of course wartime itself is coercive — which is why historians have always distinguished between flight, expulsion, and evacuation, and why erasing those distinctions is historically significant. But Jews lived in fear, too - and had nowhere to flee.

Prominent Palestinians have acknowledged the more complicated reality. Mahmoud Abbas himself described his own family as having fled Safed during the war — driven by unfounded fear that the local Jews would exact revenge for the 1929 massacres by Arabs there, not expulsion orders. That testimony does not fit Amnesty's current framing, and Amnesty has not updated its account to engage it.

Amnesty is changing history, in one direction, and we can see it clearly.

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book for book

 Tonight begins Shavuot, the holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah at Sinai — the moment the Jewish people received the text that would eventually become the moral foundation of Western civilization itself.

In 1939, Shavuot fell a week after Britain issued its White Paper closing Mandatory Palestine to Jewish refugees. Cartoonist Arie Navon marked the coincidence in Davar with a drawing showing a figure representing the Jewish people handing Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald the Tanach, Jewish Scripture. MacDonald hands back Ha-Sefer Ha-Lavan — the White Paper, in Hebrew "The White Book," his own document blocking European Jews from seeking shelter in Palestine from the upcoming Holocaust. The caption is "ספר תחת ספר" — "a book for a book."

The Jews gave the world its moral vocabulary; the world handed them a death warrant dressed as policy. Within six years, six million Jews who could not reach Palestine were slaughtered.

The exchange has not stopped — only the packaging has changed.

Mohammed Khatib, European Coordinator of Samidoun and a founding member of Masar Badil, was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury on May 19, 2026 alongside other figures linked to Hamas and the pro-Hamas flotilla network. In an October 2025 interview translated by MEMRI, he was explicit about the scope of the project: once Palestine is liberated "from the River to the Sea," the movement should turn to liberating the United States, Canada, and Australia, because "this system of white supremacy and racism must be abolished and dismantled by all means." 

This is the vision Israel is holding the line against — a revolutionary doctrine that treats the Jewish state as the forward position of a global order requiring demolition. The tools being used against Israel today are designed to accomplish what the White Paper accomplished: make it legally and politically impossible for Jews to defend themselves. Arab states pressured the Rome Statute's drafters to classify settlement policy as a war crime on par with genocide "Genocide" has been redefined to describe a military campaign that killed fewer civilians per sortie than any comparable urban operation in modern warfare. "Apartheid" has been stretched until it covers any state that asserts a particular national character - yet it is only applied to Israel. These are  legal concepts rebuilt around Israel, promoted and normalized by people who have announced openly what comes next once Israel falls.

Israel's response to that doctrine comes from the same source as the original gift. The IDF operates under Ruach Tzahal — the Spirit of the IDF, a published ethical code rooted explicitly in Jewish tradition, requiring soldiers to use force only to the extent necessary, to protect non-combatants, and to maintain their humanity in combat. That framework predates the Geneva Conventions by three millennia and is more morally serious — because it rests on obligation rather than negotiated consent, and because it was designed for a world containing genuinely malign actors, not the imaginary world of symmetrical state armies that international law assumes. Israel has prosecuted its own soldiers for violations of that doctrine. It does so while fighting enemies who deliberately use civilians as weapons, who store munitions in hospitals, and whose leadership has declared in plain language that Israel is only their first target.

Navon's cartoon assumed the exchange was asymmetric only in tragedy. MacDonald at least was responding to a real political problem with a wrong solution. The current exchange is more cynical: the instruments being handed to Israel are promoted and often drafted by people who have told us exactly what they plan to do with Western civilization once Israel is out of the way.

The Jews gave the world its moral vocabulary. Today, while progressive institutions wield international law as a weapon against Israel, Western military leaders travel to Israel to learn how to fight modern wars where malign actors use international law itself as a primary weapon. Armies know very well what the progressive elite either ignore or actively oppose: that defending your own citizens is every nation's top priority. 

On Shavuot, it is worth remembering what Israel gives to the world - and what the world keeps handing back.

(h/t Rafael Medoff)

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walzer

 

On Being Taken Seriously

A response to Michael Walzer's engagement with "Towards a New Theory of War"

I like to swing for the fences. 

In March, at the beginning of the US/Israeli war on Iran, I published a four-part series arguing that Western war theory rests on a category error — treating war as a discrete episode rather than a continuous relationship — and that revolutionary movements have spent decades exploiting that error. Therefore, I proposed an entirely new theory of war that I think aligns more with how reality works than with how international law has evolved. I freely admit that I have no academic expertise in this or many other topics I write about but I will come up with an idea, research it and write about it fairly quickly.

Marcia Kupfer, an independent scholar, was impressed enough with my argument that she invited Michael Walzer — author of Just and Unjust Wars, the book that shaped modern just war theory and long formed part of the West Point curriculum — to comment on my series. Walzer is one of the world's  most distinguished intellectuals.

Whoa.

Walzer took my arguments seriously, in detail. He agreed with some of what I argued, pushed back on other parts, and raised challenges. 

Here I will try to respond to his well reasoned points. Kupfer gave an excellent summary of my series that is worth reading in her Substack.

What I argued

The series made five interconnected claims. Western international law treats war as episodic — a discrete event with a legal trigger, a period of hostilities, and an end. Revolutionary movements, from Lenin through Mao through Islamism, treat war as continuous — a permanent state aimed at total transformation. The imminence doctrine at the heart of international law cannot address threats that are real, building, and existential but not yet "imminent" in any legally recognizable sense. The right diagnostic question before committing to any military response is: if this episodic war is won, does that actually neutralize the threat? The answer determines not just whether to fight, but what victory requires. And the existing international legal framework cannot be reformed from within — any rule flexible enough to address these problems is flexible enough to be claimed by Russia against Ukraine, by Iran against Israel.

The series drew on John Locke's definition of the state of war — declared hostile intent combined with the capacity to act on it, not active hostilities — and argued that this understanding is war as a relationship is what modern international law quietly abandoned in favor of looking at war as an episode. I claim that looking at war as an event has been systematically weaponized by revolutionary actors.

Walzer has a much more comprehensive view of history than I do. He brings up excellent counterarguments to my assertion that revolutionary movements never end until victory or total annihilation; it is a stretch to say the Korean War is still being waged and he notes that the communists won the Vietnam War but now the US has close to normal relations with them which is inconsistent with perpetual war. 

Perhaps I can sharpen the distinction - as he notes, often the revolutionaries become statists when they reach power so the ideology becomes secondary to control. Identifying their own incentives and trajectory is critical in deciding on how to respond to aggression from a self-defined revolutionary state. Walzer argues that China is more statist than revolutionary today, but I think my argument that the US is in a war-relationship with China is still accurate; China is acting in a way consistent with long-term victory over the US, currently using its expertise in surveillance, stealing technology, making other nations dependent on it for infrastructure and using social media to divide Western societies. 

So rather than fixate on Marx and Islamism as revolutionary movements - and Walzer is correct that original Marxism did not support war as the means of revolution - my argument needs to lean more on my idea of war as relationship. Relationships can change over time, as his Vietnam example proves. 

The question is, I think, when an ideology is regarded a more important than statism. My quote of Mao saying that he would gladly sacrifice hundreds of millions of Chinese to win over the West is true but Walzer is also accurate in saying that China is acting more statist than strictly revolutionary. The important thing is whether a nation would change its strategy in response to external events or only its tactics. That is where Western responses to anti-Western states and movements need to concentrate. 

Iran appears to still prioritize ideology over all. Saudi Arabia, also a state that officially follows Islam as its constitution, has shown far more pragmatism in dealing with the West. 

Israel's major error with Hamas was being lulled into thinking that the group was acting pragmatically to help its people and not recognizing that its desire to destroy Israel had not abated - and its pragmatism was a well planned deception. The idea that they would willingly sacrifice tens of thousands of its citizens just to gain public relations points was not seriously considered, let alone that this would be its guiding (and largely successful) military strategy.

Which brings us to the difference between dealing with Islamist ideologies and The Cold War. 

Walzer notes that there were repeated calls for preventive war against the Soviet Union — "strike now before we are struck" — and that it was wise to reject them. The Marshall Plan, NATO, the Voice of America, diplomatic contacts throughout: these ultimately prevailed. If communism ever inspired eternal war against Western capitalism, "the inspiration had a beginning and an end. It was smart to wait it out."

The implication is clear. If it was smart to wait out Soviet communism despite its universalist ambitions and nuclear arsenal, the same patience might apply to Iranian revolutionary Islamism.

I would argue that The Cold War worked because the Soviet Union had a survival interest. Mutual Assured Destruction was a credible deterrent precisely because Soviet leadership — whatever its ideological commitments — valued the survival of the Soviet state and Soviet society. Khrushchev blinked during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Brezhnev pursued détente. The ideological commitment to world revolution consistently yielded to the instinct for national self-preservation. That instinct is what made waiting viable.

Hamas didn't care about its leaders' survival. It cares about Islam's ultimate victory. And so does Iran. 

Khomeini stated explicitly: "We do not worship Iran. We worship Allah. Let this land burn, let it go up in smoke as long as Islam wins in the end." This is the constitutional doctrine of the Islamic Republic, institutionalized in its schools, its Friday prayers, its Revolutionary Guard theology, its proxy network. The regime was founded on the explicit subordination of national survival to revolutionary purpose.

Deterrence requires a rational actor who values survival at a rate sufficient to be deterred. The Soviet deterrence calculation was: launch and be annihilated, or don't launch and survive. Iranian revolutionary doctrine has institutionalized martyrdom as a religious virtue, constructed proxy forces specifically designed to absorb losses while Iran maintains deniability, and for forty years demonstrated consistent willingness to accept enormous costs — including economic devastation from sanctions — rather than abandon the revolutionary project. Shame culture reinforces this at every level — even tiny concessions are read as weakness, and symbolism consistently trumps reality.

There is also a technical asymmetry between Iran and the Cold War. The Cold War "wait it out" strategy was applied to a nuclear-armed adversary — the Soviet Union already had the weapons. The deterrence logic that made waiting viable depended on both sides having the capability and dreading its use. An Iran approaching the nuclear threshold is a categorically different problem. Once that threshold is crossed, the deterrence calculation inverts: instead of waiting being viable, waiting forecloses the option entirely. The Begin Doctrine — applied at Osirak in 1981, at Deir ez-Zor in 2007, against Iran in 2026 — is precisely the recognition that the window for the "wait it out" strategy closes as capability approaches threshold, and that the closing is irreversible. Walzer defended Israel's 1967 preemptive strike on the grounds of imminent threat. The Iranian nuclear program was a threat played out over decades rather than days, without a clear casus belli but where waiting is suicidal. No one can doubt that Iran would deploy a nuclear weapon against Israel and willingly sacrifice a couple of million Palestinians if they thought they could. 

Waiting Iran out might result in a successful popular uprising, or it might result in a nuclear weapon and delivery system. The latter is unfortunately more likely than the former. 

The other major challenge he makes is to my idea that each nation should prioritize their own people over their enemies. 

Walzer defends the position he and Avishai Margalit argued in Haaretz: that innocent men and women on both sides of a conflict have equal value. He reads my framework as relaxing that principle, making it "a little easier to fight against insurgents hiding among civilians" by valuing Israeli civilians at a higher rate than Gazan civilians.

I am not arguing that enemy civilians have less inherent worth as human beings. I'm saying that states have concentric circles of responsibility — to their own citizens first, to enemy civilians second — and that these circles reflect the source of a state's moral and political legitimacy, not a ranking of human worth. A government's primary claim on its citizens' obedience and sacrifice derives from its commitment to protect them. A government that sacrifices its citizens to protect enemy civilians has not demonstrated superior morality. It has inverted the moral basis of its own authority. And current international law supports this: no army is expected to endanger its own soldiers to reduce casualties of the enemy, and the laws of proportionality as adjudicated are far more favorable to the military than the standards applied to Israel. This is not a description of the value of lives but of reality: just as a parent would save her own child over another's, a state must prioritize their own citizens and an army must prioritize its own members. This is the social contract we all live under. 

If armies are expected to weigh all lives equally, that means that Hamas' human shield strategy is impossible to defeat. I would be interested to know how the equal-value principle generates operational guidance in a situation where Hamas has deliberately structured the battlefield to make Israeli restraint a Hamas strategic asset.

I deeply appreciate the discussion. Walzer could have dismissed this series. A pseudonymous blogger arguing that the experts got it wrong, published on Substack, is not an obvious target for serious engagement. He chose to engage seriously, carefully, and generously — identifying where I was right, identifying where he disagrees, and raising the hardest available challenge to my central argument. That is what intellectual discourse is supposed to look like, and it happens far less often than it should.

My theory of war is part of my larger philosophical work. If the framework I have been developing holds up under serious scrutiny from the field's most important living thinker in this domain  — not unscathed, but standing — then it may be worth developing further.

That is what I intend to do.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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dsa

 I previously wrote about the contradiction between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib's membership in the Democratic Socialists of America and their oath of office to defend the Constitution. 

The problem runs deeper. The DSA's goals are more anti-American, more illiberal, and more against the principles of the Democratic Party itself than the media tells you. 

The DSA's current platform describes these goals:

Our goal is to put workers in charge of the government through a new democratic constitution that establishes civil, political, and democratic rights for all, is based on proportional representation in a single federal legislature, and ends the role of money in politics.

Reading this carefully, there is a glaring contradiction. The DSA program says that they would provide "civil, political, and democratic rights for all," but the only people allowed to be in charge of the government are "workers." This means that anyone who is not a worker under socialist theory — the McDonald's worker who just got promoted to assistant manager, the immigrant who scraped together money to open a bodega in Brooklyn and who hires a local teen to make deliveries, the hotdog pushcart vendor, the project manager at a high-tech company, the middle-class 401(k) holder who invests in the stock market and is therefore a partial owner of large corporations — is ineligible to be in the government. These non-workers do not have the right to participate in governing.

The socialists support rights, but not equal rights for all. Some 30% of the American workforce do not qualify as "workers" under the DSA definition because they are self-employed, managers, small business owners or supervisors. About 60% own equities through investments which means that they are partial owners of major corporations. Saying that a large portion of Americans cannot join the government is not only anti-American — it goes against everything the Western liberal world has stood for over the past two centuries: unalienable rights and the dignity of all humans.

The DSA can no longer be dismissed as a mere fringe group.  DSA's membership grew from roughly 50,000 in October 2024 to over 90,000 by December 2025, nearly doubling in just over a year — fueled first by Trump's reelection and then by Mamdani's mayoral campaign. Over 250 DSA members now hold elected office across 40 states, with 90% of them elected after 2019 — including 96 city councilors and county commissioners, eight mayors or county executives, and significant council blocs in Chicago, Portland, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. At the federal level it holds two House seats. And its most prominent recent success is Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City. 

The media has largely covered this as a sign of democratic vitality — an energized grassroots left finding its voice. What the media has declined to cover with equal energy is what DSA actually says it wants to do with that power, in its own words, in its own publications, discussed openly at its own conventions.

This next passage from the same platform makes the internal logic explicit:

"With a government by, for, and of the working class and with powerful labor unions and social movements organizing in every city and town, we hope to build a socialist society..."

This is a deliberate rewriting of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, where he said "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." The DSA wants that government to perish. It has replaced "the people" — all of them — with "the working class," a category DSA itself defines and controls.

This is not only an anti-American platform that cynically rewrites one of America's most important speeches — a speech that genuinely did champion equal rights for all people. It is a platform more extreme than anything found in the major parties of Europe. Even the Green parties, the most radical formations operating in mainstream Western parliaments — the ones willing to block traffic, disrupt fossil fuel infrastructure, and push the outer limits of acceptable political action — ground themselves explicitly in universal rights. The European Green Party states that its belief in democracy is "founded upon the mutual recognition of all individuals as equals" and explicitly invokes "inalienable rights" as the foundation of its politics. The British Greens are characterized by political scientists as holding "libertarian-universalistic values" — left, libertarian, and committed to universal rights without class qualification.

DSA's own platform acknowledges that its vision "pushes further than historic social democracy." This is accurate, and DSA means it as a boast. What the boast reveals is that DSA has stepped outside the liberal framework that every mainstream left party in the democratic world — Labour, the SPD, the Scandinavian social democrats, the Greens — operates within. Those parties argue about what the state owes its citizens. DSA is arguing about which citizens the state is for.

The DSA Is Not Part of the Democratic Party. It Says So Itself.

The media's framing of DSA as the Democratic Party's progressive wing isn't just imprecise — it inverts the reality. DSA doesn't consider itself part of the Democratic Party. Its own documents, conventions, and internal debates make this explicit.

Start with policy. The 2024 Democratic Party platform supports the existing Constitution, backs Israel as a key ally, calls for secure borders alongside expanded legal immigration, and supports funding accountable policing. DSA's platform calls for replacing the Constitution entirely, opposes any legitimacy for Israel, opposes all border enforcement as racist and anti-working-class, and treats policing as a capitalist tool of class control. These are not differences of degree. They are direct contradictions on foundational questions.

Then there is the strategy. DSA's dominant electoral approach — endorsed at its 2025 National Convention without serious dissent — is called the "dirty break." The concept is straightforward: run socialist candidates on the Democratic Party ballot line because third-party runs fail under America's winner-take-all electoral system, use those campaigns to build an independent organizational infrastructure, then abandon the Democratic Party entirely once DSA has accumulated enough power to survive on its own. The Democratic ballot line is a ladder. The plan has always been to kick it away.

This is not inferred from DSA's behavior. It is stated in DSA's own publications. One DSA-aligned outlet describes the Democratic Party as "the reactionary capitalist graveyard of social movements" and calls on DSA to break from it urgently. Another describes the dirty break strategy plainly: run on the Democratic line "but use their campaigns to build an independent party-like organization capable of eventually becoming strong enough to break from the Democratic Party." The Metro DC DSA chapter states plainly on its own website that it organizes "as a quasi-political party to build power independent from the corporate and wealthy interests that pull the Democratic Party to the right" — treating the Democratic Party as an obstacle to be worked around, not a home.

This is not a secret. It is debated openly in DSA publications, conventions, and strategy documents. The media's choice to describe DSA as the Democrats' left flank, rather than as a self-described Trojan horse using the Democratic ballot line as a temporary vehicle toward goals the Democratic Party itself explicitly rejects, is a failure of basic reporting.

The Leaders Who Don't Qualify Under Their Own Rules

If DSA's platform is taken seriously, its most prominent elected officials present a problem the organization has never resolved.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender and waitress before her 2018 election — genuinely working class by almost any definition. She now earns $174,000 a year, employs a large staff, wields significant institutional power, and answers to no employer extracting surplus value from her labor. Rashida Tlaib spent a decade as a Michigan state representative before reaching Congress; her career has been in law and politics, not production. Zohran Mamdani  is a former academic and career politician whose only non-political work experience was a stint as a housing counselor, almost certainly for a nonprofit or government agency, meaning he has never worked for an exploitative capitalist by DSA's own definition of the term.

Under DSA's Marxist class analysis, none of these people are workers. They are state functionaries and professional-managerial class members — the layer that orthodox Marxist theory regards with suspicion as structurally unreliable representatives of proletarian interests. DSA has built its public face out of people its own framework disqualifies, and has never acknowledged the contradiction, because acknowledging it would require applying the framework honestly.

The problem extends downward. Each of these officials employs a paid staff: schedulers, communications directors, legislative aides, district office workers. Those employees sell their labor to a boss who sets their pay, controls their working conditions, and can terminate them. Under DSA's own class analysis, AOC and Tlaib and Mamdani are not their staffs' comrades — they are their staffs' employers, which is precisely the relationship DSA's platform identifies as exploitation. The movement to liberate the working class is being led by professional politicians who are, on their own terms, exploiting the workers beneath them. DSA is willing to overlook its own foundational principles whenever the person being promoted is sufficiently well-credentialed and sufficiently useful — which is to say, whenever the principles become inconvenient.

Rights For Some

DSA's contempt for genuine equal rights doesn't remain abstract. Its platform  endorses Palestinian terrorism as described in the ‘al-Thawabit’ principles set by the Palestinian National Council in 1977,  which means treating armed attacks on Israeli civilians as legitimate political action. DSA has made this a near-expulsion issue internally, withdrawing its endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in part over her insufficient support for it.

Once you establish that some civilians' right to life is contingent on their political context — that Israeli civilians are legitimate targets because of the class or national position DSA assigns them — you have abandoned the premise that rights are universal. You have conceded that rights are political awards, granted to those on the correct side of the correct struggle and withheld from those who are not. Every subsequent guarantee of "rights for all" in DSA's platform rests on the same logic: rights exist for those whom the workers' government recognizes as deserving them.

History has seen this before. The Soviet constitution of 1936 — Stalin's constitution — was praised at the time as one of the most progressive documents ever written. It guaranteed free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the inviolability of the person, for all Soviet citizens. The workers were supposedly in charge of the government. These rights existed on paper. What followed is known. The lesson is not that DSA will necessarily replicate Stalinist terror — it is that "rights for all" under "workers in charge" has a track record and it isn't good. There is nothing that the DSA, or Marxist theory in general, does to structurally block the system they want to build from becoming worse than what they want to replace. 

The United States Constitution was designed precisely to prevent concentrated power, recognizing the potential for abuse. Its architecture of separated powers, checks and balances, federalism, and individual rights protections exists to ensure that no faction — however righteous its self-description — can accumulate enough power to silence those who disagree with it. The framers understood that the danger to liberty comes not from obvious tyrants but from movements convinced of their own virtue. They built a system that protects minorities, dissenters, and the politically disfavored against majorities who believe they have history on their side.

DSA's platform contains none of these safeguards. Its new democratic constitution would concentrate power in a single federal legislature, eliminate the Senate's counter-majoritarian role, gut judicial review, and place governance in the hands of a class defined by DSA itself. The people DSA disagrees with — the bodega owner, the assistant manager, the 401(k) holder, the Zionist — have no structural protection in this vision, only the goodwill of the workers' government. That goodwill, as the Soviet constitution demonstrated, is not a substitute for rights.

DSA is, in the end, everything it claims to oppose: a movement seeking concentrated power, using the language of liberation to justify removing rights from those it has decided don't deserve them, hiding an authoritarian logic inside democratic vocabulary. The Constitution it wants to replace was built by people who understood exactly this danger. That is why DSA wants to replace it.

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jewish question

 

(Part 1 of a series on "The Jewish Question")

Across the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the phrase "the Jewish Question" — die Judenfrage in German, la question juive in French, the Jewish problem in English — saturated European discourse. 

But what, exactly, was the Jewish Question?

Strangely, there is no single answer. 

The phrase was ubiquitous. There were multiple books titled The Jewish Question or The Jewish Problem. There were countless newspaper articles, pamphlets, parliamentary speeches, and learned essays addressing it. One scholar catalogued 1,230 sources (books, pamphlets, articles, speeches, meetings) on the topic in a single decade from 1875-1884. 

But looking at these sources does not help define the question. They presume the reader already knows.

It appeared in Hegelian philosophy and in evangelical missionary tracts. It was the title of Bruno Bauer's 1843 treatise and Karl Marx's 1844 reply. It was used by French revolutionaries debating emancipation and by German racial theorists demanding separation. It appeared in respectable London newspapers as routine political vocabulary, requiring no definition because every reader was assumed to know what it meant. By 1939, when the Nazi government published Germany and the Jewish Problem, the phrase had been a fixture of European discourse for nearly two centuries, deployed across every political ideology, in every Western language, by every kind of publication.

The one thing nearly everyone using the phrase seemed to agree on was that the Jewish Question was not antisemitism. On the contrary. It was meant to be the alternative to antisemitism. It was the considered intellectual response to a real problem, the kind of thing serious people engaged with in contrast to the rabble who merely hated Jews.

For example, on November 7, 1881, the Pall Mall Gazette of London printed a brief telegram from Berlin under the headline "Prince Bismarck and the Jewish Question." The Tageblatt, organ of the German anti-Jewish Conservatives, was replying to remarks Bismarck had reportedly made condemning anti-Jewish agitation. The Conservatives wanted to clarify their position. "We have always condemned the brutalities of Jew-baiting," they wrote, "but these must not be confounded with the Jewish question, which is well founded. The Jewish question exists in spite of the supposed opinion of Prince Bismarck, and if the Prince adheres to the statement attributed to him, the Jewish question will exist even against him."

The German Conservatives — the leading anti-Jewish party of their moment — were drawing a line between two things they regarded as entirely distinct. On one side was Jew-baiting: vulgar, brutal, the kind of thing respectable people condemned. On the other side was the Jewish Question: serious, well-founded, a matter that any thinking person was obliged to engage with. The Conservatives located their moral position in being against the first while being committed to the second. They were not antisemites, by their lights. They were responsible men, addressing a real problem, in contrast to the ignorant bigots who physically attacked Jews.

For the educated nineteenth-century European, pogroms were awful and blood libels were medieval superstition. But the Jewish Question — that was something else. That was a matter of serious analysis.

So what was the analysis? What did the Question actually claim?

The texts will not tell you directly. They presume the reader already knows. The only way to recover what the Question meant is to work backward from the solutions its serious analysts proposed. If we can identify the solutions, we can reconstruct the questions they were meant to answer. The result is illuminating, and not in the way the analysts intended.

Four solutions, four problems

Consider four representative texts.

In 1883, Arnold Frank, a licentiate of the Irish Presbyterian Church, published The Jewish Problem and Its Solution through the Bible and Colportage Society of Belfast. Frank was an evangelical Protestant of unimpeachable respectability. The solution he proposed was conversion, pursued through evangelism. The Christian world, he wrote, had a duty to win the Jew for Christ — "if it were for nothing else than self defence," because Jewish religious influence undermined Christian belief. Working backward from this solution, the question Frank was answering becomes clear: Jews refuse the true faith and undermine those who hold it. What should we do? For Frank, the Jewish Problem was a religious problem. The condition that made Jews problematic was their continued existence as Jews, which conversion would remedy.

A century earlier, in December 1789, the French revolutionary Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre rose in the National Assembly to defend Jewish emancipation. He was a liberal and a constitutional monarchist, on the progressive side of the debate, advocating equal rights for Protestants and Jews against those who wanted to maintain the centuries-old exclusions. The solution he proposed has echoed through every subsequent discussion of Jewish citizenship: "We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, and accord everything to Jews as individuals." Working backward, the question becomes: Jews constitute a corporate body within the state — with their own laws, their own institutions, their own communal courts — incompatible with the unified citizenship the Republic requires. What should we do? For Clermont-Tonnerre, the Jewish Question was a political-organizational problem. The condition that made Jews problematic was Jewish communal existence, which dissolution of Jewish institutions would remedy.

In 1844, Karl Marx published Zur Judenfrage — "On the Jewish Question" — replying to Bruno Bauer. Marx reframed the entire debate. The solution he proposed was structural: the abolition of the social conditions that produced both Judaism and capitalism. The closing line of the essay is unambiguous: "the social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism." Working backward, the question becomes: Jewish economic activity — usury, commerce, what Marx called "huckstering" — is capitalism in concentrated form. What should we do? For Marx, the Jewish Question was an economic problem. The condition that made Jews problematic was the persistence of the social form Judaism allegedly expressed, which revolutionary transformation would remedy - and leave the world with no Judaism.

In 1879, Wilhelm Marr published Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum — "The Victory of Jewry over Germandom" — and helped popularize a new word for an old position. Marr coined "antisemitism" specifically to give Jew-hatred a scientific veneer, distinguishing his position from what he portrayed as backward religious prejudice. The solution he proposed was racial separation, which his successors would push toward catastrophic conclusion. Working backward, the question becomes: Jews are a biologically distinct people whose hereditary characteristics make them permanently incompatible with German national life. What should we do? For Marr, the Jewish Question was a racial problem. The condition that made Jews problematic was their biological inheritance, which no conversion or civic emancipation could touch.

These are not four facets of one problem. They are four different problems with four different referents and four different proposed remedies. Frank's religious problem cannot be solved by economic transformation. Marr's racial problem cannot be solved by conversion. Clermont-Tonnerre's organizational problem cannot be solved by changes in the social conditions of production. Marx's economic problem cannot be solved by the dissolution of communal courts. The four frameworks did not merely disagree about details. They disagreed about what kind of thing the Jewish Question even was.

And yet all four called what they were addressing "the Jewish Question." All four believed they were treating the same subject. Across a century of discourse, no one seems to have been particularly bothered by the fact that the people writing about "the Jewish Question" did not agree, even at the most basic level, on what the Question actually was. Yet everyone agreed that there was a question.

What the shared phrase actually meant

Each framework began from the conviction that Jewish existence was the kind of presence that required management. Frank knew Jews were a religious problem because his theology said so. Clermont-Tonnerre knew Jews were a political problem because his Republicanism said so. Marx knew Jews were an economic problem because his materialism said so. Marr knew Jews were a racial problem because his pseudo-science said so. Each was correct given his framework. But the framework did not generate the conclusion that Jews required treatment. The conclusion preceded the framework. The framework provided respectable contemporary vocabulary in which the prior conclusion could be articulated.

This becomes visible when you examine what happened as proposed solutions failed. Spain attempted the religious solution in the fifteenth century, demanding conversion or expulsion. The conversos who chose conversion were persecuted as crypto-Jews for generations afterward. If the problem had really been religious, conversion would have ended it. It did not. 

France attempted the political solution in 1791, granting full civic emancipation conditional on the dissolution of Jewish corporate identity. But Napoleon convened a Grand Sanhedrin to determine if Jews can really live in France as normal citizens. A century later, the Dreyfus Affair revealed that emancipated French Jews remained suspect as Jews. If the problem had really been organizational, civic equality would have ended it. It did not. 

The Soviet Union attempted the economic solution after 1917, abolishing the bourgeois conditions Marx had identified. Soviet antisemitism flourished anyway, eventually producing its own state-sponsored persecutions. If the problem had really been economic, abolishing capitalism would have ended it. It did not. 

Germany attempted the racial solution under the Nazis, and the catastrophe needs no description.

Each "solution" failed in the same way. A specific proposed answer was implemented, the proposed answer did not resolve the discomfort with Jewish presence, and a new framework was selected to articulate why Jewish presence remained problematic. Religious gave way to political gave way to economic gave way to racial. Each successor framework presented itself as the deeper analysis that the previous framework had missed. None of them ever considered the possibility that the Question itself was not what it claimed to be.

Real political questions, when their proposed solutions fail, generate refinement of analysis. The Eastern Question was reformulated repeatedly across the nineteenth century as Ottoman conditions changed, but each reformulation was a closer approach to the actual referent — the Ottoman Empire's relationship with European powers. The Irish Question evolved from Catholic Emancipation through Home Rule through partition, but the evolution tracked actual changes in the Anglo-Irish relationship. When the referent was finally addressed, the Question dissolved.

The Jewish Question never got refined. It got replaced. Each new framework was not a closer approach to a real referent but a fresh respectable vocabulary deployed when the previous one had become embarrassing. The pattern is the diagnostic of cognitive architecture rather than honest inquiry. A question whose stated referent keeps changing is a question whose actual referent is something else.

The actual referent — the one all four frameworks shared, beneath their respective vocabularies — was the assumption that Jewish existence as Jewish existence was the kind of presence European societies could not simply accommodate. The Question was always what should we do about our Jews?, with the answer "something" already settled, and the rationale to be supplied by whichever framework the era found most respectable.

The respectable form

This brings us back to the German Conservatives of 1881 and to the most important feature of the Jewish Question as a discursive form. Each of the four frameworks I have described did not merely articulate the assumption that Jewish presence required resolution. Each one presented itself, in its own moment, as the moderate and enlightened position — explicitly defined against a cruder antisemitism it considered beneath itself.

Arnold Frank was not a medieval Christian persecutor. He was a Belfast Presbyterian writing in the post-Enlightenment evangelical tradition. He did not endorse pogroms or forced conversion at sword-point. He represented the Protestant reform of Christian-Jewish relations: love them, pray for them, send missionaries, persuade them. By the standards of the world he had inherited, Frank was a moral progressive. He understood himself as advancing beyond the ugliness of medieval Christendom toward a more humane Christian witness to the Jewish people. And the position he took was that Jewish existence as Jewish existence should end, gently, through evangelism rather than coercion.

Clermont-Tonnerre was not a defender of the ancien régime's Jewish disabilities. He was a leading voice for Jewish emancipation in a National Assembly debate where some delegates wanted to maintain the centuries-old exclusions. His famous formulation — everything to Jews as individuals, nothing to Jews as a nation — was understood at the time as a defense of Jewish rights against those who wanted to keep Jews as a permanently inferior caste. He was on the liberal side of the argument. And his liberalism took the form of demanding that Jewish corporate existence be dissolved as the price of admission to French citizenship.

Marx was not a populist scapegoater of Jewish bankers. He was, in his own self-understanding, the deeper analyst, locating Jewish economic behavior within the structural critique of capitalism, distinguishing his position from the vulgar Jew-hatred of the conservative populists. He was a radical, and he understood his radicalism as the alternative to the cruder forms of antisemitism that produced pogroms and individual scapegoating. And his alternative was that Jewish existence as expressed in social form be abolished along with the conditions producing it.

Marr is the hardest of the four to call respectable, but in his own moment, he positioned himself as scientific and modern against what he portrayed as backward religious bigotry. He coined the word "antisemitism" precisely to give the position a scientific register, distinguishing it from the superstitious Christian Jew-hatred of the past. His self-understanding was that he was offering a sober racial analysis — modern, biological, Darwinian — in contrast to medieval prejudice. And his sober racial analysis demanded racial separation that culminated, two generations later, in industrialized murder.

Each framework, then, performed the same operation. It identified a cruder, more vulgar form of antisemitism prevalent in its environment. It defined itself explicitly against that cruder form. It articulated the same prior assumption — that Jewish existence required resolution — in the respectable contemporary vocabulary of its moment. And it understood itself, by its own lights, to be antisemitism's opposite: the moral progress over what came before.

This is what the German Conservatives were doing in the Pall Mall Gazette of 1881. They were not confused or hypocritical. They had located the moral high ground in being against the brutalities while embracing the well-founded Question. That is a stable, coherent, durable cultural-political achievement: the construction of an acceptable antisemitism, articulated in whatever vocabulary the era considers serious, sincerely understood by its adherents to be the antithesis of the vulgar form they reject.

The achievement is what made the framing so durable. Each generation could point to a worse version — one that they did not endorse — and locate themselves on the right side of history relative to it. The Reform Christian was not a Crusader. The French Republican was not an absolutist excluder. The Marxist was not a Pale of Settlement antisemite. The racial scientist was not a credulous superstitious peasant. Each could, with full sincerity, distinguish his position from antisemitism as he understood antisemitism — while occupying a position that carried forward the same load-bearing assumption that animated every cruder form.

The structural reading

When you place the four frameworks beside one another, the diagnostic is unavoidable. Frank wanted Jewish religious existence to end. Clermont-Tonnerre wanted Jewish communal existence to end. Marx wanted Jewish economic existence to end. Marr wanted Jewish biological existence to end. Each framework specified a different mode of Jewish existence as the relevant one and demanded its termination. None of them were content with Jewish existence continuing as itself.

The society's treatment of Jews was never considered the problem. The Jews themselves were the problem. And soon enough, even the respected academics admitted this. In 1879, Heinrich von Treitschke — professor at the University of Berlin, the most prominent German historian of his generation — said it without ornament in the pages of the Preußische Jahrbücher: 'Die Juden sind unser Unglück.' The Jews are our misfortune. This phrase was first published in the most prestigious journal of German political thought as an enlightened viewpoint. 

The Nazis recognized it for what it was. 

The Jewish Question was the socially acceptable form of antisemitism. It was sophisticated: serious analysis, considered solutions, learned treatises, careful debate. It carefully distinguished itself from the earlier, crude manifestations of antisemitism. And the world, by and large — including most but not all  European Jews themselves — accepted this framing. 

Almost no one considered that there was an alternative way of looking at Jews in Europe, of dissolving the Jewish question altogether. Yet there was an another way that emerged — in the New World. And only when compared against Europe can the genius of the American system be recognized, which is the topic of the next essay.

Tragically, the progressive Europeans did not recognize that the liberal, serious, progressive Jewish Question itself, that they debated endlessly as the enlightened alternative to pogroms and blood libels, is what would directly lead to genocide.

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