Rehearse it here,
not in the room.
The deck
They say
A state defined by religion or ethnicity is illegitimate. A Jewish state is racist by definition.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
The liberal case is that a state belongs to its citizens rather than to a nation, and that any constitutional order ranking a people above the citizenry produces a minority who are tolerated rather than owned. Adalah, the legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel, puts it at its sharpest: no democratic constitution in the world designates the identity of the state as serving one ethnic group.
And Israel's version does not stop at symbolism. The 2018 Basic Law says the realisation of national self-determination in the state is exclusive to the Jewish people, demotes Arabic from a second official language to an undefined special status, and makes the development of Jewish settlement a national value.
The word equality appears nowhere in it. The Law of Return admits a Jew from Los Angeles who has never been there and excludes a Palestinian born in Jaffa. Since 2003 a temporary order, renewed almost every year, has barred Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza who marry Israeli citizens from acquiring status, and around 12,700 people live on permits that must be renewed.
Adalah lists more than sixty-five laws it says discriminate. So the Danish comparison cuts the wrong way, because an established church costs a Danish Muslim nothing at the border, in the land registry or in his children's marriages.
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Pew counted 43 states with an official religion: 27 Islam, 13 Christianity, two Buddhism, one Judaism. If a state having a religion is the objection, you have 42 more to make. If only one of them moves you, the objection is not the principle.
- 01
Poland's constitution gives anyone whose Polish origin is confirmed the right to settle permanently in Poland. Article 52, paragraph 5.
A right of return by descent, written into a European democracy's constitution. It moves the argument off whether such laws exist and onto why one of them is the scandal.
Constitution of the Republic of Poland, 2 April 1997, Article 52(5)
- 02
Article 4 of the Palestinian Basic Law makes Islam the official religion and the principles of sharia a principal source of legislation.
Never say this as an accusation, because the hypocrisy version loses. Say it as a fact about two states: the principle would dissolve both, and nobody proposes that.
Palestinian Basic Law as amended 2003, Article 4, in force
- 03
In 2000 Israel's Supreme Court held the state could not allocate land for a village that admitted Jews only. Ka'adan, HCJ 6698/95.
An Arab family beat the state in the state's own court, and the president of that court wrote that equality is a foundational principle of Israel. Enforceable equal citizenship is the claim.
Ka'adan v Israel Land Administration, HCJ 6698/95, judgment of 8 March 2000, President A. Barak
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They say
Anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism. Zionism is a political ideology like any other, and opposing it is normal politics.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Zionism is a nineteenth-century political movement with a programme, a congress and factions, and political movements are argued with rather than protected from argument. Jews have opposed it from the beginning: the Bund on socialist grounds, Satmar on theological ones, liberal Jews in the west because defining Jews as a nation seemed to threaten their citizenship at home.
Those traditions predate the state and cannot be explained by hostility to Jews, because the people holding them were Jews. More than 400 scholars of antisemitism and Jewish history signed a declaration in 2021 saying that opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism is not in itself antisemitic.
And there is a sharper point underneath. To treat opposition to a state as hatred of a people assumes the state and the people are one thing, which is precisely the assumption the speaker objects to, and the assumption that gets Jews in Manchester or Melbourne blamed for a government they did not elect. On that account the conflation runs the other way, and the accuser is making it.
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The UN General Assembly declared Zionism a form of racism in 1975 and revoked the resolution in 1991. The position outlived the vote that killed it, because it was never a claim about how Israel behaves. It is a claim about which people get a country.
- 01
The First Zionist Congress met in 1897. Sinn Fein was founded in 1905, the Muslim League that produced Pakistan in 1906.
The first Arab Congress met in 1913. Kills the idea that Zionism was a latecomer riding somebody else's century. It is one of the earlier national movements, not one of the last.
First Zionist Congress, 29 to 31 August 1897; All-India Muslim League, Dacca, 30 December 1906
- 02
Pew examined 199 countries and found 43 with an official state religion. Twenty-seven of them are Islam, thirteen Christianity, two Buddhism and one Judaism.
A state with a defining national or religious character is ordinary furniture. Ask why one of the forty-three is the anachronism.
Pew Research Center, Many Countries Favor Specific Religions, 2017
- 03
The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights surveyed almost 8,000 Jews in 2023. Seventy-five per cent said they're held responsible for Israel's actions because they're Jewish.
Thirteen countries. Moves the argument off intentions, which nobody can settle, and onto where the position lands, which an EU agency has measured.
EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, third antisemitism survey, fieldwork 2023
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They say
Boycotting Israel is a peaceful and effective way to get Palestinians their rights, the same as the boycott of apartheid South Africa
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Boycott is nonviolent. It harms nobody's body, compels nobody, and asks only that people decline to buy something. It has a documented history as the instrument of populations with no army, no vote and no seat at any negotiation, and South Africa is the case everybody knows.
Palestinians under occupation have no lever over the government whose decisions shape their lives, and they have asked the world, in writing and in public, to use the one lever ordinary people hold. Refusing that while offering no alternative tells people with no power to wait quietly.
The movement says it targets institutions and companies over their conduct, and that it "does not target anyone because of his/her Jewish or Israeli identity". Ali Abunimah, answering Norman Finkelstein in 2012, argued that the 2005 call is "agnostic, focusing on the rights of Palestinians, not on state arrangements", and pointed at Northern Ireland as a place where guarantees of equality changed a state without abolishing it. The question is why a tactic that was honourable in 1959 is illegitimate now.
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BDS called SodaStream leaving the West Bank a victory. Over 500 Palestinians lost their jobs. That is the campaign's own flagship win, and it is the clearest case of what the boycott did for Palestinians.
- 01
SodaStream's West Bank plant closed in October 2015 and over 500 Palestinians lost their jobs. BDS called it proof the campaign works.
Their flagship victory, in their own words, and the people it cost were the people it was for. The claim is that the boycott is effective. Ask effective at what.
BDS Movement, SodaStream to Close Illegal Settlement Factory, 2015; The Times of Israel, on the plant closure and the last workers, 29 February 2016
- 02
Norman Finkelstein, no friend of Israel, added up the three BDS demands in 2012 and concluded: “there's no Israel.”
It reaches us through Ali Abunimah, who supports the boycott and was writing to disagree with him. Neither man can be waved away as ours.
Norman Finkelstein, quoted by Ali Abunimah, Al Jazeera, February 2012
- 03
BDS names the anti-apartheid movement as its model. Its 1955 Freedom Charter declares South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.
Their own model asked for equal citizenship inside one country. It never asked a national movement to stop existing.
The Freedom Charter, African National Congress, Kliptown, 1955
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They say
Calling it antisemitism is just a way of shutting down criticism of Israel
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Hirsh concedes the ground this stands on. He writes that the issue of antisemitism is certainly sometimes raised in an unjustified way, and may even be raised in bad faith. The documented cases are not obscure. Kenneth Stern led the drafting of the text that became the IHRA working definition.
He has written that it was built so European monitors could count incidents comparably across borders, that it was never meant to work as a campus speech code, and that it is now being used as one. He names instances: a 2022 Tennessee measure that could expose teachers who set readings critical of Zionism, and bans on chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine imposed for what they said rather than anything they did.
Somebody whose experience of the charge is an institutional process they could not answer, brought by people with more power than they had, is not describing a fantasy, and naming a rhetorical move does not dispose of it.
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In October 2020 the Equality and Human Rights Commission ruled that the Labour Party had unlawfully harassed Jews. Among the conduct it named was the claim that antisemitism complaints were smears. You have just made that claim.
- 01
In 2020 the Equality and Human Rights Commission found Labour liable for unlawful harassment, including suggesting antisemitism complaints were fake or smears.
One of the two individuals named was Ken Livingstone, the man the formulation is named after. A statutory regulator treated the move as harassment.
Equality and Human Rights Commission report on antisemitism in the Labour Party, October 2020
- 02
David Hirsh collected more than twenty users of the same formulation: Ahmadinejad and David Duke of the Klan, alongside sincere antiracists.
Nick Griffin of the BNP is on the list too. A move that serves a Klansman and a peace campaigner equally well carries no information about whether the original complaint was sound.
David Hirsh, The Livingstone Formulation, transversal, 2010
- 03
Ken Livingstone asked a Jewish reporter in 2005 if he'd been a German war criminal, then said the charge is used against critics of Israel.
Told the reporter was Jewish and offended, he said he was behaving like one anyway. It files a Nazi comparison under criticism of Israeli policy, and never touches the complaint.
Ken Livingstone and Oliver Finegold, February 2005, and Livingstone in the Guardian, 2006
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They say
Criticising Israel has nothing to do with Jews here. Stop dragging antisemitism into a foreign policy argument.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Violence against a minority is not evidence about that minority's politics. If a gunman murders four people at a Jewish school because he says he is avenging Palestinian children, that tells you he is a murderer with a stated reason. It does not make the reason false and it does not make any Israeli policy right.
A list of dead Jews cannot settle an argument about a state. Second, our own dataset undercuts the neat version. Pittsburgh, Poway, Halle, Overland Park and Jersey City were attacks by white supremacists and racial separatists in which no Israeli policy is named by anybody at any point, so antisemitism plainly has sources with nothing to do with the Middle East.
Third and sharpest, the causal reading runs both ways: if attacks abroad rise and fall with events in the Middle East, the same data says the way to protect Jews in Manchester is to change what happens in Gaza. Expect that one, and answer it on the record rather than on the feeling.
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Twenty-three lethal or attempted mass attacks on Jewish targets outside Israel since 1982, in twelve countries. The man who killed a rabbi and three children at a Toulouse school said he was avenging Palestinian children. He made the connection, not us.
- 01
The man who murdered a rabbi and three children at a school in Toulouse in 2012 told police he did it to avenge Palestinian children.
He supplies the gap himself, so you never have to assert it. Give the stated reason and the address in the same breath and let the listener close it.
Times of Israel, 22 March 2012, reporting French police accounts of the siege negotiations
- 02
The 2002 Djerba synagogue bombing was claimed in the name of Palestine, against the Jews. Fourteen of the nineteen dead were German tourists.
Djerba is a Tunisian island. It is their fax, not our characterisation, and the victim list is checkable. Nobody in that building had any connection to any Israeli decision.
CTC Sentinel, April 2017, on the statement faxed to al-Hayat and al-Quds al-Arabi
- 03
A white supremacist shot three people dead at a Jewish community centre and care home in Kansas in 2014. All three were Christians.
It kills the reply that we count only our own dead, and it shows the dataset is built on what the killer wanted rather than on who was buried.
KCUR, 29 March 2021; Miller testified he drove there looking to murder Jews
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They say
Death to the IDF. It is an army of occupation and no decent person defends it.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
History does not license conduct. Every army on earth was founded on a story of necessity and not one is exempt from judgement on what it did last month, so the person opposite you can accept every word of the history and still ask what it has to do with a strike in Gaza.
An army is a state institution, and hostility to a state institution is not hostility to a people: nobody hears "down with the Russian army" as a statement about Russians. Conscription cuts both ways too. A force of eighteen-year-olds is not beyond criticism, and the argument that every family is in it converts easily into an argument that every family is implicated, which is the conclusion our side spends most of its time refusing.
And the appeal to Jewish history moves the subject from what is being done now, which is checkable and contested, to what was done to Jews then, which is neither. Some of the sharpest critics of that army are Israelis whose children serve in it.
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Israel's Defence Service Law conscripts women as well as men, from eighteen. So you are not chanting at a colonel. You are chanting at somebody's niece who left school in June. Hold any view you like about that army. Death to it is a view about Jews.
- 01
At Entebbe the hijackers sorted the Jewish passengers from the rest. Days later Israeli aircraft flew 4,000 kilometres and brought 102 of the 106 home.
The selection and the rescue sit a week apart and neither half needs asserting. Give the cost in the same breath: three hostages died in the fighting and one was murdered afterwards.
World Jewish Congress on Operation Entebbe, 27 June to 4 July 1976
- 02
In Hebron in August 1929 sixty-seven Jews were killed in two days. The British evacuated 484 survivors, 153 of them children, and the community ended.
It is what having no army looked like in practice: a mob, one policeman, and a protecting power that removed the survivors instead of defending them.
Jewish Virtual Library, The Hebron Massacre of 1929
- 03
In the 48 hours after 7 October 2023 Israel called up 300,000 reservists. It is not a professional army. It is the neighbours.
It turns a chant about an institution into a sentence about somebody's nineteen-year-old, which is how a Jewish family hears it whatever the chanter intended.
The Times of Israel, 300,000 reservists mobilised in 48 hours, 9 October 2023
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They say
Do you support the settlements? They are illegal under international law and that ends the argument
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
On 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice held that Israel's transfer of settlers into the West Bank and East Jerusalem is contrary to Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and that the prohibition covers any measure taken to organise or encourage transfer, not only force.
On ending settlement activity and evacuating settlers, the Court divided fourteen to one. Security Council resolution 2334 called the settlements a flagrant violation of international law and passed fourteen to nil. The first legal opinion Israel's own government ever received, from its foreign ministry legal adviser in September 1967, said the same.
Then the argument that needs no court. A corridor to Ma'ale Adumim and a finger reaching to Ariel are not marginal adjustments. They sit where a contiguous Palestinian territory would have to be. And the law of belligerent occupation is a law of temporary administration.
An arrangement in its fifty-ninth year, with courts, planning committees, motorways and a housing market, is not a holding position. It is the settlement, imposed rather than negotiated.
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Israel has dismantled settlements twice. Every settlement in Sinai went in 1982, and in 2005 it removed 21 in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank, more than 8,000 residents in a week. A policy reversed twice is not an argument that has ended.
- 01
Israel has dismantled settlements twice. Every Sinai settlement went in 1982. In 2005 it removed 21 in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank.
More than 8,000 residents removed in a week in 2005. The answer to "they will never give anything up", and it is dates rather than intentions. It makes the settlements a policy, not a creed.
Anti-Defamation League backgrounder on the 2005 disengagement; Jewish Virtual Library on the Yamit evacuation, 23 April 1982
- 02
A study of eight long-term occupations found settler populations grew in all eight. Almost nowhere else is it called a Geneva Convention breach.
Western Sahara, Northern Cyprus and Crimea among them. It moves the question from whether you approve of the settlements to whether the rule being applied is a rule at all.
Eugene Kontorovich, Unsettled: A Global Study of Settlements in Occupied Territories, Journal of Legal Analysis, volume 9, 2017
- 03
About 77 per cent of settlers live west of the security barrier, in blocs near the Green Line. Over a hundred outposts break Israeli law.
Those outposts went up between 1992 and 2020 without government approval. It breaks "the settlements" into two objects that need different answers, and either reader can use it.
Israel Policy Forum, West Bank Settlements Explained, drawing on Shaul Arieli
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They say
Europe murdered the Jews, so why are the Palestinians paying for it?
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
The decisive international support arrived at a specific moment and for a reason. Britain restricted Jewish immigration in 1939 and held to that through the war. What changed was the camps. The Anglo-American Committee sat in 1946 because a quarter of a million survivors had nowhere to go, and the General Assembly voted for partition in November 1947 rather than in 1937 or 1927.
Guilt moved the votes, and the states that had refused Jewish refugees in the 1930s were the ones voting to settle them somewhere else. In 1948 over 700,000 Palestinians left or were driven from their homes, have not been allowed back, and their descendants are stateless in Lebanon and Gaza today.
Those people did not build Auschwitz, did not vote for the governments that did, and in most cases had never seen Europe. That Jews had lived in Jerusalem for centuries, or were driven out of Baghdad, explains how a claim arose. It does not explain why the cost fell on a population innocent of the crime being answered.
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Between 1948 and 1952 more Jews reached Israel from Asia and Africa than from Europe. They were not paying for Europe's crime. They were being pushed out of their own countries because of it.
- 01
The British census of 1931 counted 174,610 Jews in Palestine, nearly seventeen per cent. Taken before Hitler took office.
The claim needs a Jewish state to be an idea that occurred to the world in 1945. Fifty years of immigration were already on the ground.
British Mandate census of Palestine, 1931
- 02
Between 1948 and 1952, 738,891 people reached Israel: 377,251 from Asia and Africa, 340,842 from Europe. Iraq alone sent 124,226.
Hand the question back. Which European crime were the Jews of Sana'a and Baghdad paying for?
Immigrants to Israel 1948 to 1952, Jewish Virtual Library
- 03
Iraq had 135,000 Jews in 1948 and fewer than ten by 2018. Libya had 38,000 and now has none.
Nobody calls those departures Europe's fault, and the families they produced are about half of Israel's Jews.
Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries, country figures for 1948 and 2018
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They say
Fine. So what do you actually want? What does your side think the ending looks like?
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
The honest case against this is that it describes a destination with no road left to it. Every element was on a table twenty-five years ago and none of it was signed. The West Bank settler population was about 110,000 in 1993 and stood at 541,085 on 1 January 2026, and the growth has gone into exactly the places a border has to cross.
Neither public elects anybody who holds this position: the Knesset voted 68 to 9 against Palestinian statehood in July 2024, and the last Palestinian legislative election was in January 2006. Two states have been the declared policy of most of the world for thirty years and have produced no state, which at some point stops being an unlucky run and starts being evidence about the framework itself.
Then the sharper version. A plan needing a hundred and thirty thousand people to move, an army nobody has raised to guarantee a border, and a Palestinian leadership able to deliver Gaza and the West Bank at once is not a plan.
Wanting something coherent is not the same as having a route to it, and the route is what the question was asking for.
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In October 2025 a Palestinian pollster found two-state support at 64 per cent in Gaza and 56 per cent in the West Bank. The whole agreement was written out in 2003: fifty pages, with annexes on borders, Jerusalem, refugees and security. Now yours.
- 01
The whole agreement was written out in 2003. Fifty pages with annexes, borders, Jerusalem, refugees, security, signed by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in Geneva.
It binds nobody: Beilin was in opposition and the Palestinians signed in a private capacity. It kills one thing only, the idea that the ending has never been described.
The Geneva Accord, a draft permanent status agreement launched in Geneva on 1 December 2003
- 02
About 76 per cent of West Bank settlers live between the Green Line and the barrier, and that share has held for over twenty years.
The barrier is not a border and no bloc line is agreed. Say both. The other quarter is still about 130,000 people, and they are the hard part of any map.
Israel Policy Forum, Quiet Deterioration in the West Bank, 7 July 2026
- 03
Security Council resolution 2803 endorsed a plan naming a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood. Adopted 17 November 2025, 13 votes to none.
An American text, conditional, no timeline, no mention of two states, Russia and China abstaining. It answers "nobody serious wants this" and nothing beyond that.
UN Security Council resolution 2803 (2025), adopted 17 November 2025
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They say
Globalise the intifada just means uprising. Intifada is Arabic for shaking off, and reading murder into it is prejudice
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
The fairest version does not rest on the dictionary. Intifada is the ordinary Arabic word for an uprising. It was used of Iraqis in 1952 and of Lebanese, Bahrainis and Sudanese since, and hearing terrorism inside a foreign noun is a standard nobody would accept applied to their own language.
The uprising the word most strongly denotes among Palestinians is the first one, which was overwhelmingly strikes, tax refusal, boycotts and stones, and which is remembered across the Arab world as the moment an unarmed population stopped complying. On that reading globalise asks other people to join a political struggle rather than attack anybody: to divest, to strike, to refuse, to make an occupation cost something in their own capital.
The director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign describes the phrase as worldwide support for ending the oppression of Palestinians by all legitimate means. And a community that hears a call to murder in a demand that people organise politically is asking the world to police Arabic for its comfort.
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The second intifada was 146 suicide bombings and about a thousand Israelis dead, most of them civilians. Thirty at a Passover dinner in Netanya. The slogan first appears three weeks later. Globalise means spread that.
- 01
The earliest recorded use of globalise the intifada was at a Washington rally in April 2002, three weeks after the Passover seder bombing in Netanya.
Middle East Eye traced that, not us. The phrase was coined while the buses were still going up.
Middle East Eye, What is the meaning of globalise the intifada and when did it first appear
- 02
The second intifada was 146 suicide attacks in five years and killed about a thousand Israelis, most of them civilians.
It is the number nobody chanting the word has been told, and it is two clicks from checkable.
Yoram Schweitzer, Institute for National Security Studies, and the Economic Cooperation Foundation
- 03
On 27 March 2002 a bomber walked into the Passover seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya and killed thirty people at dinner.
A date, a place and a meal. It needs no adjective and it cannot be argued with.
Passover massacre, Park Hotel, Netanya, 27 March 2002
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They say
Hamas is a resistance movement, and calling it terrorist is a political choice
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
This is an argument about consistency and it has real force. Occupation has produced armed movements almost everywhere it has happened, and the people who ran them were called terrorists until the day they were called presidents. The African National Congress was proscribed, Nelson Mandela stayed on a United States terrorism list until 2008, and British governments negotiated with the IRA while formally refusing to.
International law is not silent either. In 1982 the General Assembly reaffirmed the legitimacy of struggle against foreign occupation by all available means including armed struggle, and Additional Protocol I extends the law of international armed conflict to peoples fighting alien occupation.
Designation is a decision taken by states about groups they are in conflict with, which is why the lists differ by country and change when governments do. On that reading the word marks which side the speaker is on. And an advocate who applies it to one party while the other faces war crimes allegations at the ICC has chosen an asymmetry and called it a description.
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The 1988 charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by name and quotes a hadith about killing Jews. The 2017 rewrite is better drafted and never revoked it. A movement that had changed its mind had one sentence to write, and did not write it.
- 01
The Hamas Covenant of 1988 names the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and quotes a hadith about killing Jews behind stones. Not Zionists. Jews.
You never have to argue about the word terrorist. Read them their own founding text and ask which part you have got wrong.
Hamas Covenant, 1988, Articles Seven and Thirty-Two, Avalon Project, Yale
- 02
The 2017 document does not mention the 1988 Covenant, let alone revoke it. Mahmoud al-Zahar of Hamas: "The charter is the core of Hamas's position."
He went on: the mechanism of this position is the document. A movement that had changed its mind had one sentence available to it and did not write that sentence.
Mahmoud al-Zahar, quoted in Gulf News, on the 2017 document
- 03
Amnesty International documented at least 23 Palestinians extrajudicially executed by Hamas during the 2014 war, in an operation Hamas itself called Strangling Necks.
Six were shot outside the al-Omari mosque before hundreds of spectators, children among them. The people it executed are Palestinians and the documenting was done by Amnesty.
Amnesty International, Strangling Necks, MDE 21/1643/2015
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They say
Israel gets singled out. Nobody treats any other country in the world this way.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Whataboutery is a recognised fallacy, a variant of tu quoque, and a documented propaganda technique. Soviet officials were trained to answer human rights complaints by pointing at segregation in the United States, and the move has a long record of use by governments with a great deal to hide.
Somebody who hears the shape of it and reaches for the word has learned something real. Second, the pattern has innocent explanations that go a long way: reporters can work in the territory and file the same day, which was not true of Khartoum, the conflict is old enough that audiences already hold the map, former colonial powers were directly involved, and the United Nations has claimed responsibility for the question since it voted on partition in 1947.
Third and hardest, none of the counts touch the merits of anything. A body can be obsessive and still be right about a particular allegation, and an argument that reaches for Sudan in order to avoid answering a specific charge is doing precisely what the fallacy describes.
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On 27 May 2021 the UN Human Rights Council voted 24 to 9 to open an inquiry into Israel with no end date, the first commission of inquiry in its history given an open-ended mandate. Nothing Israel did that May was new. The mandate was.
- 01
The UN Human Rights Council's agenda has ten items. Item 4 covers every country on earth. Item 7 is the only one naming a place.
Item 7 is "Palestine and other occupied Arab territories". Not a campaigner's tally: it is the Council's own standing agenda, fixed by resolution 5/1 of 2007, open in a minute.
UN Human Rights Council standing agenda, resolution 5/1 of 18 June 2007
- 02
Kofi Annan said in 2006 that Israel's supporters feel it is judged by standards not applied to its enemies, and too often that's true.
In his farewell to the General Assembly, where he added, particularly in some UN bodies. The Secretary-General conceding the double standard inside his own institution, on the way out.
Kofi Annan, farewell statement to the UN General Assembly, 19 September 2006
- 03
Since 2006 the UN Human Rights Council has adopted 112 resolutions against Israel, 45 against Syria, 16 against Iran and 11 against Russia.
Twenty years, so nobody can say the year was picked. Syria's war killed 306,887 civilians on the UN's own count and drew fewer than half as many. Compiled by UN Watch, which campaigns on this. Say who counted before you are asked.
UN Watch, 2025 UNGA Resolutions on Israel vs. Rest of the World, 19 November 2025, citing its Resolution Database; UN human rights office, Syrian civilian deaths, March 2011 to March 2021
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They say
Israel has never made a serious offer of peace and has never accepted a Palestinian state
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
On Camp David their case is close to unanswerable. Robert Malley was Clinton's special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs and sat in the room, and he wrote in 2001 that "strictly speaking, there never was an Israeli offer": nothing in writing, no map, ideas conveyed orally and put as American rather than Israeli concepts, with roughly 9 per cent of the West Bank annexed against about 1 per cent returned.
Then the wider point. Settlement building never stopped. Peace Now counts about 110,000 West Bank settlers in 1993 and about 465,000 in 2023, outside East Jerusalem on both counts, and the line rises through Camp David, through Taba and through the talks that produced the Olmert proposal.
Land offered while you are settling that same land looks like a race against the clock rather than a negotiation. On 2008, Olmert himself says "Abbas never said no". And a rejected offer does not on its own establish who is responsible for a failure. Terms can be documented, serious, unprecedented and still not good enough to sign.
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Israel's cabinet voted to accept Clinton's parameters on 28 December 2000. Olmert showed Abbas a map in 2008 and no counter-map ever came back. You can argue the offers were not good enough. You cannot argue something better was tabled.
- 01
The Clinton Parameters offered a Palestinian state on 94-96 per cent of the West Bank plus all of Gaza. Both sides accepted, with reservations.
December 2000. An American proposal, not an Israeli one. The Americans who wrote it judged only Israel's reservations compatible, but carry both sets: that is the first thing you'll be asked.
The Clinton Parameters, 23 December 2000, and the Israeli cabinet vote of 28 December
- 02
Abbas described the 2008 Olmert offer: "He showed me a map. He didn't give me a map." No Palestinian counter-map ever came back.
He went on that Olmert said 'This is the map' and took it away. His own account, a complaint about method rather than the terms. Ask what the counter-proposal was.
Mahmoud Abbas, interviewed on Israel's Channel 10, broadcast 18 November 2015
- 03
In 2005 Israel removed over 8,000 of its own citizens from 25 settlements and withdrew every soldier from Gaza.
Twenty-one settlements in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank, over four weeks in 2005, against ferocious domestic opposition. Argue about what came next. You cannot argue it never happened.
The 2005 disengagement, Anti-Defamation League backgrounder
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They say
Israel is a settler colonial state. Jews are European colonisers who took somebody else's country, and Zionism is a European colonial project like any other.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 that Zionist colonisation "must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population", behind an iron wall. That is his word for his own programme. A European empire issued the Balfour Declaration, a European-dominated League of Nations wrote the Jewish national home into the Mandate, and British administration held the ring for three decades while the Jewish population grew roughly twentyfold.
The missing metropolis is thinner than it sounds, and the man who built the category said so. Patrick Wolfe's footnote 35 calls Israel "a partial exception" and in the same sentence rejects the argument that it cannot be colonial for want of one commissioning capital: the Yishuv co-opted Ottoman, British and US imperialism in turn, Rodinson's collective mother country.
And underneath it all, ancestry is beside the point. Settler colonialism is a structure, not a pedigree. What defines it is displacement and a new society built on the land base of the old one. Prove Jewish indigeneity to the last inscription and that sentence is still standing.
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Around half of Israel's Jews descend from families from Baghdad, Sana'a, Tripoli and Cairo, driven out by statute and by mob. Britain ruled Palestine until 1948 and Zionist militias fought to end it. Zionists were not settling Palestine on Britain's behalf.
- 01
Britain's 1939 White Paper capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years. Britain held that through the Holocaust, and Jewish forces fought to overturn it.
After the quota, none without Arab acquiescence. Give the date and the fighting rather than asserting a rule about metropoles. A colony does not have to defeat its metropolis to be born.
British White Paper of 1939, Avalon Project, Yale Law School
- 02
Lewin-Epstein and Cohen, working from European Social Survey data, found Israeli Jews 44.9 per cent Mizrahi against 31.8 per cent Ashkenazi.
Pew found 48 per cent Sephardi or Mizrahi against 45 per cent Ashkenazi. "Jews are European colonisers" is not a contested reading. It is a factual error about who lives there, and it can be looked up in a minute.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2018; Pew Research Center, 2016
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They say
Israel is an apartheid state
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Two legal systems have run in one territory for close to sixty years, allocated by nationality: Israeli citizens in the West Bank tried in civilian courts, Palestinians under military orders. Israeli organisations, not foreign ones, document the gap at every stage from arrest to sentencing, alongside a permit system, separate roads and a planning regime that approves almost nothing.
In July 2024 the International Court of Justice held that Israel's measures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem breach Article 3 of the racial discrimination convention, which prohibits segregation and apartheid. Judge Nolte, who would not find apartheid, still called the violations undoubted, discriminatory and disproportionate.
The sharpest part is permanence. "Temporary" carries an enormous load after fifty-nine years, and a system entrenched, expanding and showing no sign of ending starts to resemble the regime the definition names. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch both concluded the line was crossed.
And Benjamin Pogrund, who reported on apartheid for the Rand Daily Mail and refused the analogy for decades, wrote in 2023 that he no longer could.
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Salim Joubran, an Arab justice of Israel's Supreme Court, chaired the committee that supervised Israel's national elections from 2013 to 2015. Apartheid was a system for keeping the ballot box away from a man like him, not for putting him in charge of it.
- 01
Richard Goldstone, the South African judge who led the UN's Gaza inquiry, called the apartheid charge false and malicious in 2011.
Say the rest yourself, because they will. He withdrew the Gaza report's targeting finding in 2011 and his fellow commissioners stood by it. Different piece, different question, never retracted.
Richard Goldstone, Israel and the Apartheid Slander, New York Times, 31 October 2011; retraction, Washington Post, 3 April 2011; Jilani, Chinkin and Travers, the Guardian, 14 April 2011
- 02
In February 2007 Majalli Wahabi, a Druze member of the Knesset, served as acting head of state of Israel.
Apartheid means one racial group dominating another. Ask who the ruling race is meant to be.
Majalli Wahabi, acting President of Israel, 27 February 2007
- 03
Inside Israel, Arab citizens were 8% of the country's physicians in 2010 and about a quarter by 2023, alongside roughly half of its pharmacists.
No apartheid system trains the subordinate group to treat the dominant one and puts them on the same ward.
Rosen and Miaari, Israel Journal of Health Policy Research, 2025
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They say
Israel is committing genocide in Gaza
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
On 16 September 2025 the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide, finding four of the five Article II acts and holding that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference from the evidence as a whole. It has not stepped back: a further report on 23 June 2026 records children still being killed after the ceasefire, and its chair said that substantiates the finding.
Amnesty International said the same in December 2024, and so did 86 per cent of the votes cast at the International Association of Genocide Scholars in August 2025. Nor is the intent evidence all inferred. Senior ministers said things in the early weeks a reasonable listener could read as intent to destroy rather than to defeat an armed group.
And the serious version is not that scale proves intent. It is that killing, siege, starvation and the destruction of the means of life, continued after repeated warnings and binding court orders, becomes hard to explain by military necessity, and that at some point continuing it is the evidence.
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In October 2025 Israel released 250 prisoners serving life sentences in exchange for twenty living hostages. Genocide is a claim about intent, and a state intent on destroying a people does not pay that to stop.
- 01
Human Rights Watch counted 184 Israeli evacuation orders, then concluded the warning system flagrantly failed. The count is the critic's own.
Say the failure in the same breath, because a system that failed is still a system that was built. Warnings defend no strike. A state set on destroying a population has a cheaper option.
Human Rights Watch, Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged, 14 November 2024
- 02
The judge who presided over the ICJ's January 2024 order told the BBC that a plausible case of genocide "isn't what the court decided".
The most quoted thing about that case is the most misquoted. The Court found Palestinians have a plausible right to be protected, which is not a finding about Israel's conduct.
Joan Donoghue, President of the ICJ at the time of the order, BBC HARDtalk, April 2024
- 03
Israel released 250 prisoners serving life sentences and about 1,700 detainees on 13 October 2025, in exchange for the last twenty living hostages.
Say the limit in the same breath: the ceasefire has not held cleanly. A state pursuing the destruction of a people still does not negotiate an end to it and pay that price.
TIME, 13 October 2025; UN Security Council resolution 2803, 17 November 2025
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They say
Israel is doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Analogy is how political argument works. Nobody objects when a surveillance law is called Orwellian, or a strongman compared to Mussolini, and the Holocaust is taught in European schools as a warning, which means it was meant to be applied to something.
A lesson nobody is permitted to apply is not a lesson. Jews have made the comparison themselves, and not marginal ones. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Orthodox Jew and among Israel's best known philosophers, used the word Judeo-Nazi about the conduct of the occupation in 1982 and never withdrew it.
In August 2014 around 40 Holocaust survivors, more than 200 descendants and some 50 other relatives signed a letter in the New York Times using the language of genocide about Gaza. Those people are not deploying a trope against themselves, and an argument that has to call them antisemites has already broken.
And to rule one comparison alone out of bounds, while every other stays available, hands one state a protection no other state has.
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In 1942 the Germans took roughly 40,000 Jews from the ghettos to build a military road, then killed them as the road went up. No concession, no surrender, no exile: there was nothing a Jew could do to end it. This war had negotiations, and ended in one.
- 01
In 1942 the Germans took roughly 40,000 Jews from the ghettos to build a military road, then killed them as the road went up.
They destroyed the Lodz ghetto while it made goods their army needed. Yehuda Bauer's point: every other genocide had something real underneath it. This one worked against its own war.
Yehuda Bauer, Meyerhoff Lecture, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006
- 02
There were no terms. Nothing a Jew could do ended it: no concession, no surrender, no change of conduct, no exile, no negotiation on offer.
This is the feature no political conflict shares. Whatever you conclude about Gaza, that dispute has produced negotiations that happened, failed and resumed.
Yehuda Bauer, On the Holocaust and Other Genocides, 2006
- 03
Ask what the transport is. The ghetto was a holding pen with one exit and the exit was the train.
Better asked than asserted. Where there is no answer, the word has been borrowed rather than used.
Lesley Klaff on Holocaust inversion, Fathom, 2014
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They say
Israel is ethnically cleansing Palestinians. Gaza, the West Bank, it is happening right now and the world is watching it happen.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Nearly two million of Gaza's 2.2 million people were displaced, most of them repeatedly, into space that kept shrinking. The army did not leave when the fighting stopped. It holds the ground behind the yellow line, which OCHA figures put at 64.9 per cent of the Strip by June 2026 against about 53 per cent at the ceasefire, so the line has moved forward and the people whose homes are behind it cannot reach them.
Demolition continued afterwards, the New York Times counting more than 2,500 buildings razed. In the northern West Bank, Operation Iron Wall emptied the camps at Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur Shams and El Far'a from 21 January 2025, displacing 40,000 registered refugees, and Human Rights Watch called it the crime against humanity of forcible transfer.
The intention was said out loud: the Finance Minister told a settler conference on 26 November 2024 that Gaza's population could be halved in two years. And the deepest version needs no deportation order. Destroy the homes, hold the ground, and you achieve removal without signing anything.
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In the first month of the October 2025 ceasefire the UN counted nearly 600,000 movements north inside Gaza, most along a single road, people walking back to what was left. Cleansing is a claim about where people end up. Ruined is not removed.
- 01
In August 2005 Israel removed 21 settlements from Gaza and more than 8,000 of its own Jewish residents, in a week.
A state clearing a territory of one people does not start by clearing it of its own. Say "Jewish residents" and not "residents", or in a Gaza context it will be misheard.
Anti-Defamation League backgrounder on the 2005 disengagement
- 02
The Palestinians' own statistics office puts Gaza's population at 2.13 million at the end of 2025, with about 100,000 having left the Strip.
Cleansing is a claim about where people are. Carry the scope: the same brief records 70,942 killed, which is a different charge and answered on a different page.
Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, brief on the status of the Palestinian people at the end of 2025
- 03
The framework that ended the fighting states that no one will be forced to leave Gaza, and that Israel will not occupy or annex it.
Say the limit in the same breath. The army did not leave. It holds ground behind the yellow line, which OCHA figures put at about 65 per cent of the Strip by June 2026.
The twenty-point proposal published 29 September 2025, points 12 and 16
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They say
Israel is not interested in peace, has never given up anything for it, and only understands force
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Peace with a state is a different problem from peace with a stateless people. Egypt and Jordan had governments, armies and borders, so a deal existed and Israel did it. The Palestinians have none of that, and they are asking for the one commodity Israel has never agreed to part with, control of the land between the river and the sea.
The treaties prove Israel will trade territory it does not want to a counterparty who can guarantee a border. They do not prove it will trade territory it does want to a counterparty who cannot. Both left the core dispute untouched, and settlement building continued through every year of every agreement.
The Abraham Accords make that worse: four states that had lost nothing to Israel normalised relations, paid for by Washington in weapons, recognition and sanctions relief. If Washington can buy Arab recognition, the pressure to settle with the Palestinians falls away. And the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative offered normalisation by every Arab state in exchange for withdrawal. Israel did not take it up.
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Israel agreed to return the whole Sinai in 1979 and completed the withdrawal in 1982: land two and a half times its own size, with the settlements, the airbases and the oil. Two treaties signed, two still standing. What else is a state supposed to pay?
- 01
Israel agreed to return the whole Sinai in 1979 and completed the withdrawal in 1982: land two and a half times its own size, with the airfields and the oil.
Intentions can be denied. A signed treaty and a map cannot, and almost nobody in the room knows how much larger Sinai is than Israel.
Egypt-Israel Treaty of Peace, 1979; World Encyclopedia and World Bank areas
- 02
The Arab League summit at Khartoum in 1967 produced the three noes: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.
The claim that one side understands only force is the same proposition with the parties reversed, and it survives because nobody recalls Khartoum.
Fourth Arab League Summit, Khartoum resolution, September 1967
- 03
Fourteen Israeli civilian communities had been built in Sinai. All were removed in 1982, 1,400 settler families evacuated from Yamit and the buildings demolished.
Two airbases were rebuilt inside the Negev and the Gulf of Suez oil fields handed over. Not empty desert and not free: the United States had to guarantee Israel's oil supply first.
The Yamit evacuation, 1982; Washington Institute costing of the withdrawal
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They say
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, the only Jewish state, the only country in the region with a pride parade, and the only place Jews can go when it happens again.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
A superlative is a rhetorical device, not an argument. Nothing follows from being the only one of something, and a speaker who reaches for "only" four times in a minute is performing rather than reasoning. On democracy the word is doing work the speaker has not earned.
A state that has administered several million people under military law for close to sixty years, people with no vote for the parliament that decides their movement, their water and their land, is not straightforwardly described by the word its supporters want.
Comparative indices measure the citizens inside the line and say so in their own methodology. On gay rights the objection is relevance: nobody in the dispute over the West Bank has raised the treatment of gay people as a reason for anything, and it enters only when an advocate needs a favourable comparison.
And being freer than Saudi Arabia is a bar chosen by the person quoting it. A case that needs those neighbours to work is a weak case in a confident voice.
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Pew found Israel the only country on earth where Jews are more than two per cent of the population. On 14 December 2025 seven of its justices unanimously overturned the government's sacking of the attorney general, and the prime minister complied.
- 01
Freedom House 2026 rates Israel 73 out of 100, status Free, against Tunisia on 42. It scores the West Bank 22 and Gaza 2 separately.
Freedom House says Israel's score excludes what its army and settlers do in the territories. That is the claim you're making: the constitutional order inside the line. The occupation is a different argument.
Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2026: Israel 73, West Bank 22, Gaza 2
- 02
The Human Dignity Trust lists 19 Middle East and North Africa jurisdictions that criminalise consensual same-sex intimacy. Israel is not on the map.
In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the UAE the death penalty is imposed or available. A fact about statute books, not attitudes, so it cannot be answered with a counter-anecdote about Tel Aviv.
Human Dignity Trust, map of jurisdictions that criminalise LGBT people
- 03
In 1938 delegates from 32 countries met at Evian on Jewish refugees from Germany. Other than the Dominican Republic, none would take more.
The St Louis sailed the next May with 937 passengers and was turned away by Cuba and the United States. It turns the Law of Return from a sentiment into an answer to a documented problem.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, on Evian and the voyage of the St Louis
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They say
Israel only exists because America pays for it. Why are we sending billions of our money to a foreign country?
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Israel has received more American assistance than any other country since the Second World War, $174 billion by the Congressional Research Service's own count, and it still draws around $3.8 billion a year while American voters are told there is no money for things at home.
The aid is not ceremonial. It underwrites the qualitative military edge, a formal object of United States policy since 1973, and it buys airframes, interceptors and munitions that Israel does not make and in some cases cannot make. Cash flow financing lets Israel sign contracts against appropriations Congress has not passed yet, a benefit almost nobody else has.
On top of that sits diplomatic cover: dozens of American vetoes at the Security Council, and a standing commitment renewed by administrations of both parties. A country that needed none of this would not have negotiated a ten-year guarantee of it. And a citizen of a republic is entitled to ask what the return is, about this recipient and every other one, without being told the question is disreputable.
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Israel fought the 1948 war under an American arms embargo, with Czech rifles. Grant aid at scale starts in December 1973, when the state was twenty-five years old. It is now 14 per cent of the defence budget, and most of it is spent with American firms.
- 01
Of the $3.3 billion in grant aid for 2025, Israel may spend $450.3 million in Israel. The rest buys American. By 2028, all of it.
It is a line in an appropriations act, section 11206(1), not an estimate. Real money is still appropriated. What it is not is money leaving the country.
Congressional Research Service, U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel, RL33222, 28 May 2025, on P.L. 119-4 and the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding
- 02
Annual American grant aid is about 14 per cent of Israel's defence budget, and under one per cent of its economy.
Fourteen per cent is a subsidy and worth arguing about. Say the word yourself. It is not a life support machine, and the other 86 per cent is Israeli money.
Congressional Research Service, RL33222, citing Jane's Defence Budget, April 2025; Israeli GDP from World Bank Open Data
- 03
In 1948 America embargoed weapons to every side. Israel fought that war with Czech rifles, and France armed it until de Gaulle cut it off.
American grant aid at scale starts with the emergency act of December 1973. The state was twenty-five years old. The dates are the answer to "only exists because".
US State Department Office of the Historian on the 1948 arms embargo; Congressional Research Service RL33222 on P.L. 93-199 of 26 December 1973
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They say
Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan in 1967. That is where the occupation comes from. Land taken by war, and held ever since.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Israel fired the first shot, on the morning of 5 June 1967, and no amount of context changes who opened fire. The prohibition on acquiring territory by war carries no defensive exception on its face. Resolution 242 opens by emphasising the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war without pausing to ask who started it, and on 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice held, by eleven votes to four, that Israel's continued presence in the occupied territory is unlawful and must end as rapidly as possible.
Fifty-nine years is not a temporary occupation, and an argument built on the emergency of June 1967 weakens every year it is used to explain 2026. And the one that actually bites: the absence of a Palestinian state before 1967 creates no right to govern the people living there.
Jordan's annexation being unrecognised transfers nothing to Israel, and three million people do not lose their claim to self-government because the previous administration was also illegitimate.
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Three months after the 1967 war the Arab League met at Khartoum: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation. When Egypt later offered all three, Israel returned every inch of Sinai.
- 01
Israel warned in 1957 that closing the Straits of Tiran would be an attack. Egypt closed them in 1967. Israel struck thirteen days later.
The 1957 warning was given to the UN General Assembly. It turns the first shot into the announced consequence of an announced act. Nobody can say Israel invented the trigger afterwards.
Statement of Foreign Minister Golda Meir, 1 March 1957, quoted in Foreign Relations of the United States 1964-1968, volume XIX, document 131
- 02
Ten days before Israel fired, Nasser said: "The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel."
Said to Arab trade unionists on 26 May 1967, in the same speech that boasted Egypt could expel the UN force within half an hour. The intent is on the record, in his own voice, before the war.
Statement by President Nasser to Arab Trade Unionists, 26 May 1967, Jewish Virtual Library
- 03
Jordan barred Jews from the Western Wall from 1948 to 1967. Since 1967 the Jordanian Waqf has administered Al-Aqsa and Muslims have prayed there.
An Israeli committee found in 1967 that 56 of the Jewish Quarter's 58 synagogues had been destroyed. Checkable in both directions, which is what makes it hold.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, report of an Israeli inter-ministerial committee, 2 November 1967
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They say
Israel used starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
This is the one charge that was actually brought. On 21 November 2024 the International Criminal Court issued warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, finding reasonable grounds to believe they intentionally deprived Gaza's civilians of objects indispensable to survival. It is the first use of that charge in the court's history.
And the case on intent does not rest on inference, because the government published it twice. Gallant announced a complete siege on 9 October 2023 in his own voice: no electricity, no fuel, everything closed. On 2 March 2025 the Prime Minister's Office announced that all entry of goods would cease, and tied it to Hamas's refusal of a negotiating framework.
Aid stayed off for eleven weeks. Writing for West Point's Lieber Institute, Rob McLaughlin argues that conditioning a total cut-off on a negotiating outcome cannot be a lawful precaution, because it hits the whole civilian population rather than Hamas. On 22 August 2025 the IPC confirmed Famine in Gaza Governorate, all three thresholds met.
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The UN-backed famine committee put the finding on in March 2024, took it off that June, put it on in August 2025 and took it off that December. It came off both times because more food got in. You do not reverse your own war aim.
- 01
Four IPC famine findings in twenty months: projected in March 2024, not found that June, confirmed in August 2025, lifted that December.
Each one tracked how much food got in. Say the whole sequence or none of it: anyone who quotes one point is handed the next one.
IPC Famine Review Committee, Gaza Strip, 25 June 2024, 22 August 2025 and December 2025
- 02
Over the same ceasefire weeks in 2025, COGAT counted 459 aid trucks a day entering Gaza and the UN counted 113 offloaded at the crossings.
Quote either number without the other and a briefed opponent ends the exchange. Quote both and you are the person in the room who knows how the counting works.
Associated Press analysis of COGAT figures and UN data, 12 October to 7 December 2025
- 03
Article 54(2) of Additional Protocol I bars removing objects indispensable to survival "for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value".
The ICC Elements of Crimes likewise require intent to starve civilians as a method of warfare. Purpose is the whole crime, and the treaty says so in four words.
Additional Protocol I, 1977, Article 54(2); ICC Elements of Crimes, Article 8(2)(b)(xxv)
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They say
Israel was built on ethnic cleansing. The Nakba wasn't a war, it was a plan, and the state was born in a crime.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Around 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes between 1947 and 1949. More than 400 villages were emptied, many of them levelled. Benny Morris, working from Israeli military records, counted about two dozen massacres by Jewish forces, including between 100 and 110 killed at Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948, and Yitzhak Rabin signed the expulsion order for Lydda.
Morris found no written order from Ben-Gurion and no comprehensive policy, and in the same archives he found an atmosphere of transfer, called Ben-Gurion a transferist, and told Haaretz in 2004 that a Jewish state could not have come into being without uprooting 700,000 Palestinians, which in his view made it necessary.
Then the half that needs no intent at all. When the fighting stopped Israel did not let the refugees home, and has not since, though the General Assembly resolved in December 1948 that those wishing to return and live at peace should be permitted to.
A state that keeps the demographic result of a displacement it did not entirely plan is still living off it.
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The word Nakba was put into circulation in Beirut on 5 August 1948, by an Arab professor writing about Arab failure. Seven states declared war on Zionism, he wrote, stopped impotent before it, and turned on their heels. He was naming a defeat.
- 01
Benny Morris, who documented the 1948 massacres from Israeli army archives, wrote that the Yishuv had no "master plan for expelling the Arabs".
He added that its leaders never adopted one either, and in the same revised edition he reported more expulsions than he first found. Quote him whole, or the other half gets read back to you.
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1987
- 02
The Jewish Agency accepted partition in 1947. The Arab League called it "not susceptible of execution by peaceful means", and four armies crossed.
15 May 1948, and regular armies rather than militias. Not an interpretation either: a cable with a UN document number, written by the side that says it was given no choice.
Arab League cablegram to the UN Secretary-General, UN document S/745, 15 May 1948
- 03
Around 150,000 Arabs remained inside the armistice lines and became citizens. Their descendants are about two million today, more than a fifth of Israel's population.
Say the military government yourself: permits and curfews until 1966. It ended, in equal citizenship. Their descendants vote and sit on the Supreme Court. Ethnic cleansing means you are not there.
Council on Foreign Relations, on the Arab citizens of Israel
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They say
Israel's response is disproportionate
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
A test that turns on the target, the intelligence, the munition and the alternatives can only ever be applied by the party holding the file. A rule whose application is controlled by the actor it constrains is close to unfalsifiable in practice.
International bodies have not treated it as unknowable either: the UN Human Rights Office examined six specific Israeli attacks in late 2023 and concluded that distinction, proportionality and precautions may have been systematically violated. And the ICTY in Kupreskic went further than the treaty text in January 2000, suggesting that where attacks are repeated, all or most in the grey area between indisputable legality and unlawfulness, their cumulative effect might warrant concluding they are not in keeping with international law.
A court pointing the other way on the per-strike rule, and an advocate who has not heard of it will be shown it. And if only the commander can ever know, nothing is answerable, and an audience is right to hear a position built to be immune from evidence.
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Allied air forces killed perhaps 60,000 French civilians while liberating France, and one night over Tokyo in March 1945 killed an estimated 110,000. If a ratio settled it, no war anybody calls just would pass.
- 01
In law, proportionality asks whether the civilian harm a commander expected was excessive against the military advantage anticipated. The enemy's dead aren't on the scale.
It applies strike by strike, on what was known at the time. The person using the word is making a moral point with a legal term and has not noticed.
Additional Protocol I, Article 51(5)(b), 8 June 1977
- 02
The legal standard for what counts as excessive is the reasonable military commander, set out by an ICTY committee reviewing NATO's bombing in 2000.
The committee added that a human rights lawyer and an experienced combat commander are unlikely to assign the same values. It answers who decides what counts as excessive.
ICTY, Final Report to the Prosecutor on the NATO Bombing Campaign, 13 June 2000, paragraph 50
- 03
The law changed in 1977, so this is not a legal argument: Allied air forces killed perhaps 60,000 French civilians while liberating France.
Not a defence of Israel. One night over Tokyo in March 1945 killed an estimated 110,000. It tests whether the standard being applied is one anybody has ever applied to themselves.
Dodd and Knapp, French History, 2008; The National WWII Museum on Operation Meetinghouse
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They say
It's a joke, you just have no sense of humour
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Taking offence at jokes is a real and tiresome feature of public life, and the person in front of you may have watched comedians lose work over a routine and concluded that the complaint is the problem. That is not a fantasy.
A rule that treated dark humour as evidence of extremism would condemn an enormous amount of ordinary comedy, most of it made by people with no politics attached, and Jewish comedy has traded in exactly this material for a century. Plenty of young men repeating these lines hold no worked-out ideology whatsoever.
They have absorbed a register from a feed and are performing it for friends, and treating them as recruits to a movement is both wrong and self-fulfilling. And the last part is the sharpest: a heavy, wounded, procedural response to a joke is precisely the reaction the tactic is built to produce.
It looks bad every time, it is the clip that travels, and anyone advising you to produce it is advising you to lose in public.
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In December 2017 a 17-page style guide for the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer leaked. It orders writers to keep the tone light so outsiders cannot tell whether they mean it. The deniability is not a by-product of the joke. It is the job of the joke.
- 01
The Daily Stormer's leaked style guide tells its neo-Nazi writers to keep the tone light, so the unindoctrinated can't tell whether they're joking.
Seventeen pages, leaked to HuffPost in 2017. The tactic written down as house policy by the people using it, rather than inferred by their critics. Very hard to argue with a document.
Ashley Feinberg, HuffPost, 13 December 2017, on Andrew Anglin's leaked style guide
- 02
At a Charlie Kirk event at Ohio State in 2019, 11 of the 14 audience questions came from followers of Nick Fuentes.
One agreed warmly, then asked the panel to look up a phrase indexing a 9/11 conspiracy theory about Israelis. The ambush is organised and countable, so a chair can plan for it.
Ico Maly, Tilburg University, in Diggit Magazine, 31 October 2019
- 03
Bellingcat studied the radicalisation accounts of 75 fascist activists and found humour repeatedly named as the entry point.
One described ironic memes as getting used to the temperature before going in. Irony is not the wrapping on the belief. In the accounts of the people it worked on, it is the door.
Robert Evans, Bellingcat, 11 October 2018
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They say
Jews are deliberately engineering the demographic replacement of white or European populations through immigration
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Demographic change in Europe and North America over the past sixty years is real, measurable and published by the statistical agencies of the countries concerned. People are entitled to notice it, to dislike it and to vote against it, and being told that noticing it is a conspiracy theory is both false and infuriating.
Nor is naming an individual by itself paranoid. There are foundations and philanthropists who fund migration advocacy openly, publish their grant lists and say in their own words that they want more open borders. Pointing at a published grant is not the same activity as inventing a secret cabal, and treating the two identically discredits the person who does it.
And there is a real grievance underneath. The charge of antisemitism has been used, by people who knew what they were doing, to make immigration policy undiscussable and to place particular donors above the scrutiny anybody else in their position would attract.
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Objecting to immigration numbers is not antisemitism. Explaining them with a hidden Jewish hand is. One is an argument about policy, which you can win or lose. The other needs a plot, and a plot needs a plotter.
- 01
The Nazi Party newspaper invented the reading of Coudenhove-Kalergi as architect of a replacement plan in 1940. Hitler had attacked him by name in 1928.
His wife was a Jewish actress; he fled Austria in 1938 and France in 1940. The man now named as author of the plot was denounced by Hitler and running from him. Checkable in an afternoon.
Historians Roland Clark and Nikolaus Hagen, cited in PolitiFact, 24 January 2022
- 02
The Tree of Life attacker posted, minutes before killing 11, that a Jewish refugee charity "likes to bring invaders in that kill our people".
It shows what the demographic version is for. The target was not a border or a government. It was a congregation at prayer.
Pittsburgh, 27 October 2018; Anti-Defamation League backgrounder on the great replacement, 2021
- 03
Between 2018 and 2022 killers in Pittsburgh, Christchurch, Poway, El Paso, Halle and Buffalo named the theory. The Christchurch manifesto was titled The Great Replacement.
Say it once, without adjectives. Six sets of funerals inside four years is the argument.
Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center backgrounders, 2021 and 2022
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They say
Jews are white and privileged, so antisemitism is not real racism
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Many Ashkenazi Jews in Western countries are integrated, prosperous and safe from the specific things that make a person's life harder every day: the stop, the sifted CV, the landlord who has suddenly let the flat. Calling that group marginalised strains the ordinary meaning of the word, and a movement that stretches words until they cover the comfortable ends up unable to describe the people who are not.
There is a second point and it is also true. The charge of antisemitism is sometimes made in bad faith, by people who know exactly what they are doing, to place a political position beyond argument. And a third, which is the strongest of the lot.
Competing claims of victimhood between minority groups are corrosive, they are actively cultivated by people who benefit from both groups being weaker, and they should be refused on all sides rather than won.
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The global index of antisemitic attitudes puts eleven statements to adults in 103 countries. Five ask whether Jews have too much power. None asks whether Jews are inferior. A model that finds racism by looking at who is at the bottom cannot see this one.
- 01
Almost nine per cent of Jewish children in Britain, over 4,300, live in households where no adult is in work.
Prosperous is a generalisation, and it is not true of the Charedi communities. Say it before they do, because a claim about a whole people falls to one street in it.
Institute for Jewish Policy Research, Child poverty and deprivation in the British Jewish community
- 02
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 defined a Jew by descent: three or four Jewish grandparents. Belief, practice and baptism were irrelevant to the test.
The people who wanted Jews dead wrote down that they were not white. Whiteness was granted late and has been withdrawn before.
The Nuremberg Race Laws, 15 September 1935, US Holocaust Memorial Museum
- 03
The global index of antisemitic attitudes asks eleven questions. Five ask whether Jews have too much power or control. None asks whether Jews are inferior.
The instrument built to measure this prejudice had to be built upside down, by the people who measure it. That is the answer to a model that finds racism by looking for the group placed at the bottom.
ADL Global 100 index of antisemitism, eleven-statement index; 2024 wave, over 58,000 adults in 103 countries and territories
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They say
Jews aren't really from there. Ashkenazi Jews are European converts, descended from the Khazars, and the DNA proves it.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
The Khazar hypothesis has a real academic pedigree. A Hebrew University historian argued it in 1944, a serious writer took it to a mass readership in 1976, and a geneticist published a peer-reviewed paper for it in 2013. The underlying history is not disputed.
A steppe empire north of the Caucasus existed, its ruling class is widely held to have adopted Judaism, and Judaism has always absorbed converts. Then the part that bites. The genetics does not say what advocates say it says. Ashkenazi genomes carry very substantial European ancestry, on the best estimates about half, the maternal lineages are argued to be overwhelmingly European, and the admixture is dated to Europe rather than the Levant.
Anyone answering "we are genetically Middle Eastern" is overstating a contested literature. And the last part deserves respect, not rebuttal. The whole exchange treats ancestry as a title deed. No legal system accepts descent as a source of political right, and a people that wins this argument on blood has agreed to fight on ground its enemies chose.
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In 2013 a genome study compared 1,774 people from 106 populations, 261 of them from the Caucasus. Ashkenazi Jews came out closest to other Jews, not to anyone in the Caucasus. They looked, with the samples to find it, and it is not in the data.
- 01
The 2013 Khazar paper used Armenians and Georgians as proxies for Khazars. No population is known to descend from Khazars.
It is the specific objection thirty geneticists made in print. It concedes nothing about whether the Khazars existed, which is why it holds.
Behar and others, No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews, Human Biology 85(6), 2013
- 02
The paper putting most Ashkenazi maternal lines in prehistoric Europe found almost none from the North Caucasus, and Near Eastern paternal ancestry.
It is their own best source, read properly. Concede the European maternal finding in the same breath and the concession is what makes it land.
Costa and others, A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages, Nature Communications 4, 2013
- 03
Thirty-three Jews buried at Erfurt in the 1300s were sequenced. Middle Eastern, southern European, eastern European. Modern Ashkenazi Jews are their close match.
Ancient DNA, not inference from living people. The three sources are stated openly, so nobody can accuse you of hiding the European half.
Waldman and others, Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews, Cell 185(25), 30 November 2022
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They say
Jews control the media, the banks and world events
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Some individuals really are enormously influential, and a philanthropist who funds political causes in dozens of countries has bought himself scrutiny in the same way any other donor has. Concentration of media ownership is a real and serious subject, studied by people with no interest in Jews whatsoever, and somebody who raises it is usually asking about competition and accountability.
Lobbying, donor influence and the revolving door between finance and government are legitimate objects of investigation everywhere. And there is a fair complaint attached to all of it: the charge of antisemitism is sometimes deployed, by people who know exactly what they are doing, to place a wealthy or powerful individual beyond the ordinary criticism anybody else in that position would face.
An answer that cannot tell those arguments apart from a conspiracy theory will be caught out, and deserves to be.
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In August 1921 The Times of London printed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion beside the 1864 French satire it was copied from. A court in Berne found the same in 1935. A claim that outlives its own exposure by a century is not being held for evidence.
- 01
In 1921 The Times of London printed the Protocols side by side with Maurice Joly's 1864 French satire, which contains no Jewish content.
A Swiss court in Berne found the same in 1935. A claim that outlives its own refutation by a hundred years is not being held for evidential reasons.
Philip Graves, The Times of London, August 1921; Berne trial, 1935
- 02
Medieval Christendom barred Jews from land, farming and the guilds, while the Third Lateran Council of 1179 denied notorious usurers communion and Christian burial.
The stereotype about Jews and money is the residue of a ban. People were pushed into lending, resented for it, and expelled over it.
Rowan Dorin, No Return, Princeton University Press, 2023
- 03
In 2017 Hungary's government covered the country in posters of one elderly Jewish financier. The Hungarian Jewish community asked it to stop.
Then run the test. Put the word Jews where the poster had Soros and ask whether the meaning changes. The people it was aimed at could read it without the substitution.
World Jewish Congress, Hungarian Jewish community urges government to halt anti-Soros poster campaign, 6 July 2017; Anti-Defamation League, The Antisemitism Lurking Behind George Soros Conspiracy Theories, 11 October 2018
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They say
Jews don't need a country of their own. A state built around one nationality is an anachronism, and Jews are safer as equal citizens of liberal democracies. The case for Israel is an argument from suffering.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Ethnic nationalism has a poor record: the twentieth century produced its states by sorting populations, done to people living where they always had, in Anatolia, the Punjab, central Europe. A principle dozens invoked is not thereby a good one, and pointing at the others defends the crowd, not the case.
The bill for settling the Jewish claim fell on a population with no part in European antisemitism, most of whom had never seen Europe. Over 700,000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948 and have not been allowed back. A state founded to end one people's insecurity has produced insecurity for another, and the people whose safety it was built for now live in the country where they are likeliest to be killed for being Jewish.
The diaspora argument is Jewish and old. Jewish life without sovereignty produced most of what anybody means by Judaism. The Pittsburgh rabbis and the Bundists in Vilna were not self-haters. They held that tying all Jewish security to one small, permanently contested piece of ground concentrates risk rather than dispersing it.
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On two days in May 1991 Israel flew more than 14,300 Ethiopian Jews out of Addis Ababa, in thirty-six hours, on thirty-five aircraft. That is what sovereignty is for. Name me the other country that was going to do it.
- 01
When the UN was founded, some 750 million people lived in dependent territories. More than 80 former colonies have become independent states since 1945.
Close to a third of the world. Nobody asks a Slovak to justify Slovakia. Somebody is proposing that one people out of the dozens hand the right back alone. Ask why that one.
United Nations, Decolonization, Global Issues
- 02
Jews were expelled from England 1290, France 1306 and 1394, Spain 1492, Portugal 1497, Prague in the 1740s, Moscow 1891.
Different centuries, different continents, Christian rulers and Muslim ones. Read together it is a condition rather than a run of bad luck.
Record of expulsions, from Rome in 139 BCE to the First World War
- 03
On 24 and 25 May 1991, Operation Solomon flew more than 14,300 Ethiopian Jews out of Addis Ababa within 36 hours, on 35 aircraft.
Name the other country that was going to do that. It is what sovereignty is for, stated as an event rather than as a principle.
Operation Solomon, the Jewish Agency for Israel, May 1991
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They say
Jews have no ancient connection to the land. The connection is a modern invention, a nineteenth-century nationalist story retrofitted onto a religion.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
The prayers prove the wrong thing. Continuity of religious longing is not continuity of a national claim, and the tradition drew that line: in the liturgy the return is something God does at the end of days, not something a movement does with a bank and a rifle.
The Talmud at Ketubot 111a records an oath that the Jews should not ascend to the land en masse, read for centuries as forbidding what happened after 1882. Rabbinic opposition to Zionism stood there, and some still does. The continuous presence was small, a few thousand in a country of several hundred thousand, and a minority's continuity does not found a majority state.
Palestinians have their own continuity in the same land, so proving the Jewish one settles nothing. The strongest form concedes the archaeology and the siddur entirely, and says what was new in the nineteenth century was turning an orientation in prayer into a state with a border and an army. That is real, it is dated, and it is the thing being argued about.
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The Mishnah, the first code of rabbinic law, was compiled about 200 CE and already fixes an annual fast for the destruction of Jerusalem. That is seventeen centuries before the first Zionist congress, and the fast has been kept every year since.
- 01
The word Jew is the word Judea. Hebrew Yehudi, of the kingdom of Judah, through Greek and Latin into English by about the year 1000.
The people are named after the place, and have been for two and a half thousand years. That is a fact about the word and not a claim to the deed, and the charge was invention.
Britannica, Jew: derived through the Latin Judaeus and the Greek Ioudaios from the Hebrew Yehudhi; in English from about the year 1000
- 02
Jewish law fixed the direction of prayer before 250 CE: outside the land you face the land, inside it Jerusalem. Practice, not property.
It is a dated compass rather than a feeling, and every synagogue since is built on it. Say what it proves and stop there.
Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 30a, citing a Tosefta; Mishnah Berakhot 4:5 to 4:6, on Sefaria
- 03
In 1267 Nachmanides found two Jews in Jerusalem, brothers who dyed cloth, and had a synagogue running within weeks. The low point, not zero.
Say it before they do. Conceding how small the community got is what makes the claim that it never ended believable.
Letter of Nahmanides from Jerusalem, 1267, Center for Online Judaic Studies
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They say
Jews here are more loyal to Israel than to the country they live in
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Organisations do exist that advocate for the interests of a foreign state, some of them say so openly in their own published material, and they raise money, brief politicians and are paid to change policy. Asking who funds an organisation, who it meets and whose position it advances is ordinary democratic scrutiny, applied to advocates for every country on earth.
If that question becomes unaskable the moment the state involved is Israel, then one subject has been placed beyond debate, and placing subjects beyond debate is corrosive whoever benefits. Anyone who answers a funding question by reaching for the word trope is confirming exactly the suspicion.
That argument is correct as far as it goes, and it goes no distance at all towards a claim about what any individual person is loyal to.
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In 1806 Napoleon put twelve questions to an assembly of French Jews. The sixth asked whether Jews born in France regarded France as their country. There was no Israel for another 142 years. The suspicion has only ever needed a Jew, not a country.
- 01
In 1806 Napoleon put twelve questions to an Assembly of Jewish Notables. The sixth asked whether Jews born in France regarded France as their country.
That is this accusation intact, 142 years before there was an Israel to be loyal to. The country in it keeps changing.
Napoleon's twelve questions to the Assembly of Jewish Notables, Paris, 1806
- 02
International IDEA counted 216 countries and territories in 2018 and found 151 with a legal framework for voting from abroad.
Applied as a general rule, the suspicion makes a suspect of a large share of every country that ever received migrants. Ask for the rule.
International IDEA, out-of-country voting, 2018
- 03
Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, wrote that during his 2024 vice-presidential vetting he was asked whether he'd ever been an agent of the Israeli government.
It happened inside a professional process run by people who would be appalled to be called bigots. This arrives politely more often than it arrives as abuse.
Josh Shapiro, memoir of the 2024 vetting, reported January 2026
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They say
Jews here should answer for what Israel does
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
This is not usually a claim that Jews are collectively guilty of anything. It is an argument about institutions and stated positions: if a communal organisation publicly supports a government's actions, or an individual says they support them, then asking that organisation or that person to defend the position they have actually taken is legitimate, and calling the question bigoted would insulate any political stance from challenge simply because the person holding it is Jewish.
That version is correct and worth conceding immediately. The disagreement is not about whether stated positions can be challenged. It is about the slide from "you said this" to "your community must account for this" to "you must denounce it before I will treat you normally", and about who gets asked.
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No British Catholic is asked to account for Italy, and nobody has ever thought to. The demand gets made of Jews, about one state, and the answer is checked. That makes it a test of Jews rather than a question about Israel.
- 01
The IHRA definition and the Jerusalem Declaration disagree about a great deal. Both call holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel's actions antisemitic.
You can cite the more restrictive of the two, the one written by critics of the other, and still be on solid ground.
IHRA working definition of antisemitism, adopted 26 May 2016, example 9; Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, March 2021, guideline 9
- 02
The Community Security Trust has recorded antisemitic incidents in Britain rising with every round of fighting in Israel and Gaza, for twenty years.
That is what collective responsibility looks like when it lands. Then ask who else here was asked to answer for a foreign government, and what happens to the one who declines.
Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Reports, annual series
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They say
Name one thing Israel did in Gaza that shows the slightest regard for civilian life.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Human Rights Watch collected 184 Israeli evacuation orders and then took them apart: orders that contradicted one another, orders issued during telecommunications blackouts when nobody could read them, an online map that needed electricity in a place with none, and areas people were sent to that were struck afterwards.
A warning with no survivable destination is a thin sort of precaution, and HRW concluded the system flagrantly failed. The polio pause covered twelve days of a war measured in years, came under enormous pressure, and concerned an outbreak that threatened Israelis too.
The deepest version also disciplines our side: mitigation is not compliance. A belligerent can issue warnings, run pauses and still commit thousands of unlawful attacks, because none of those measures is the legal test for any of them. The ICC issued warrants in November 2024 for starvation as a method of warfare and for intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.
An affirmative case that selects the strongest facts is doing what advocates do. It is not an account of the war.
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Israel paused the fighting nine hours a day, area by area, for twelve days so the WHO could vaccinate half a million Gazan children. That is a WHO report, not an Israeli one. An army that does not care has a cheaper option than that, every single time.
- 01
The World Health Organization vaccinated 558,963 children in Gaza in twelve days of September 2024, under area-specific pauses of nine hours a day.
It is a WHO operational report, not an Israeli claim, from an agency that has spent the war criticising Israel. It shows what was agreed to, not what was said.
World Health Organization, Gaza polio campaign, 1 to 12 September 2024
- 02
Human Rights Watch collected 184 Israeli evacuation orders issued between October 2023 and August 2024, by leaflet, SMS, phone call, radio and drone loudspeaker.
The count comes from the prosecution. HRW's case is that the warnings failed, which concedes that a system of warnings was built and used, and that is the only thing you need it for.
Human Rights Watch, Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged, 14 November 2024
- 03
In Mosul the Associated Press found 9,000 to 11,000 civilians killed. The US-led coalition acknowledged 326. Official counts run low by an order of magnitude.
That is all it establishes. It sets no benchmark and no ratio, and saying the limit yourself is what stops it being used against you thirty seconds later.
Amnesty International on the Associated Press findings for Mosul, 20 December 2017
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They say
That is religion, not racism. Khaybar is history, Al-Aqsa is being stormed, and the Jews did reject Christ.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Anger about Al-Aqsa is not conjured out of theology. Israeli police have entered the mosque itself, in riot gear, during Ramadan, and the pictures are real. The rules on Jewish prayer at the compound have been loosened by an Israeli government whose national security minister campaigns openly for that change.
Somebody who says the arrangement is being altered is describing something that is happening, and telling them it is a religious fantasy is both wrong and self-defeating. Second, Christian antisemitism has been formally repudiated by the churches that carried it, in some cases sixty years ago, and raising it now against a Christian who has never taught any of it looks like dredging for a weapon.
Third, the whole category can be abused. If any religious criticism of Israel can be reclassified as theological antisemitism, imams and priests lose the ability to say anything about a war, and the label ends up doing exactly what its critics say it does.
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On 28 October 1965 the Catholic Church declared that the death of Christ cannot be charged against the Jews of that time or of today. Centuries of teaching, gone in a paragraph. What a church can repeal was never a fact about God. It was a claim about Jews.
- 01
The Al-Aqsa compound is run day to day by the Jordanian-funded Islamic Waqf. Israel holds security responsibility and controls entry. That division dates from 1967.
The Waqf employs around 900 people. Almost nobody arguing about the site, on either side, can say who actually runs it. Being the person in the room who can changes the argument.
The Times of Israel, on the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf and its Jordanian funding
- 02
The Second Vatican Council declared in 1965 that Christ's passion cannot be charged against all the Jews then alive, nor against the Jews of today.
The answer to a Christian making the deicide argument is usually his own church, in a published document, sixty years ago. It is not your opinion against his faith.
Nostra Aetate, section 4, Second Vatican Council, 28 October 1965
- 03
Article Seven of the Hamas covenant quotes a hadith where stones call out that a Jew hides behind them, so he can be killed.
It settles whether a movement's hostility is political grievance or theology, and you have not had to assert anything. The document does it.
Hamas Covenant 1988, Article Seven, Avalon Project, Yale Law School
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They say
That's pinkwashing. Israel promotes its LGBT rights record to distract from what it does to Palestinians.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
States do use rights records instrumentally, and noticing that is ordinary political literacy rather than cynicism. A good domestic record on one axis carries no information about conduct in occupied territory: Israel can be one of the better places in the world to be gay and the West Bank can still be what its critics say it is.
And LGBT Palestinians have objected in their own voices to being invoked by people who are not interested in them otherwise. That is not Israeli advocates being misquoted, it is the people in question saying no. There is a tell on our side too.
Many who reach for the regional comparison have never raised gay rights in Kuwait or Iran in any other context, which suggests the subject is picked up because it is useful rather than because it is cared about.
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In 1994 Israel's Supreme Court made El Al give a steward's male partner the same spousal ticket it gave wives. The state fought the adoption case to the end in 2023, and the surrogacy case for eleven years. A tourism board did not win any of that.
- 01
Jasbir Puar, who supplied the theory the word rests on, wrote in 2013 that homonationalism is not an accusation and not a position.
On the same pages she calls Israel a pioneer of homonationalism and says the state must be challenged. Say that half yourself. She is a hostile witness, which is exactly why her line that the word is not an accusation cannot be waved away.
Jasbir Puar, Rethinking Homonationalism, International Journal of Middle East Studies, volume 45, 2013, pages 337 to 338
- 02
In Israel, anti-gay employment discrimination has been unlawful since 1992, the military open since 1993. Israel performs no civil marriage for anybody, gay or straight.
Adoption, domestic surrogacy and recognition of foreign marriages followed. The last sentence stops you being corrected: the marriage gap is the rabbinate's rule for everyone, not a gay exception.
Equal Employment Opportunities Law 1992; IDF policy 1993; High Court on adoption, 28 December 2023; surrogacy from January 2022; registry recognition from 2006
- 03
Same-sex adoption in Israel was won in court against the state in 2023. Every right came that way: gay Israelis suing their own government.
Over forty years, with their names on the case. A marketing exercise does not spend years fighting its own selling point in court, and the word hands the credit to a tourism board.
Israeli High Court of Justice on same-sex adoption, 28 December 2023; Danilowitz v El Al, Supreme Court, 30 November 1994
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They say
The account of 7 October has fallen apart, and what is left is Israeli propaganda
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
This is an argument about how evidence was handled, and parts of it are correct. In the first weeks specific atrocity claims were amplified by Israeli officials, by first responders with no forensic training and by major news organisations without verification, and several turned out to be false.
Israel has an obvious interest in the maximal version of that day, and it controlled the scene, the bodies and the order in which material was released. It then refused to cooperate with the UN Commission of Inquiry, barred medical professionals from speaking to it and denied it access to the sites, so the one UN team that did get in drew much of its information from Israeli national institutions and said so.
That mission was expressly not investigative, could not establish prevalence, and found at least two widely repeated allegations unfounded. And Israeli fire did kill Israelis that day: the Commission verified up to fourteen Israeli civilians killed in two incidents alone.
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On 21 November 2024 the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant over 7 October for the Hamas commander Mohammed Deif. It issued warrants for Israel's prime minister and defence minister the same day. That court took nobody's word on trust.
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Al Jazeera's own investigative unit built its October 7 film from seven hours of CCTV, dash cam, phone and Hamas head-camera footage.
It treated the perpetrators' own recordings as authentic. The outlet least likely to be accused of carrying Israel's water worked from the same material, so the fabrication argument goes.
Al Jazeera Media Network, press release for the I-Unit film "October 7", March 2024
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The UN Commission of Inquiry authenticated the visual record with metadata, alteration detection, facial recognition and satellite geolocation, while Israel refused it entry.
It answers the chain-of-custody objection with the one body that owed Israel nothing and was obstructed by it.
Commission of Inquiry, A/HRC/56/CRP.3, 10 June 2024, paragraphs 8 to 13
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The early claims that didn't survive were retired by the UN's own mission team, Israeli media and Israeli first responders. None by a critic.
It hands you the corrections before they are used on you, and turns the fact of correction into evidence that the record is under test. Say it before they raise it.
SRSG-SVC mission report, 4 March 2024, paragraph 65; Haaretz and Israeli press corrections, 2023 to 2024
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They say
The blood libel, that Jews murder people deliberately for blood, for organs or by poison
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
There is no good-faith version of the accusation itself. But there is a serious objection to how the label gets used, and it has three parts. First, it is applied too readily: an allegation is called a blood libel because it is ugly and false, when ugly and false is not what the term means.
Second, it functions as a shutdown. If any reporting about Palestinian deaths can be met with a word that carries eight centuries of murder behind it, the effect is that the reporting does not get examined, and journalists who would examine it decide the cost is too high.
Third, and hardest, calling a disputed factual claim a blood libel begs the question. It assumes the claim is false in order to classify it, and then treats the classification as the proof. Somebody who alleges a specific act by a specific unit is making a claim that evidence can settle, and answering the classification instead of the evidence looks like an answer only to people who already agree with you.
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On 4 July 1946 at Kielce in Poland, at least 42 Jews were murdered after a boy of nine said Jews had held him in a cellar. He had run away from home. Most of the dead had come back from the camps. That is 1946, not 1146.
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Kielce, Poland, 1946: at least 42 Jews murdered after a boy said Jews had held him in a cellar. Most had survived the camps.
The boy was nine and had left home without permission. Say the date twice: 1946, not 1146. People who had come back from the camps were killed over a medieval story, and that is the answer to "all of this was the Middle Ages".
The Kielce Pogrom, 4 July 1946, US Holocaust Memorial Museum
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Mahmoud Abbas told the European Parliament in 2016 that rabbis had called for poisoning Palestinian water. His own office withdrew it as baseless.
Three days later. The Palestinian president made the accusation and the Palestinian president retracted it. Nobody has to argue about the label.
Abbas retracts rabbis' water poisoning comment, Al Jazeera, June 2016
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Aftonbladet published "Our sons are plundered of their organs" on 17 August 2009. The author later said he had no proof.
The organ claim's most cited outing in the Western press was abandoned by the man who wrote it.
Aftonbladet, 17 August 2009, and the author's subsequent statement
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They say
The death toll proves Israel is killing civilians indiscriminately
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Three separate bodies of evidence sit behind this. A capture-recapture study in the Lancet in January 2025 estimated 64,260 violent deaths to 30 June 2024, with women, children and people over 64 making up 59.1 per cent of those whose age and sex were recorded.
A household survey in the Lancet Global Health in April 2026 put violent deaths higher, at 75,200 to 5 January 2025, with the same groups at 56.2 per cent. And in August 2025 the Guardian, +972 and Local Call reported an Israeli military intelligence database listing 8,900 Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters as dead or probably dead by May 2025, against at least 53,000 recorded deaths.
On the demographic point the serious counter is a baseline rather than a denial: civilian men die at higher rates than civilian women in most wars, because they are the ones outside, working, queuing, searching rubble. Action on Armed Violence built its January 2026 estimate on that, and put the civilian-to-combatant ratio between five and eight to one.
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Human Rights Watch collected 184 Israeli evacuation orders for Gaza, sent by leaflet, text and drone loudspeaker between October 2023 and August 2024. The count is the prosecution's own. An army killing indiscriminately does not announce where it is going.
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No casualty ratio settles it. Article 51(5)(b) asks, attack by attack, whether the civilian harm a commander expected was excessive against the military advantage anticipated.
No number in the law marks where a campaign becomes unlawful. It disarms every ratio at once, including the ones that cut against you. The source is West Point's own law institute.
Oded Hen, Lieber Institute at West Point, 20 March 2026; Additional Protocol I, Article 51(5)(b)
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The WHO vaccinated 558,963 children against polio in Gaza in twelve days, each phase under an area-specific pause of nine hours a day.
September 2024. A hostile witness on the record. An army pursuing civilian death does not stop for twelve days so half a million children can be immunised.
World Health Organization, Gaza polio campaign, September 2024
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In Mosul the Associated Press found 9,000 to 11,000 civilians killed. The US-led coalition acknowledged responsibility for 326. Nobody read intent off that gap.
Britain, France and the United States were in that coalition. It asks for consistency rather than indulgence, and puts the burden on whoever wants to read intent off a total.
Amnesty International on the Associated Press findings for Mosul, 20 December 2017
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They say
The Palestinians are the only people who were displaced here. The Jews in Arab countries weren't expelled, they chose to go to Israel because they were Zionists.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
The departures were not one thing. Zionist emissaries had been organising in Iraq and Yemen for years, and Ezra and Nehemiah and Magic Carpet were Israeli airlifts, not deportation convoys. In Morocco and Tunisia, which hold the largest numbers, the picture is emigration under pressure rather than expulsion by decree.
They then went to a state that wanted them, and the Law of Return made them citizens on arrival. Nobody is stateless, nobody is in a camp, nobody is waiting on a status. Many rejected the word refugee themselves: the Knesset speaker said in 1975 they had come with messianic aspirations, not as refugees.
And the sharpest part is when the point gets raised. Almost never in a claim for redress against Baghdad, almost always in a conversation about Palestinians, where it works as a ledger entry cancelling somebody else's loss. When Israel opened property registration, only three to four thousand families came forward, out of nearly a million. A grievance produced only when the other side speaks looks like a debating tactic.
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About 851,000 Jews lived in Arab countries in 1948. Fewer than 4,000 live there now. They lost their nationality and their property by law, and no agency was ever created for them.
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Around 851,000 Jews lived in Arab countries in 1948. Fewer than 4,000 live there today. Iraq had 135,000 and has fewer than ten.
Libya had 38,000 and has none. The argument wins on the before and after, and starts losing the moment it turns into assertion. Lead with the figures.
Jewish populations of Arab countries, 1948 and 2018, country by country
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Iraq's Law No. 1 of 1950 let Jews emigrate only if they surrendered their nationality. In 1951 parliament froze the assets of everybody who had.
The assets went to a Custodian General with power to liquidate them. That is not emigration, it is a statute. A government watching its Jews leave freely need not legislate their citizenship away.
Iraqi Law No. 1 of 1950 and the freezing law of 19 March 1951
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Egypt's 1956 nationality law barred "Zionists" from citizenship and never defined the word. At least 10,000 left within three months, each signing they went voluntarily.
Twenty Egyptian pounds and one small case each. The voluntariness in the claim is a paperwork artefact, manufactured at the time by the governments doing the expelling.
Egyptian nationality law of 22 November 1956, and Military Proclamation No. 4
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They say
There is no real debate inside Israel. Israelis all back whatever their government does
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
The serious version is not that Israelis never argue. It is that internal argument proves nothing about the thing being argued over. Apartheid South Africa had white liberals, a free press for whites and courts that sometimes ruled against the government, and none of it made the system defensible.
The 2023 protests are the weakest example to reach for, because they were overwhelmingly a Jewish Israeli movement about Jewish Israeli democratic rights. Almost nothing on the placards concerned Palestinians in the West Bank, who do not vote for the government those marches were aimed at, and several protest leaders said so at the time.
The organisations cited here cut the other way too. B'Tselem concluded in 2021 that Israel runs a regime of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea, and in July 2025 that it is committing genocide in Gaza. Yesh Din finds 93.6 per cent of investigations into offences against Palestinians closing with no indictment. Anyone offering these bodies as character witnesses has to accept what they say.
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In June 2004 Israel's Supreme Court heard a Palestinian village council and voided the barrier's route along thirty of the forty kilometres in dispute. Everything you know about Israeli wrongdoing you learned from Israelis, in Israel, under their own names.
- 01
In July 2023 the reservist group Brothers in Arms announced that roughly 10,000 volunteer reservists would stop turning up.
More than 1,100 were air force, 904 from military intelligence. Soldiers withdrawing unpaid service to pressure their own elected government. No equivalent anywhere in the region.
Brothers in Arms press conference, Herzliya, reported by The Times of Israel, 22 July 2023
- 02
In January 2024 Israel's Supreme Court sat with all fifteen justices for the first time and struck down the government's flagship law. The government complied.
Eight to seven. Protest shows people are angry. Obeying the ruling shows the machinery works. That is the whole argument in one sentence.
HCJ ruling on Amendment 3 to Basic Law: The Judiciary, 1 January 2024
- 03
Nearly every report of Israeli wrongdoing in circulation came from an Israeli organisation: ACRI since 1972, B'Tselem since 1989, Breaking the Silence since 2004.
Yesh Din since 2005, all registered in Israel. Ask where the other side gets its material. The answer is Israelis, publishing at home, under their own names.
Founding dates from each organisation's own about page
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They say
They were prisoners of war, and Israel was holding thousands of Palestinians. It was a swap between two sides doing the same thing.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Israel holds Palestinians in very large numbers, and around a third are held under administrative detention, without charge or trial, on evidence the detainee cannot see. That is not a swap between equals, it is two systems of captivity of very different sizes.
The UN Human Rights Office reported in July 2024 on arbitrary, prolonged and incommunicado detention of thousands of Palestinians since October 2023, with allegations of torture and sexual abuse. Nine Israeli reservists were arrested over the sodomising of a detainee at Sde Teiman in July 2024, and in March 2026 a military court dropped the charges against five of them.
Dozens of Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli custody since October 2023, some with post-mortem findings of prolonged malnutrition. So the sanctity-of-life argument arrives carrying a bill. And the exchange ratios measure nothing about Israeli tenderness. They measure how many Palestinians Israel holds in the first place. Nobody trades at ninety-eight to one unless they have ninety-eight to spare.
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Hamas took a nine-month-old baby, and held a Bedouin Muslim with documented mental illness for a decade. Which war were they prisoners of? The Red Cross was not allowed near one of the 251 in 843 days. That is the difference between a prisoner and a hostage.
- 01
In 2011 Israel released 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for one soldier, Gilad Shalit. One was Yahya Sinwar, who went on to plan 7 October.
280 were serving life sentences. A single checkable transaction that states the argument without you asserting anything, and it concedes the cost, which stops it sounding like a boast.
Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange, 18 October 2011, as reported by Britannica and The Jerusalem Post
- 02
Hamas held Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed for a decade each. One born in Ethiopia, one a Bedouin Muslim, both civilians with documented mental illness.
Both had been discharged from the army as unfit and the Red Cross was never given access. It removes the prisoner-of-war framing with two men who were neither soldiers nor, in one case, Jewish.
Avera Mengistu, held from September 2014, and Hisham al-Sayed, from April 2015, both released 22 February 2025
- 03
Article Eight of the 1988 Hamas Covenant ends "death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes". No later document revokes it.
Article Eight is the movement's own slogan. It anchors the celebrate-death argument in one organisation's published constitution, so there is nothing to argue about except whether you have quoted it correctly.
Hamas Covenant 1988, Article Eight, Avalon Project, Yale Law School
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They say
Zionism is a political position, not an identity. Nobody is entitled to a platform, and we are allowed to decide who is in our space.
Their best case
Put as fairly as we can manage, because this is the version you will actually meet. Read it, then answer it before you look.
Freedom of association is a real liberty and it protects unpopular associations first. People who organise around a politics are entitled to organise around that politics, and a rule about who gets invited to speak is not a rule about who is allowed to exist.
Zionism is a word people apply to themselves, which makes it a stated commitment rather than an ascribed characteristic, and a commitment can be argued with. Some people who describe themselves as Zionist do hold positions others may reasonably refuse to platform, about Palestinians, about transfer, about whose presence in the land is legitimate, and a group is not obliged to host that to prove its good faith.
Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law, said of the bylaw adopted by student groups at his own school that he found it offensive and that they had the right to say it. Both halves of that were serious. And the charge of discrimination is sometimes deployed precisely to force entry into spaces that have decided what they are.
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In March 2025, 88 per cent of American Jews said Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Bar that belief and you have emptied the room of Jews. Nobody gets to do that and then call the result a coincidence.
- 01
In March 2025, 88 per cent of American Jews said Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.
A rule written against that belief removes almost every Jew in the room. Argue from what people believe, not what they call themselves: the label polls fifty points lower.
Jewish Federations of North America with Burson, fieldwork March 2025, more than 1,800 respondents
- 02
In Frankel v. Regents, Judge Mark Scarsi found Jewish students excluded from parts of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.
A federal judge, on the record, describing the disavowal as the price of entry. Not an advocacy group's characterisation.
Frankel v. Regents of the University of California, C.D. Cal., 13 August 2024
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Salt Lake DSA's 2024 resolution exposes members to expulsion for affiliating with listed Zionist organisations. One is J Street, which campaigns for a Palestinian state.
Their own document, and it catches people who want exactly what the rule claims to be defending.
Resolution: For an Anti-Zionist Salt Lake DSA, 29 January 2024
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No cards under those two settings
Widen one of them and the deck fills again.
That is the set
The ones you did not have come back first next time, so a second run is shorter and harder than the first.