Inside Auschwitz II-Birkenau, prisoners gave one of the camp's most infamous work details an astonishing name:

Kanada.

To them, Canada represented abundance.

It was one of the few places in the camp where a prisoner might find an extra piece of bread, a warm coat, a hidden medicine bottle, or something small enough to smuggle to a starving friend.

Some survivors later credited Kanada with saving their lives.

Not because it was merciful.

But because the prisoners assigned there quietly stole food, clothing, and medicine, risking death to smuggle them to fellow inmates who were slowly starving.

Only afterward does the terrible irony reveal itself.

Those supplies came from the luggage of Jews who had already been murdered.

The Kanada warehouses were filled with the possessions stolen from Jews who had been sent to the gas chambers and exterminated, often only hours earlier. Suitcases. Shoes. Coats. Children's toys. Wedding rings. Family photographs.

It was a place built upon unimaginable evil. Yet, paradoxically, it also became one of the places where life sometimes endured.

Think about that for a moment.

In the darkest place humanity has ever created, Canada became synonymous with hope. Not the country itself, but the idea of it.

And yet, while prisoners in Auschwitz looked to Kanada as the place where life might still be found, the real Canada remained largely closed to Jews desperately trying to escape Europe.

Between 1933 and 1945, Canada admitted fewer than 5,000 Jewish refugees, one of the lowest totals among Western democracies during the Holocaust.

The phrase that came to define that shameful chapter of Canadian history was simple:

"None is too many."

It captured a government policy that all but closed Canada's doors to Jewish refugees at the very moment they needed refuge most.

The irony could not have been greater. Inside Auschwitz, Canada was imagined as a place of abundance. Outside Auschwitz, Canada was a locked door.

But history did not end there.

After the war, Canada changed.

The country that had once failed Europe's Jews became one of the world's great destinations for Holocaust survivors. Tens of thousands arrived with little more than trauma, resilience, and the determination to begin again.

They built businesses. They built synagogues. They built schools. They built families.

They helped build Canada.

For many survivors, Canada became everything they had once imagined when they heard the word Kanada behind the fences of Auschwitz. It was not perfect, and it was never free of antisemitism. But it was safe, and it was a place where Jewish life could flourish.

Which is why this moment feels so profoundly unsettling.

Because today, for many Canadian Jews, something has changed.

It is not Auschwitz.

It is not Nazi Germany.

It is not the Holocaust.

Those comparisons are historically inaccurate and morally irresponsible. But history does not repeat itself by recreating identical circumstances.

It echoes.

Jewish schools require armed security. Synagogues are routinely protected by police. Jewish students increasingly conceal parts of their identity. Jewish businesses are vandalized. Community events are treated as security concerns.

And "Zionist" has become a socially acceptable substitute for saying things about Jews that would otherwise be recognized immediately as antisemitic.

The shift is not only happening on our streets.

It is happening inside our institutions.

That is why the controversy surrounding the Canadian Museum for Human Rights' Nakba exhibit matters.

The issue is not whether Palestinians experienced suffering. They did.

Nor is it whether their history deserves examination. It does.

The question is whether a national human rights museum can tell that story honestly while refusing to tell the whole story.

Can it discuss Palestinian displacement without explaining the war launched against the newly declared Jewish state?

Can it discuss 1948 without explaining the Arab rejection of partition?

Can it discuss dispossession without acknowledging the roughly 850,000 Jews who were themselves expelled or forced to flee Arab and Muslim countries?

Can it present one people's historical memory while recasting another people's survival as their original sin?

That is the cautionary note.

The greatest danger facing modern Jewry is not merely rising antisemitism.

It is the quiet transformation of Jewish history itself.

It is the gradual rewriting of Jewish memory.

The Holocaust is remembered. The dead Jew is honoured. The survivor is celebrated.

But the living Jew, the Jew who defends himself, the Jew who supports Israel, the Jew who insists on historical context, and the Jew who refuses to surrender his narrative, increasingly becomes the problem.

That is how memory is rewritten.

Not by denying the past.

But by rearranging it.

By changing who is cast as history's permanent victim.

By transforming Jewish survival into moral guilt.

By replacing context with symbolism.

By teaching future generations that Jewish power, rather than Jewish persecution, is the defining moral lesson of Jewish history.

Kanada began as one of history's cruelest ironies.

A place named after hope.

Built upon death.

Canada later became something remarkable.

A country where Holocaust survivors rebuilt their lives.

A place where Jewish communities flourished.

A symbol that redemption, even after failure, was possible.

Today, that symbol is being tested.

When a national museum begins presenting Jewish history without its essential context, when Jewish national survival is reframed primarily through the lens of Jewish culpability, and when institutions become more comfortable curating Jewish memory than listening to living Jews, the meaning of Canada begins to change.

Not all at once.

Gradually.

Quietly.

Institution by institution.

Not because Canada has become Auschwitz.

It has not.

But because Canada risks becoming a country where Jewish safety is conditional, Jewish memory is rewritten, and Jewish belonging depends upon silence.

The tragedy of Kanada was not simply that it existed inside Auschwitz.

The tragedy would be if we forgot why it was called Kanada in the first place.

Because once, even in humanity's darkest place, Canada represented hope.

The question is not whether Canada has become Kanada.

The question is whether today's Canadian Jews still instinctively hear the word Canada with the same confidence that Holocaust survivors eventually came to know.

History will not answer that question.

Canadians will.

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ upcoming Nakba exhibit has generated considerable controversy. Much of that controversy has focused on familiar questions. Does the exhibit adequately explain the events of 1948? Does it provide visitors with the context of the Arab rejection of partition? Does it explain that the refugee crisis emerged during a war launched against the newly declared State of Israel?

Those are important questions.

But the more I reflected on the exhibit, the less interested I became in the history itself.

What began to fascinate me was the language.

Over the past several decades, discussions surrounding the Nakba have increasingly adopted concepts such as inherited trauma, collective memory, intergenerational victimhood, permanent catastrophe, and the moral obligation to remember. These ideas are now so common that they barely attract notice. They feel natural. Self-evident, even.

Yet the more I thought about them, the more familiar they seemed. Not because I had encountered them in discussions about the Middle East, but because I had encountered them almost everywhere else. Museums. Educational programs. Memorials. Commemorative events. Academic literature devoted to trauma and memory.

The language surrounding the Nakba increasingly resembles the language through which Western societies remember the Holocaust. That does not mean the two experiences are identical. It means they are increasingly being framed through similar moral habits of remembrance.

By “Holocaustification,” I do not mean trivialization of the Holocaust, but rather the adoption of a moral and commemorative framework shaped by Holocaust remembrance and applied to another historical event.

At first, I wondered whether I was imagining the connection. The more I looked, however, the harder it became to ignore.

And once I noticed it, another question emerged.

How did one refugee crisis among many become a unique moral category?

Or perhaps more accurately, how did a historical event become something larger than history itself?

As a mediator, I have spent much of my professional life watching people argue about events they both experienced. What fascinates me is how rarely the disagreement is actually about the facts.

More often, it concerns meaning.

Two people can leave the same conversation with entirely different understandings of what occurred. One remembers betrayal. The other remembers necessity. One remembers abandonment. The other remembers survival. The facts often remain surprisingly stable. The stories do not.

Nations behave in much the same way. Communities do as well.

History provides the raw material. Memory determines what becomes symbolic, what becomes sacred, and what ultimately becomes part of a group’s identity.

The more I thought about the modern Nakba narrative, the more it struck me that the central dispute is no longer primarily about history.

It is about memory.

The displacement of Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 war is a historical event.

The Nakba, as it is increasingly presented in Western institutions, is something more.

It is a memory project.

That distinction may seem subtle, but it matters enormously. Once an event becomes part of a society’s moral memory, the discussion shifts. People are no longer debating merely what happened. They are debating what it means, how it should be remembered, who bears responsibility for it, and what moral obligations flow from that remembrance.

That is a very different conversation.

The difficulty for the modern Nakba narrative is that history was remarkably uncooperative.

The displacement of roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 war was undeniably tragic. Families lost homes. Communities were fractured. Lives were permanently altered.

The suffering was real.

The years surrounding the Second World War, however, were filled with similar tragedies. The partition of India and Pakistan displaced approximately fourteen million people and claimed somewhere between one and two million lives. Between twelve and fourteen million ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe following the war. Approximately 850,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab countries as ancient Jewish communities disappeared across the Middle East and North Africa. Millions more were uprooted throughout Europe and Asia as borders shifted, empires collapsed, and new states emerged.

For a few decades in the middle of the twentieth century, it seemed as though entire populations were playing an involuntary game of musical chairs with national borders.

History, unfortunately, was not particularly selective in distributing misery.

The twentieth century produced no shortage of refugees. What it produced very few of were refugees whose status would expand across generations rather than gradually disappear.

What makes the Palestinian experience unusual is therefore not that a refugee crisis occurred.

The twentieth century was filled with refugee crises.

What makes it unusual is what happened afterward.

Most refugee populations eventually ceased being refugees. Their children became citizens. Their grandchildren inherited family stories rather than refugee status. The memory remained, but the identity changed.

The Palestinian case followed a different trajectory. The refugee identity survived. Then it expanded. Then it became institutionalized. What began as a wartime displacement gradually evolved into one of the defining features of Palestinian national consciousness.

This evolution was not inevitable. Although Palestinian leaders and advocates often emphasized return over resettlement, they were hardly acting alone. Many Arab states chose not to integrate large portions of the refugee population into their societies. With the notable exception of Jordan, which granted citizenship to most Palestinians within its borders, host countries generally maintained the refugees as a distinct population rather than absorbing them.

Yet even where citizenship was granted, refugee identity often persisted through international registration and inheritance, ensuring that displacement remained a living political and cultural memory rather than simply a historical event.

Over time, the camps themselves became more than temporary shelters, they became symbols, physical reminders of an unresolved grievance and a standing claim against Israel.

No collective memory survives on its own. Historical events fade. Survivors pass away. Public attention moves elsewhere. If a grievance is to survive across generations, it requires institutions dedicated to preserving it.

In the Palestinian case, those institutions proved remarkably successful. Unlike virtually every other refugee population in modern history, Palestinian refugee designation could be passed from one generation to the next. International organizations reinforced that status rather than gradually resolving it. Political leaders emphasized return rather than resettlement.

The result was that a wartime displacement did not gradually recede into history. It expanded across generations. The refugee population grew rather than shrank. The memory remained active rather than becoming historical. Much of the modern Nakba narrative derives its emotional and political power from that transformation.

And that is where the story becomes less about Palestinians and more about the West.

The success of the Nakba narrative is often attributed to Palestinian advocacy.

That is only half the story.

Advocates can offer a narrative. Someone else still has to embrace it.

Mediators encounter this constantly. The most persuasive story is rarely the one that is most detailed. It is the one that fits a framework the listener already understands. People rarely adopt entirely new moral vocabularies. They interpret unfamiliar events through concepts that already make sense to them.

The more I reflected on this, the more I began to suspect that the real story may not primarily be about Palestinians at all.

It may be about us.

By the late twentieth century, Western societies had become increasingly accustomed to viewing history through the language of trauma, remembrance, and historical injustice. We built museums dedicated to memory. We developed academic disciplines devoted to trauma studies. We became comfortable discussing events through the lens of victims, oppressors, inherited responsibility, and intergenerational harm.

Much of this development emerged for understandable reasons.

The Holocaust played an enormous role in shaping that worldview. So did colonialism. So did slavery. So did residential schools.

By the end of the twentieth century, Western institutions had become extraordinarily adept at preserving historical memory and increasingly uncomfortable with allowing historical grievances to simply fade into history.

Over time, Western institutions developed a moral vocabulary built around memory. A people suffers. A historical injustice occurs. The trauma echoes across generations. The descendants inherit the grievance. Society bears an obligation to remember.

By the time the modern Nakba narrative arrived, that vocabulary was already waiting.

Western audiences already understood the story.

The Nakba fit comfortably within that moral vocabulary.

From a conflict resolution perspective, this is hardly surprising. Human beings naturally interpret unfamiliar events through concepts they already understand. We borrow narratives. We borrow symbols. We borrow language. It helps us organize the world.

The challenge begins when the moral vocabulary becomes more important than the history itself.

And that, I suspect, is what happened here.

Most refugee crises eventually became history.

The Nakba became an inheritance.

That distinction may be the single most important fact about the modern Nakba narrative.

The more I examined the phenomenon, the less it appeared to be a story about suffering and the more it appeared to be a story about meaning.

Specifically, it appeared to be a story about what happens when a historical event becomes attached to the most powerful moral architecture available in a given culture.

And there is no more powerful moral architecture in the modern West than the one built around the Holocaust.

The Holocaust occupies its unique place not because Jews suffered. Many peoples have suffered.

It occupies its place because of what was attempted.

The objective was not conquest, displacement, or political domination.

The objective was elimination.

The Nazis did not seek a Jewish surrender. They did not seek a Jewish withdrawal. They did not seek Jewish concessions.

They sought a world without Jews.

There is an irony here that is difficult to ignore. The Holocaust framework emerged from an event in which Jews were denied agency almost entirely. They were targeted regardless of what they believed, where they lived, whom they voted for, or what choices they made. The defining moral lesson was that extermination required no justification beyond existence itself.

Increasingly, the modern Nakba narrative operates in the opposite direction. The decisions that preceded 1948 recede into the background while the catastrophe that followed moves to the foreground. The rejection of partition, the expectation of military victory, and the invasion by surrounding Arab armies become secondary to the outcome.

Agency fades. Victimhood remains.

The result is that the outcome increasingly eclipses the choices that helped produce it.

Whether intentional or not, that shift fundamentally changes how the conflict is understood.

That distinction matters because it explains why Holocaust remembrance developed the way it did. Museums dedicated not simply to preserving history but to preventing repetition. Educational programs focused on bearing witness. The language of “Never Again.” The idea that memory itself carries moral responsibility. The conviction that forgetting is not merely unfortunate but dangerous.

These concepts emerged from a specific historical reality. They were responses to an event that many believed represented the outer limits of what human beings could do to one another.

Over time, however, something interesting happened.

The architecture of remembrance developed around the Holocaust gradually became detached from its original context and increasingly available for other causes to adopt.

Not because the events were identical.

Far from it.

But because that architecture had acquired extraordinary moral authority.

And once an idea acquires that kind of authority, people naturally begin borrowing from it.

This is not unique to the Palestinian national movement. Every political movement seeks legitimacy. Every movement seeks a language capable of persuading outsiders that its cause deserves attention.

The difference is that few movements have found a moral architecture as powerful as the one created by Holocaust remembrance.

The more one looks at contemporary Nakba commemoration, the harder it becomes not to notice the similarities. Inherited trauma. Collective memory. Intergenerational victimhood. The obligation to remember. The catastrophe that remains active decades later. The descendants who continue carrying the burden of an event they never personally experienced.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these concepts.

The question is why they became attached to one refugee crisis and not so many others.

The descendants of Germans expelled from Eastern Europe do not generally define themselves through refugee status. The descendants of refugees from the partition of India and Pakistan do not generally inherit refugee designation. The descendants of Jews expelled from Arab countries do not generally appear before international institutions as refugees generations later.

Only the Palestinians.

That reality is now so familiar that it rarely attracts attention.

Yet it is historically extraordinary.

Unlike most refugee crises, the Palestinian case did not gradually fade into history. The refugee identity expanded across generations, transforming a historical event into a permanent inheritance.

History records what happened.

Memory determines what survives.

History asks questions about causation, responsibility, and context.

Memory asks what deserves remembrance.

The two often overlap.

They are not the same thing.

And the more I look at the modern Nakba narrative, the more I wonder whether memory has begun overwhelming history.

Consider how the Nakba is typically framed today.

The emphasis is rarely on the decisions that preceded the refugee crisis. The rejection of partition. The confidence that military victory would be swift and decisive. The invasion by surrounding Arab states. The belief that the Jewish state would be extinguished before it had truly begun.

These facts have not disappeared.

But they increasingly occupy supporting roles in a story focused elsewhere.

Gradually, the catastrophe becomes the story. The decisions that preceded it fade into the background. Context becomes supporting material. The memory itself takes center stage.

And once that happens, the event begins to occupy a different place in public consciousness.

It is no longer merely something that happened.

It becomes something that defines.

In some respects, that may be the greatest achievement of the modern Nakba narrative.

It is not that it has convinced the world that Palestinians suffered. Most reasonable people already accept that they did.

Its success lies in persuading much of the world that Palestinian suffering belongs in a category of its own. One not shared by the Germans expelled after the war, the Hindus and Muslims displaced during Partition, the Jews driven from Arab countries, or countless other populations uprooted during the upheavals of the twentieth century.

That transformation did not occur because the suffering was greater.

History offers little support for that proposition.

It occurred because the suffering was attached to a narrative structure capable of elevating it into something larger.

A permanent moral reference point.

And that is where the comparison begins to matter.

Ideas are not neutral.

They shape conclusions long before evidence enters the conversation.

If the Nakba increasingly occupies the role of ultimate victimhood, what role remains for Israel?

If Palestinians become analogous to history’s most famous victims, who becomes analogous to history’s most famous perpetrators?

The comparison rarely needs to be stated explicitly.

The narrative does much of the work on its own.

That is what makes it powerful.

It is also what makes it dangerous.

Once that lens is accepted, questions of context begin to fade. Questions of responsibility become secondary. Historical complexity gives way to moral simplicity.

The story becomes easier to understand.

It also becomes less accurate.

And perhaps that is what troubles me most about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights exhibit.

Not that it seeks to remember Palestinian suffering.

It should.

Not that it encourages reflection on a painful chapter of history.

It should.

What troubles me is the possibility that the exhibit is participating in something larger than remembrance.

It is participating in the construction of memory.

Museums are often described as places that preserve history. In reality, they do something far more significant.

They help determine how future generations will remember history.

A museum does not simply tell us what happened.

It tells us what matters.

What deserves reverence.

What deserves moral attention.

What lessons should be carried forward.

In that sense, museums are not merely custodians of history. They are architects of memory.

And that is why the framework matters.

Because the controversy surrounding the Nakba is no longer primarily a dispute over what happened in 1948.

It is a dispute over how 1948 should be remembered.

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is not merely presenting history.

It is helping construct memory.

And that is precisely why the exhibit deserves scrutiny.

The Nakba did not become unique because history treated it differently.

It became unique because memory did.

Subscribe

Modern discussions about the Nakba often focus on what happened after the war.

Fair enough. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, and those consequences are still felt today.

But there is a question that rarely gets asked:

What if the greatest tragedy was not what happened after the war, but the decision to launch it?

The 1948 war launched to prevent the existence of a Jewish state may have been the very event that secured its long-term demographic survival.

Because the catastrophe remembered as the Nakba did not emerge from peaceful coexistence shattered by an unprovoked Zionist campaign of elimination. It emerged from a failed regional attempt to prevent partition and destroy the newly declared Jewish state militarily.

And in one of history’s most consequential miscalculations, that decision may have helped create the very Israel it sought to prevent.

In 1947, the United Nations proposed partition through Resolution 181. The plan envisioned dividing the British Mandate into two states: one Jewish and one Arab.

Looking back from 2026, it’s easy to imagine Israel’s existence as inevitable.

It was not.

The proposed Jewish state looked fragile enough that many people assumed it wouldn’t survive at all.

It would have contained approximately 498,000 Jews and roughly 407,000 Arabs. The Arab state, by contrast, would have been almost entirely Arab, containing approximately 725,000 Arabs and only about 10,000 Jews.

Jews would have constituted only about 55% of the population within the proposed Jewish state itself. Across the broader territory of Mandatory Palestine, Jews remained only about one third of the total population.

This is often forgotten in modern discourse.

The Zionist leadership accepted partition despite the vulnerability of the borders, despite the demographic uncertainty, and despite deep dissatisfaction with many aspects of the map. They accepted it because Jewish sovereignty, after centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust, mattered more than territorial perfection.

The Arab leadership rejected it entirely.

The response to partition was not compromise.

It was war.

Following Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948, five Arab armies invaded alongside local Arab forces with the stated objective of crushing the new Jewish state before it could consolidate itself.

And yet the deeper irony is that if partition had been accepted peacefully in 1947, Israel may not exist today in anything resembling its current form.

That statement sounds shocking only because so much of the modern conversation has flattened 1948 into a simplistic morality play of colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed. But demographic reality tells a far more complicated story.

Had partition been accepted peacefully in 1947, the map and language of the modern Middle East might look entirely different today.

There likely would have been a small Jewish state living beside an Arab state that, at the time, would almost certainly not have been called “Palestine” in the modern national sense. The dominant political and cultural identity among the local Arab population was broadly Arab, regional, familial, religious, or connected to southern Syria rather than centered around a distinct Palestinian nationalism as it is understood today.

Here’s where things get even more speculative.

We take it for granted today that there would have been a Palestinian state beside Israel.

Maybe.

But in 1947 Palestinian nationalism did not yet exist in the form that most people understand it today.

It is entirely possible that a future Arab state would have gravitated toward Jordan, Syria, or some broader pan-Arab identity instead.

More importantly, the demographic future of the region may have evolved in ways few people today fully appreciate.

Without the 1948 war, approximately 850,000 Jews from across the Arab world may never have been expelled, dispossessed, or forced to flee from countries such as Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Morocco, and elsewhere. Those ancient Jewish communities may have continued living in their historic homelands rather than resettling in Israel.

The consequences of that alternate history are enormous.

Without the massive influx of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jewish refugees into Israel during its formative decades, the Jewish population within the new state would likely have remained comparatively small for generations. Under the original UN partition proposal, the Jewish state already contained a very narrow Jewish majority, with Arabs comprising nearly half the population within its proposed borders.

At the same time, Arab birth rates across the region during the twentieth century significantly outpaced Jewish birth rates for long periods.

In that alternate demographic trajectory, absent the refugee absorption triggered by war and regional expulsions, Jews may eventually have become demographically overwhelmed west of the Jordan River.

In other words, the war launched to prevent Jewish sovereignty may have been the only plausible scenario in which a durable Jewish-majority state could emerge.

The war did not merely reshape demographics.

It forged Israeli identity itself.

Modern Israel was not built only through diplomacy or ideology. It was forged under existential pressure. The 1948 war forced disparate Jewish populations, Holocaust survivors, secular socialists, religious communities, Mizrahi refugees, and Jews from dozens of countries into immediate collective nationhood under conditions of survival.

The constant external threat accelerated nearly every institution that would later define Israeli resilience: military organization, intelligence capacity, agricultural development, technological innovation, emergency medicine, infrastructure building, and an unusually strong sense of national cohesion.

Existential danger created urgency.

Urgency created unity.

Without the trauma and pressure of repeated regional wars, it is possible Israel may have evolved into a far weaker and more internally fragmented society. The very hostility intended to destroy the Jewish state may have been one of the primary forces that consolidated it psychologically, politically, and culturally.

History is filled with nations forged through conflict.

But few examples are as ironic as this one.

Modern Nakba discourse often struggles with this reality because it complicates the simplicity of the story. It introduces agency, miscalculation, and consequence into a narrative increasingly framed through binaries of oppressor and oppressed.

The dominant narrative today often portrays Israel as the sole actor of history while Arabs appear only as passive victims swept helplessly into catastrophe. But nations make decisions. Leaders make calculations. Wars have causes.

And some decisions alter history irreversibly.

The Arab states and local Arab leadership in 1947 believed that military victory was inevitable. The Jews were vastly outnumbered regionally. The surrounding Arab world possessed larger armies, greater territory, and enormous demographic advantages. From their perspective, partition itself likely appeared temporary and reversible.

But history did not unfold the way they expected.

Instead, the war produced the exact opposite outcome.

Israel survived.

Israel consolidated.

Israel absorbed Jewish refugees from across the Middle East.

Israel developed military strength, economic resilience, and national cohesion under existential pressure.

And over time, many of the surrounding Arab regimes that rejected Jewish sovereignty collapsed into authoritarianism, coups, internal repression, economic stagnation, sectarian violence, or geopolitical irrelevance.

Perhaps the Nakba can be understood in four distinct phases or interpretations.

The first was the original meaning articulated by Arab intellectual Constantine Zurayk in 1948 itself. For Zurayk, the catastrophe was not initially framed primarily as refugee displacement. The catastrophe was the humiliation of military and civilizational failure. It was the shock that the Arab world, despite its size, confidence, and resources, failed to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state.

The second phase became the displacement itself. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were uprooted or fled amid war, fear, expulsion, and societal collapse. Over time, the refugee experience became the emotional and political center of the Nakba narrative, increasingly detached from the rejection of partition and the regional decision to pursue war.

The third phase emerged later, particularly in the modern West, where the Nakba increasingly became interpreted through the framework of postcolonialism and settler colonial theory. In this reading, Israel came to symbolize broader Western colonial guilt, while the complexities of Jewish indigeneity, regional history, Arab rejectionism, and Jewish displacement from Arab lands often faded into the background.

But there may now be a fourth phase of the Nakba, one rarely acknowledged openly.

The unintended creation of a remarkably powerful, durable, and resilient Israel.

The very war launched to prevent Jewish sovereignty helped consolidate it. The attempt to stop Jewish statehood accelerated Jewish demographic consolidation, strengthened Israeli national identity, triggered the absorption of Jewish refugees from across the Middle East, and forged one of the most militarily, technologically, and economically successful states in the modern world.

In this sense, the deepest historical irony may be that the catastrophe was not merely the failure to destroy Israel in 1948.

It may have been the series of decisions that transformed a fragile and uncertain Jewish state into a permanent regional power.

Every time I raise this point, I can practically hear keyboards being furiously pounded across the internet.

“So you’re saying the Nakba was a good thing?”

No.

That’s not what I am saying at all.

In fact, it’s almost the opposite.

Recognizing a tragic miscalculation does not make the resulting suffering any less tragic.

This does not mean the suffering of Arab refugees was unreal. Nor does it mean every Israeli action during the war was morally perfect or beyond criticism. No war is clean. No national birth is free from tragedy.

History requires moral consistency.

If one wishes to understand the Nakba honestly, one must also understand the decision that preceded it.

Partition was offered.

Partition was rejected.

War was chosen.

And the consequences of that choice transformed the Middle East forever.

The real tragedy of the Nakba was not simply displacement.

It was the catastrophic miscalculation that Jewish statehood could be prevented altogether.

I suspect many people have never considered this possibility:

Had partition been accepted, Israel may have ended up far smaller, far weaker, and perhaps even demographically unsustainable over the long term.

We can’t know for certain.

But it’s a possibility worth considering.

Subscribe now

Sometimes I wonder whether the modern conversation about Israel is actually about Israel at all.

Stay with me.

The more I listen to debates about the Nakba, settler colonialism, decolonization, reconciliation, and historical guilt, the more I find myself thinking that many of these conversations are really about something much closer to home.

As a mediator, I’ve learned that people are rarely arguing about what they appear to be arguing about. A couple may come into my office furious about dishes left in the sink, but twenty minutes later you discover they’re really arguing about respect, trust, resentment, or years of feeling unheard.

Public debates can work the same way.

What began as an Arab narrative of defeat and displacement gradually became something larger. A moral framework through which Western societies could process their own anxieties about colonialism, indigeneity, race, power, and historical guilt.

In that framework, Israel became more than a country. It became a screen onto which the West could project unresolved debates about conquest, settlement, justice, and reconciliation.

The consequences of that shift have been significant. A conflict rooted in two national movements, two historical narratives, and two sets of existential fears increasingly came to be understood through a far more familiar lens of colonizer and colonized, settler and indigenous, oppressor and oppressed. The complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict was not erased, but it was often compressed into a moral vocabulary that many Western societies had already developed to understand themselves.

Yet this was not how the Nakba was originally understood.

Arab intellectual Constantine Zurayk first used the term to describe not simply displacement, but a profound civilizational humiliation. The catastrophe was that the Arab world, despite its size and confidence, had failed to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state. As Dr. Brian Schwartz recently observed on The Schmooze, the original disaster was not merely the refugee crisis that followed the war, but the defeat itself and the collapse of Arab confidence that accompanied it. Only later would the Nakba become absorbed into broader Western frameworks in which displacement became the dominant lens through which the conflict was interpreted.

The transformation was gradual. As post-colonial thought spread through Western universities and public culture during the late twentieth century, many societies began reexamining their own histories of conquest, slavery, segregation, indigenous dispossession, and racial hierarchy. These conversations were often necessary and morally serious. They also encouraged a habit of interpreting conflicts through categories that had proven powerful in explaining Western historical experiences.

Israel entered this intellectual environment at precisely the moment Western political culture was becoming increasingly preoccupied with questions of colonialism and historical responsibility. The result was that a conflict with its own distinct history, actors, and circumstances was increasingly interpreted through frameworks developed to explain very different historical realities.

Why Israel Fits the Frame

European Jews arriving in significant numbers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could be reframed as settlers. Palestinian Arabs could be recast as an indigenous population displaced by colonial intrusion. Zionism could be interpreted not as a national liberation movement rooted in an ancient connection to the land, but as another chapter in the history of European expansionism.

Israel is a Western-oriented democracy. The land itself occupies a central place in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, making the conflict instantly familiar to audiences across Europe and North America. The conflict receives disproportionate international media attention, and many of the early Zionist leaders came from Europe, making comparisons to colonial projects appear intuitive to many observers.

Unlike conflicts in Sudan, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, or dozens of other territorial disputes, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict arrived already embedded within the cultural imagination of the West. It therefore became an ideal canvas onto which broader questions of colonialism, race, power, and historical guilt could be projected.

But simplicity is often achieved through omission.

For Israel to fit comfortably within the post-colonial narrative, large portions of Jewish history had to recede into the background. Jewish indigeneity to the land of Israel became minimized or denied. The continuous religious, cultural, and physical presence of Jews in the land became secondary. The expulsion of approximately 850,000 Jews from Arab countries after 1948 largely disappeared from public consciousness. The fact that nearly half of Israel’s Jewish population descends from Middle Eastern and North African communities complicated the image of Israel as a purely European settler project. Even the Arab rejection of partition and the decision by surrounding Arab states to launch war against the newly declared Jewish state became increasingly marginalized within popular discourse.

The result was a profound historical flattening.

A conflict involving two legitimate national movements with competing historical claims, historical grievances, and existential fears became increasingly reduced to a familiar moral narrative. The more the conflict was interpreted through categories inherited from Western colonial history, the less attention was paid to the particular history of the conflict itself.

The Framework Goes Global

The influence of these ideas did not remain confined to academic departments. Over time, they became embedded within broader political and cultural discourse throughout the Western world.

In the United States, the conflict increasingly came to be interpreted through frameworks shaped by race theory, intersectionality, anti-imperialism, and civil rights activism. Israel was no longer viewed simply as a nation-state engaged in a territorial conflict. It increasingly became positioned within a broader global system of power, privilege, militarism, and oppression. The language surrounding the conflict began to mirror the language used to discuss race relations, systemic inequality, and historical discrimination within American society.

As a result, a conflict rooted in the distinct histories of Jews and Arabs in the Middle East increasingly became understood through categories developed to explain American social and political realities.

A similar dynamic emerged in Australia and New Zealand. As both countries grappled with the legacies of colonization and the historical treatment of Aboriginal Australians and the Māori, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became increasingly interpreted through the moral vocabulary already shaping domestic conversations surrounding indigeneity, land, sovereignty, and reconciliation.

The language of settler colonialism that had emerged to explain local historical experiences was gradually extended outward and applied to Israel. Whether the comparison fully fit the historical circumstances often became less important than the fact that the framework itself already felt familiar and morally intuitive.

Canada followed a similar path, though often through the language of reconciliation.

Over the past two decades, Canadian public life has become increasingly defined by conversations surrounding residential schools, indigenous dispossession, land acknowledgements, truth and reconciliation, and historical responsibility. These conversations have reshaped how many Canadians understand questions of power, justice, and historical harm.

Yet reconciliation in Canada often remains heavily symbolic. Land acknowledgements have become commonplace across governments, universities, corporations, and public institutions. Public demonstrations of moral awareness frequently substitute for measurable structural transformation in the relationship between the Canadian state and indigenous communities themselves.

Within this environment, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict increasingly became absorbed into Canada’s own moral vocabulary surrounding settler colonialism and historical injustice. Israel became not simply a foreign country engaged in a complex national conflict, but an externalized expression of Canada’s unresolved colonial anxieties.

Condemning Israel could therefore function as more than a position on Middle Eastern geopolitics. It could also serve as a public affirmation of one’s anti-colonial moral identity.

This is not to suggest that criticism of Israel is inherently insincere, nor is it to deny the reality of Palestinian suffering and displacement. Rather, it is to recognize that the conflict increasingly came to occupy a unique symbolic role within Western political culture.

The power of the modern Nakba narrative does not come solely from the events of 1948. It comes from the emotional and ideological needs the narrative fulfills within the societies that invoke it.

This is another reason I keep coming back to mediation.

When conflict becomes symbolic, the original dispute often fades. People stop arguing about the issue itself and begin arguing about everything the issue has come to represent.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict increasingly seems to function this way in Western discourse.

For many people, it is no longer simply a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It has become a vessel for broader conversations about colonialism, race, privilege, power, and historical guilt.

When the Framework Reaches Institutions

If these dynamics have become embedded within Western political culture, we would expect them to appear not only in universities and political activism, but increasingly within public institutions themselves.

Before anyone accuses me of suggesting that every criticism of Israel is secretly about Western guilt, that’s not my argument.

The question isn’t whether colonialism exists, whether Palestinians suffered.

The question is whether Western institutions increasingly approach this conflict through frameworks that were developed to explain their own histories first.

The controversy surrounding the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ upcoming Palestine Uprooted exhibit offers a useful case study.

The debate is not fundamentally about whether Palestinian experiences should be discussed. They should. Human suffering, displacement, and historical memory are legitimate subjects for public examination.

The question is whether a publicly funded national institution is presenting a contested historical narrative through a predetermined moral lens.

The exhibit has generated concern among many members of Winnipeg’s Jewish community not because it addresses Palestinian displacement, but because critics argue that it adopts a particular interpretation of history while minimizing competing historical realities, including Jewish indigeneity, Arab rejection of partition, the broader regional war, and the displacement of Jews from Arab countries.

On a recent episode of The Schmooze, Gustavo Zentner, Vice President of CIJA for Manitoba and Saskatchewan, summarized the concern succinctly:

“If you want to talk about feelings, there is theatre for that. If you want facts, you go to a national institution.”

His point was not that difficult stories should be avoided. His point was that institutions entrusted with public education have a responsibility to distinguish between historical inquiry and moral narrative.

That distinction matters.

Museums are not merely repositories of artifacts. They are institutions that shape public understanding. When they present complex historical conflicts, they inevitably influence how future generations understand those events.

The question therefore becomes not whether a museum should present difficult history. The question is whether it should present contested history as though it were settled.

Dr. Brian Schwartz raised a related concern. He argued that much contemporary discourse begins not with the particulars of Jewish history, Arab history, Zionism, the Ottoman Empire, or the British Mandate, but with the familiar categories inherited from contemporary political frameworks of colonizer and colonized, settler and indigenous, oppressor and oppressed.

Once those categories are assigned, the conclusions often become predictable. History becomes filtered through a framework rather than examined on its own terms.

Whether one agrees with Schwartz’s assessment or not, his observation points to the larger issue at the heart of the controversy.

The dispute is not simply over one exhibit. It is ultimately a dispute about the role of public institutions themselves.

Should institutions challenge citizens to grapple with complexity, competing narratives, and historical ambiguity? Or should they reinforce moral frameworks that already feel familiar?

The significance of the CMHR controversy extends beyond Winnipeg.

It reveals how deeply the language of colonialism, reconciliation, and historical guilt has become embedded within Western understandings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More importantly, it demonstrates how public institutions increasingly become the places where those broader cultural conversations are expressed, amplified, and contested.

The museum did not create this framework.

It inherited it.

And that may be precisely why the debate surrounding the exhibit has become so intense.

When History Becomes Symbolism

The modern Western understanding of the Nakba did not emerge fully formed in 1948.

It evolved.

What began as an Arab narrative of military defeat and civilizational humiliation gradually merged with broader Western conversations surrounding colonialism, indigeneity, reconciliation, race, and historical guilt. In the process, the conflict became increasingly detached from its own particular history and absorbed into frameworks developed to explain very different historical experiences.

This transformation brought a degree of moral clarity.

It also brought simplification.

The language of colonizer and colonized, settler and indigenous, oppressor and oppressed provides an accessible framework through which to understand a complicated world. Yet accessible frameworks are not always complete ones.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict contains elements that fit comfortably within these categories. It also contains many that do not. Jewish indigeneity to the land of Israel, the continuous Jewish presence there, the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, the rejection of partition, the broader regional war, and the competing national aspirations of both peoples all complicate a narrative that seeks clear heroes and villains.

Recognizing that complexity does not require dismissing Palestinian suffering or denying the hardships experienced by those displaced during the 1948 war.

It simply requires acknowledging that history is often more complicated than the frameworks through which we choose to understand it.

The controversy surrounding the Canadian Museum for Human Rights demonstrates that this debate is no longer confined to academic theory or political activism. It has entered the institutions responsible for shaping public understanding itself.

The argument is not simply about an exhibit. It is about how modern Western societies understand history, and whether we remain capable of examining difficult conflicts on their own terms.

In much of the Western imagination, the Nakba has become more than a historical event. It has become a symbol through which questions of power, justice, identity, and historical responsibility are increasingly understood.

Of course, the 1948 war happened. People were displaced. Families lost homes. Lives were forever altered. None of that is in dispute.

What interests me is something else.

Why has this particular conflict become such a powerful vehicle through which Western societies process their own histories?

Why Israel?

Why this conflict?

Why has a war fought in 1948 become such a central reference point for conversations about colonialism taking place in Toronto, Melbourne, London, New York, and increasingly within institutions like the Canadian Museum for Human Rights?

The more I look at the debate, the more I wonder whether many people discussing Israel are actually talking about Israel at all.

They may be talking about themselves.

And if that is true, then the greatest irony may be this:

In transforming the conflict into a symbolic morality play through which Western societies can process their own historical anxieties, we may have succeeded in making the conflict more emotionally satisfying while understanding it less accurately than ever before.

Continue the Conversation

This article was inspired in part by a recent episode of The Schmooze featuring Gustavo Zentner, Vice President, Manitoba & Saskatchewan, CIJA, and Dr. Brian Schwartz, Professor and Asper Chair Emeritus of International Business and Trade Law.

In that conversation, we explore the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ upcoming Palestine Uprooted exhibit, the concerns raised by Winnipeg’s Jewish community, the role of public institutions in presenting contested history, and the broader questions of narrative, memory, and public trust that increasingly shape how Canadians understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Whether you agree with the concerns raised or disagree with them entirely, I encourage you to listen to the discussion, review the source materials, and come to your own conclusions.

Listen here:

• Spotify:

• YouTube:

As always, The Schmooze isn’t about telling people what to think.

It’s about giving people enough information to think for themselves.

Subscribe now

In mediation, there is a moment when I know resolution is becoming unlikely.

It is not when people become angry. It is not when they disagree about facts. It is not even when they refuse to compromise.

It is when one person stops seeing the other as an independent human being.

The moment they begin to believe that the person sitting across from them is merely repeating someone else’s script, the conflict changes. The disagreement is no longer about ideas. It becomes about legitimacy. And once that happens, resolution becomes extraordinarily difficult.

That thought stayed with me as I listened to Warren Kinsella discuss his new book and documentary, The Hidden Hand, during our recent Schmooze Live event in Calgary.

Kinsella’s work explores a provocative question: What if much of what we perceive as spontaneous public opinion is not entirely spontaneous?

He examines the possibility that sophisticated influence campaigns, supported by governments, organizations, activists, and digital ecosystems, may play a far greater role in shaping public discourse than many people realize.

Whether one agrees with each of his conclusions is not the most important issue. What matters more is the effect that this idea has on how people relate to one another.

As I listened, I found myself just us focused on the psychology as I was on the politics of it.

Not because politics is less important, but because I am a mediator. Mediators are trained to recognize the conditions that allow conflict to move toward resolution, as well as the conditions that cause it to harden.

The most important insight I took from Kinsella’s work is this: the greatest danger is not influence itself, but the erosion of our faith that other people are thinking for themselves.

Once that belief begins to erode, conflict resolution becomes structurally fragile.

Resolution Begins with Human Agency

One of the most common misconceptions about mediation is that resolution depends on agreement.

It does not.

Parties regularly resolve disputes without agreeing on the underlying facts, the interpretation of events, or even the fairness of the outcome. A divorcing couple may finalize parenting arrangements while still believing they were wronged. Business partners may settle while holding entirely different views of what occurred. Neighbours may resolve property disputes without ever reconciling their competing accounts of the past.

Agreement is not the foundation of resolution. Personal agency is.

Each party must believe that the person across from them is capable of independent thought, capable of making choices, and capable of reconsidering their position. This assumption is rarely stated out loud, yet it is essential.

Without it, meaningful dialogue cannot begin.

Even in high-conflict situations, people are willing to negotiate with individuals they dislike, distrust, or strongly disagree with. What they are not willing to negotiate with is a person they perceive as merely repeating a script.

When the Person Disappears

The moment one party concludes that the other is not speaking independently, the nature of the conflict changes.

The disagreement is no longer about ideas or outcomes. It becomes a question of legitimacy. Instead of asking, “Why do you believe that?” the question becomes, “Who is putting those ideas into your head?”

At that point, the individual in front of them begins to disappear. The focus shifts to an imagined force operating behind the scenes.

In practical terms, mediation becomes far more difficult at this stage. The conversation is no longer between two people attempting to understand one another. It becomes an attempt to confront an unseen influence that cannot be questioned, challenged, or persuaded.

People can negotiate with an opponent. They cannot negotiate with what they perceive to be a proxy.

The Hidden Hand Problem

This is where Kinsella’s argument intersects directly with conflict resolution.

His work suggests that many narratives shaping public opinion may be coordinated rather than organic. He points to shared messaging patterns, organized activism, digital amplification, NGO networks, and state actors pursuing aligned goals.

Some of these dynamics are well documented. Others remain contested. It is important to distinguish between demonstrable coordination and perceived coordination.

However, for the purposes of conflict, that distinction is not always decisive.

What matters is that increasing numbers of people believe public discourse is being managed or manipulated.

That belief has consequences.

When people suspect that ideas are being distributed through coordinated systems, they naturally become more skeptical of those who express those ideas. In some cases, that skepticism may be warranted. In others, it may be overstated.

Either way, the effect is similar. Trust begins to erode.

And without trust, the conditions required for dialogue begin to weaken.

The Rise of Tribal Thinking

Human beings are not purely rational actors. We are social creatures shaped by a long evolutionary history in which belonging was essential for survival.

For most of human history, exclusion from the group carried real risk. Inclusion provided safety. Those instincts have not disappeared. They have merely adapted.

Today, tribes take the form of political movements, ideological communities, professional networks, activist organizations, and digital ecosystems. The structure has changed. The psychology has not.

People derive identity, meaning, status, and belonging from these groups. When that happens, beliefs begin to function as markers of membership rather than positions to be examined.

This shift has profound implications.

Because once belonging becomes attached to belief, ideas stop being ideas. They become identities.

When Identity Replaces Ideas

In healthy disagreement, people debate ideas. They weigh evidence. They consider alternatives. They revise positions when persuaded.

In entrenched conflict, people defend identities.

The difference is profound.

When an idea is challenged, we can evaluate the argument. When an identity is challenged, the experience feels entirely different. The issue is no longer, “Is this idea correct?” The issue becomes, “What does accepting or rejecting this idea say about me?” Or perhaps more importantly, “What will my group think if I accept it?”

Human beings are remarkably sensitive to threats against identity.

A challenge to deeply held beliefs can activate powerful defensive responses. When a belief becomes intertwined with belonging, disagreement no longer feels like disagreement. It feels like attack.

And people rarely become curious when they feel under attack.

Changing one’s mind can then carry social consequences: loss of status, loss of belonging, loss of community. Under those conditions, even weak arguments can be defended with extraordinary passion.

As a mediator, I often observe that people are not primarily protecting their reasoning. They are protecting their place within a group.

Why Propaganda Is Effective

This dynamic helps explain why propaganda often outperforms factual argument.

Facts appeal to reason. Propaganda appeals to identity and belonging.

Propaganda provides a framework that answers fundamental social questions. It tells people who they are, who their allies are, and who their adversaries are. It offers clarity in situations that are otherwise complex and uncertain.

Most importantly, it provides moral certainty.

And moral certainty is intoxicating.

Because certainty relieves us of the burden of complexity. It removes the need for self-questioning. It allows us to stop wrestling with ambiguity.

The individual gradually becomes less distinct. The group begins shaping perception, interpretation, and response. And once that happens, disagreement begins to feel less like an exchange of ideas and more like an attack on identity itself.

The Mediator’s Warning

The central concern is not that people are influenced. Influence has always been part of human society.

The concern is that people begin to outsource their thinking entirely to groups, movements, narratives, or systems that reward conformity and certainty.

When that happens, curiosity becomes risky. Questions can be interpreted as disloyalty. Nuance can be seen as weakness. Independent thought can carry social cost.

From a mediation perspective, these are precisely the conditions under which resolution becomes unlikely.

Effective conflict resolution requires people to step, even briefly, outside the expectations of their tribe. It requires them to tolerate uncertainty, reconsider assumptions, and engage with another person’s perspective in good faith. And perhaps most importantly, it requires enough confidence in themselves that they can hear a different perspective without feeling that their identity is under siege.

The Death of Curiosity

In practice, the most important moment in many mediations is not the final agreement. It is not the compromise. It is not the concession.

It is the moment curiosity returns.

The moment a party stops preparing a rebuttal and asks a genuine question: “Help me understand how you reached that conclusion.”

That question changes everything. It reintroduces the possibility that the other person is thinking, reasoning, and capable of reflection.

Curiosity humanizes. It slows escalation. It creates space for nuance and complexity. Most importantly, it reminds us that people are more than the slogans they repeat, the movements they join, or the tribes they identify with.

Coordinated narratives, or even the widespread belief in them, can undermine this process. They encourage people to believe that understanding is unnecessary because motives have already been assigned and conclusions have already been reached.

When that happens, curiosity is replaced by certainty.

And dialogue begins to close.

Peace Requires Human Beings

Peace is not negotiated between slogans. It is not negotiated between algorithms. It is not negotiated between competing narratives. And it is certainly not negotiated between tribes.

Peace is negotiated between people.

People who possess agency. People who can think independently. People who can question their own assumptions. People who can listen, reconsider, and sometimes change.

The moment we stop believing that the person across from us possesses that capacity, the foundation of resolution begins to weaken.

When individuals are reduced to representatives of a tribe, or perceived merely as vehicles for external influence, meaningful dialogue becomes far more difficult to sustain.

People cannot negotiate with abstractions. They cannot negotiate with imagined forces operating behind the person in front of them. In effect, they cannot negotiate with a ghost.

Perhaps that is the deepest danger posed by coordinated narratives.

Not simply that they influence what people think. Not even that they persuade people to adopt particular positions. It is that they can make curiosity seem unnecessary.

Once we become convinced that we already know who is good, who is evil, who is manipulated, and who is authentic, we stop asking questions.

And when curiosity dies, resolution rarely survives for long.

That may be the most important implication of the ideas raised in The Hidden Hand. Not simply that information can be shaped, but that belief in pervasive manipulation can gradually erode confidence in human agency itself.

And when confidence in human agency is lost, peace becomes far more difficult to imagine, let alone achieve.

This article was inspired by a conversation with Warren Kinsella during Schmooze Live in Calgary. While it draws upon themes explored in The Hidden Hand, the views expressed here are my own and reflect my perspective as a mediator.

Get your copy of The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda here

Watch the Schmooze with Warren Kinsella here:

Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before a synagogue this week and delivered what many Jewish Canadians have long been waiting to hear: an unequivocal acknowledgement that Canada is facing a genuine crisis of antisemitism. In a speech that was notable both for its moral clarity and its political symbolism, he described a country in which bullets have been fired at Jewish schools, synagogues have been targeted by firebombs, Holocaust memorials have been vandalized, Jewish students increasingly feel unsafe on university campuses, and Jewish Canadians have begun to question whether the protections and mutual obligations that underpin Canadian pluralism still apply equally to them. His description of the problem was forceful, detailed, and, for the most part, entirely accurate.

For many Jewish Canadians, simply hearing a prime minister publicly acknowledge the scale of the problem carried significance. For months, and in some cases years, Jewish organizations, community leaders, parents, students, and ordinary citizens have been sounding the alarm about a rapidly deteriorating environment. The statistics tell part of the story, but only part. Behind every statistic lies a parent wondering whether a Jewish school is safe. Behind every statistic lies a student removing a Star of David necklace before walking across campus. Behind every statistic lies a community increasingly aware that what once seemed unthinkable has become disturbingly routine.

Carney deserves credit for recognizing that reality. He deserves credit for acknowledging that the problem is real, serious, and incompatible with the values Canadians claim to hold. He deserves credit for rejecting the temptation to minimize or rationalize what has occurred.

Yet as I listened to the speech, I found myself increasingly struck not by what Carney chose to discuss, but by what he conspicuously left unsaid.

The Prime Minister spent considerable time cataloguing the manifestations of antisemitism, but almost none examining the ideological environment from which much of it has emerged. He described the crisis itself, but not its underlying engine. He named the victims, but not the movement that increasingly targets them. Most importantly, he never addressed what I believe has become one of the defining political and cultural phenomena of the post-October 7 era: Antizionism.

Before proceeding, it is important to define what I mean.

I am deliberately not using the term anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism, at least in theory, can refer to opposition to Zionism as a political ideology. One can disagree with Zionist philosophy, challenge aspects of Israel’s history, criticize Israeli governments, or advocate for alternative political arrangements without necessarily harboring animosity toward Jews. Whether one finds those arguments persuasive is beside the point. They exist within the realm of political discourse.

Antizionism, by contrast, describes something fundamentally different. It is no longer merely a critique of Zionism but an ideological framework through which Jews, Jewish institutions, and Jewish collective identity are increasingly viewed. It treats the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate among nations, applies standards to Jewish self-determination that would be rejected if applied to virtually any other people, and increasingly functions as a moral permission structure through which hostility toward Jews can be rationalized while maintaining the language of human rights and social justice.

In its contemporary form, Antizionism does not simply oppose certain Israeli policies. It frequently constructs Israel itself as a uniquely malignant actor in world affairs. It portrays Zionism not as a national movement that can be debated, criticized, or challenged, but as a uniquely immoral ideology that exists outside the boundaries of legitimate political expression. It transforms Israel from a country among countries into a symbol upon which broader social, historical, and ideological grievances can be projected.

That distinction matters because it helps explain a question that political leaders increasingly struggle to answer.

If the current wave of hostility is truly directed only at Israel, why do its consequences so consistently fall upon Jews living thousands of kilometers away?

Why are Jewish schools requiring unprecedented security measures?

Why are synagogues being targeted?

Why are Jewish students reporting harassment and intimidation regardless of their personal views on Israeli politics?

Why have Jewish community institutions become focal points of activism ostensibly directed at a foreign government?

These are not peripheral questions. They are the central questions. Any explanation of contemporary antisemitism that cannot adequately answer them is, by definition, incomplete.

The uncomfortable reality is that much of what Canada is currently experiencing did not emerge spontaneously. Antisemitism did not simply materialize out of thin air. Political cultures do not emerge without causes. Social movements do not emerge without narratives. Hatreds do not emerge without intellectual frameworks that allow them to appear reasonable, justified, or even virtuous.

For nearly two years, Canadians have been immersed in an information environment unlike anything most of us have witnessed before. In universities, activist spaces, media discourse, and increasingly within political institutions themselves, Israel has been presented not merely as a nation facing criticism but as a uniquely malevolent actor occupying a category entirely its own.

This exceptionalism deserves careful examination.

The world is not lacking in conflict. It is not lacking in occupation, displacement, ethnic violence, authoritarianism, religious persecution, or humanitarian catastrophe. Yet no nation appears to occupy the symbolic space that Israel does within contemporary political discourse. Conflicts that have produced vastly higher death tolls receive a fraction of the attention. Regimes that openly persecute minorities often generate only passing concern. Human rights abuses elsewhere frequently fade from public conversation within days or weeks.

Israel, by contrast, remains under constant moral scrutiny.

The point is not that Israel should be exempt from criticism. No democracy should be. The point is that Israel is increasingly subjected to a standard that is not merely critical but exceptional. It is treated not as a state that sometimes acts rightly and sometimes wrongly, but as a uniquely problematic entity whose very existence demands continual moral examination.

Ideas have consequences.

When a society repeatedly presents one nation as uniquely illegitimate, uniquely criminal, uniquely oppressive, and uniquely deserving of international isolation, those narratives do not remain neatly confined to debates about foreign policy. Over time, they begin to shape perceptions of the people most closely associated with that nation. The distinction between “the Zionists” and “the Jews” begins to erode. The distinction between opposition to Israel and hostility toward Jewish communities becomes increasingly blurred.

This is not speculation. It is precisely what Jewish communities across the Western world have been reporting since October 7.

The targets have not primarily been Israeli government offices. They have been Jewish institutions.

The intimidation has not primarily been directed at policymakers in Jerusalem. It has been directed at Jewish students in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, New York, London, Paris, and Melbourne.

The hostility has not remained confined to geopolitical debate. It has spilled into everyday Jewish life.

This reality poses a profound challenge for political leaders, forcing them to confront a possibility many would rather avoid. It requires acknowledging that at least some contemporary expressions of antisemitism are not occurring despite Antizionist activism but through it.

This does not mean every critic of Israel is an antisemite.

Nor does it mean every participant in anti-Israel activism harbors hostility toward Jews.

Such claims would be both inaccurate and intellectually lazy.

The issue is not individual motivation. The issue is political consequence.

Movements can produce outcomes that exceed the intentions of many participants. Ideologies can create social permission structures that normalize behaviors their supporters never explicitly endorse. Narratives can shape cultural attitudes in ways that extend far beyond their original purpose.

The question, therefore, is not whether every Antizionist is antisemitic.

The question is whether Antizionism has become one of the primary vehicles through which contemporary antisemitism is expressed, legitimized, and amplified.

Increasingly, the evidence suggests that it has.

This is where Carney’s speech becomes most frustrating.

Not because it lacked compassion.

Not because it lacked sincerity.

Not because the incidents he described were exaggerated.

Rather, because it treated antisemitism primarily as a phenomenon requiring management rather than explanation.

The proposed solutions reflected that approach. More security funding. Better coordination. Enhanced data collection. New advisory structures. Improved monitoring. Stronger institutional responses.

Some of these measures may prove valuable. Many are likely necessary.

But all of them operate downstream from the problem itself.

None directly address the ideological environment that has made the problem possible.

One cannot effectively combat radicalization without examining the narratives that radicalize people.

One cannot effectively combat hatred without examining the ideas that normalize hatred.

One cannot effectively combat antisemitism while refusing to investigate the movements that increasingly incubate it.

Yet this reluctance extends beyond the Prime Minister.

It exists within universities that tolerated rhetoric they would never accept toward other minority communities.

It exists within activist organizations that insist they oppose only Israel while repeatedly targeting Jewish spaces.

It exists within media institutions that often frame Jewish concerns as distractions from larger political conversations.

And it exists within political parties across the spectrum that have found it easier to condemn antisemitism in the abstract than to confront the specific ideological movements contributing to its resurgence.

This includes Carney’s own political environment.

If Canada is serious about understanding the rise of antisemitism, then it cannot limit its examination to fringe extremists and anonymous online trolls. It must also examine the respectable institutions, political actors, activist networks, and cultural narratives that have contributed to the current climate.

That examination may prove uncomfortable.

It may require acknowledging that some forms of prejudice now present themselves as social justice.

It may require recognizing that certain slogans celebrated in activist circles would be immediately condemned if directed at any other minority group.

It may require confronting the possibility that some institutions have confused moral passion with moral clarity.

But uncomfortable conversations are often necessary ones.

Carney framed antisemitism as a test of Canada’s civic compact. In many ways, he is correct. The ability of Jewish Canadians to participate fully, openly, and safely in public life is indeed a measure of the health of Canadian pluralism.

Yet preserving that compact requires more than identifying victims. It requires understanding causes.

It requires more than condemning incidents. It requires examining ideologies.

And it requires more than creating task forces. It requires the courage to follow evidence wherever it leads, even when doing so may create political discomfort.

Mark Carney was willing to name the crisis.

He was willing to describe the attacks.

He was willing to acknowledge the fear.

He was willing to affirm the place of Jewish Canadians within the Canadian story.

What he was not willing to do was name the movement that increasingly links many of these developments together.

Until that changes, Canada will continue responding to the consequences of Antizionism while refusing to confront Antizionism itself.

And that is not a strategy for solving a problem.

It is a strategy for managing its symptoms while the disease continues to spread.

Watch the Schmooze Between... where Don & Jared break it down

“In here, life is beautiful
The girls are beautiful
Even the orchestra is beautiful.”

These lines are more than lyrics. They are an invitation. To step inside the Kit Kat Klub. To relax into the lights and the music. To not look too closely at what waits just beyond the frame.

When the director and producer of Front Row Centre Players’ current production of Cabaret invited the Holocaust and Human Rights department of the Calgary Jewish Federation to work with the cast, we accepted. Our usual program, Here to Tell, draws from survivor testimonies and the original exhibit at the Glenbow Museum. It walks participants through a factual timeline. Hitler’s rise. The incremental stripping of rights. The descent into mass murder. Necessary work, but often received at a distance.

This time was different.

The cast was already living inside the emotional world of the material. Cabaret does not depict the Holocaust itself. It dramatizes its prelude. The final, glittering years of the Weimar Republic, where economic turmoil and political violence simmered beneath a surface of frantic hedonism and cultural experimentation. The musical captures the seductive rhythm of ordinary life continuing even as the ground begins to shift.

We did not deliver a detailed lecture. Instead, we traced patterns. A society flooded with repetitive messaging that gradually recasts a group of people first as outsiders, then as a problem. The slow conditioning of language and culture. The way exclusion moves from suggestion to policy without ever feeling like a clean rupture. And crucially, the way violence, once it begins, does not halt everyday existence. People still go to work. They laugh. They fall in love. They make quiet calculations about safety, status, and belonging.

At one point during the session, the energy in the room changed. It was not shock at the horror. It was recognition.

They were no longer simply learning history. They were seeing familiar human behavior. Our shared capacity for distraction, rationalization, and selective attention reflected back at them.

Later, we stayed to watch part of rehearsal. The transition back into performance was seamless, yet something had shifted. Pauses lingered a fraction longer. Glances carried new weight. Choices that might have passed unnoticed now held quiet tension. The actors were no longer just performing the denial. They were inhabiting it.

Cabaret lives precisely in this space. The orchestra still plays. The girls still dance. Life still feels beautiful. Even as relationships grow more complicated, identities become liabilities, and silence starts to feel like the safer, more habitual path. The change is rarely dramatic. It is incremental, relational, and deeply human. A joke left unchallenged. A friend quietly distanced. A question that goes unasked because the social cost has quietly risen.

We like to believe that danger announces itself with obvious evil. That we will recognize the moment when things turn extreme. History suggests otherwise. By the time measures appear extreme to those watching from outside, they have often already become normalized for those living inside the frame.

The Holocaust was unique in its scale and ideological ferocity. But the human tendencies that helped create its conditions. Dehumanizing language. Social conformity. The comfort of looking away. These are not.

That is why this production matters. Front Row Centre Players’ Cabaret runs May 15–30, 2026 at the Pumphouse Theatres. When you go, watch for the small moments. The hesitations. The averted eyes. The choices to keep dancing while the world outside the spotlight changes. That is where the story truly lives.

Because danger does not always arrive when everything feels broken.

It arrives while everything still seems normal.

In here, life is beautiful
The girls are beautiful
Even the orchestra is beautiful.

Get your tickets to this amazing production Here

Few words in modern political discourse carry as much emotional weight as Nakba.

For many, the word evokes images of displacement, loss, dispossession, and exile. It has become central not only to Palestinian identity, but to how much of the world understands the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. Today, the Nakba is often presented as a singular historical injustice, one in which Palestinians existed primarily as passive victims acted upon by Zionism, colonialism, and Western power.

But there is something deeply missing from the modern Nakba narrative.

Agency.

One of the more striking features of contemporary discussions about 1948 is how rarely Palestinians are described as historical actors within their own story. Instead, they are often framed almost entirely as objects of history. Things happened to them. Wars were imposed upon them. Decisions were made around them. Catastrophe simply descended.

Yet history is rarely that simple.

And ironically, stripping a people of agency may be one of the most dehumanizing things we can do.

The original usage of the term Nakba itself reveals this complexity. When Syrian historian Constantine Zurayk popularized the phrase “the catastrophe” following the 1948 war, he was not primarily describing Palestinian victimhood in the way the term is understood today. He was describing the catastrophic failure of the Arab world. The humiliation. The military defeat. The inability of surrounding Arab states to prevent the establishment of Israel.

In other words, the original framing centered Arab action and Arab failure.

That distinction matters because it reminds us that 1948 was not simply something that happened to Palestinians in isolation. It was a war. A war initiated after the rejection of partition and the refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state alongside an Arab one.

This does not erase Palestinian suffering. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced during the war. Many lost homes, communities, and stability. Trauma was real. Refugees were real.

But acknowledging suffering is not the same thing as erasing causation.

One of the most troubling developments in modern discourse is the tendency to discuss Palestinians almost exclusively through the language of victimhood, while minimizing the political choices, leadership failures, regional decisions, and historical dynamics that contributed to the outcome of 1948.

Peoples are not shaped only by what happens to them. They are also shaped by the decisions they make, the wars they fight, the leaders they follow, the compromises they reject, and the futures they choose to pursue.

That is what agency means.

And without agency, history becomes mythology.

This dynamic did not end in 1948. In many ways, it became institutionalized. Unlike nearly every other major refugee crisis of the twentieth century, the Palestinian refugee issue was preserved rather than resolved. While millions of refugees across Europe, India and Pakistan, and the Middle East were eventually absorbed into new societies, Palestinians were uniquely maintained in permanent political limbo across much of the Arab world.

The reasons for this were not accidental.

The refugee crisis became politically useful.

A permanent refugee population allowed surrounding regimes and political movements to preserve the conflict indefinitely, transforming Palestinian identity itself into a living symbol of unresolved grievance. Over time, the Nakba evolved from a historical tragedy into something larger: a foundational political narrative through which every subsequent conflict would be interpreted.

And as that narrative expanded globally, particularly within Western academic and activist spaces, something else quietly disappeared.

Palestinian responsibility.

To speak openly about Palestinian agency today is often treated as cruelty, as though acknowledging decision-making somehow invalidates suffering. But mature moral analysis requires the ability to hold both realities simultaneously.

A people can suffer profoundly while still possessing agency.

A people can endure displacement while still being participants in history rather than merely victims of it.

In fact, denying agency often produces the opposite of compassion. It infantilizes. It reduces an entire population to passive spectators within their own story, forever acted upon but never acting. Forever symbolic, but never fully human.

As a mediator, I see versions of this dynamic constantly. Conflict escalates when one or both sides begin seeing themselves exclusively through the lens of victimhood. Once people lose the ability to examine their own choices, failures, fears, or contributions to conflict, resolution becomes nearly impossible.

Accountability is not the opposite of empathy.

In many ways, it is a prerequisite for dignity.

What makes the modern Nakba narrative so powerful is not simply that it preserves memory. All peoples preserve memory. Jews certainly do. The power of the Nakba narrative lies in how effectively it transformed a historical event into an enduring moral framework through which Palestinians are increasingly understood primarily as symbols of dispossession rather than as complex human beings with political agency, internal divisions, competing visions, and historical responsibility.

That framework may generate solidarity. It may generate activism. But it does not necessarily generate peace.

Because peace requires something much harder than symbolic politics.

It requires historical honesty.

It requires the ability to acknowledge tragedy without erasing causation. It requires empathy without romanticizing victimhood. And it requires recognizing that lasting coexistence becomes impossible when one side is treated exclusively as an object of history rather than a participant within it.

The tragedy of 1948 was real.

But so were the choices that shaped it.

And until the conversation allows room for both truths to exist together, the conflict risks remaining trapped inside the same narratives that have sustained it for generations.

One of the strange consequences of modern life is that we are constantly surrounded by people, yet increasingly detached from humanity.

We see each other constantly, through screens, headlines, and curated fragments of outrage, identity, and fear. But we are no longer really encountering one another.

Instead, we encounter abstractions.

That thought stayed with me long after our recent conversation on The Schmooze with representatives from Sharaka, an organization bringing together young Arab and Jewish voices in the wake of the Abraham Accords.

The discussion was ostensibly about the Middle East, normalization, coexistence, and shifting regional realities. But beneath all of that was something far more universal: a conversation about how human beings stop seeing each other clearly.

At one point, Fatema Alharbi, a young woman from Bahrain, described her first visit to Israel.

Like many raised in the Arab world, much of what she understood about Israelis came through inherited narratives, political rhetoric, media framing, and decades of conflict. Israel existed less as a place than as an idea. Israelis existed less as people than as symbols.

She admitted that when she landed in Tel Aviv, part of her expected hostility. Maybe even hatred.

Instead, while walking through the city, a stranger approached her and asked where she was from.

When she answered Bahrain, he smiled and said:

“We’ve been waiting to have peace with Arabs for a long time.”

There was something profoundly disarming about that moment.

Not because it solved anything. Not because it erased disagreement or history. But because, for a brief moment, two people stepped outside inherited narratives and encountered something far more destabilizing:

Each other.

You could hear the shift in the conversation itself. Beneath the politics was something immediately recognizable, two people taught to fear one another suddenly recognizing something human instead.

The more I reflected on that moment, the more I returned to a simple idea:

Hatred depends on distance.

Not just geographic distance, but emotional and psychological distance. The farther away people become, the easier it is to flatten them into caricatures.

Once someone becomes “a Zionist,” “a Muslim,” “a progressive,” “a conservative,” “an occupier,” or “a colonizer,” something essential is lost. Complexity disappears. Certainty expands.

Abstraction accelerates hatred.

Social media has intensified this process. Most people now encounter conflict through emotionally charged fragments optimized for reaction, not understanding. Algorithms reward outrage because outrage sustains attention. Nuance rarely survives.

The result is that entire populations are experienced not through relationships, but through symbols. And once people become symbols, almost anything can be justified against them.

As a mediator, I see smaller versions of this constantly. Long before relationships collapse, people stop seeing each other accurately. A spouse becomes “the narcissist.” A parent becomes “toxic.” A colleague becomes “impossible.”

The person disappears behind the story constructed about them.

Conflict escalates because people are no longer responding to the human being in front of them. They are responding to an idea.

That is why proximity matters.

Not proximity in the shallow sense of shared space, but genuine human proximity, conversation, curiosity, vulnerability. Sitting with someone long enough for them to stop feeling like an abstraction.

Proximity does not guarantee empathy. People can live side by side and still despise one another. But without it, empathy rarely has a chance to begin.

Fatema described how Sharaka brings together people carrying deep suspicion, prejudice, even outright antisemitism. And sometimes, what shifts those attitudes is not argument or ideology, but encounter.

Meeting someone. Hearing their story. Realizing they are not what you were taught to expect.

One of the most striking parts of the conversation was hearing both Fatema and Rachel describe similarities in their upbringing despite emerging from profoundly different worlds. Both spoke about inherited narratives about “the other.” Both described parents who encouraged curiosity over hatred.

Both were changed not by ideas, but by people.

That distinction matters.

Because despite all our technological sophistication, we are losing the ability to remain curious about those we disagree with. Modern discourse rewards certainty over humility, performance over reflection, tribal loyalty over conversation.

But complexity is where humanity lives.

One small moment from the conversation continues to stand out. Fatema noted that before the Abraham Accords, Israel was commonly referred to in Bahrain as “the Zionist entity.” After normalization, it became “Israel.”

That is not merely semantic.

Language shapes perception. And perception shapes what becomes morally possible.

The moment people stop being described exclusively as symbols, new possibilities emerge, not perfect agreement, but the possibility of recognition.

That is not naive.

It is difficult. It is uncomfortable. It requires resisting the pull of certainty and the ease of distance.

It is far easier to hate an abstraction than to sit across from a person.

And perhaps that is what makes this moment so striking. At a time when much of the Western world feels trapped in cycles of outrage and ideological escalation, some of the most meaningful efforts at coexistence are emerging from people willing to take that risk anyway.

To sit together anyway.
To listen anyway.
To see one another anyway.

That is not weakness.

It is courage.

What stayed with me after this conversation was not simple optimism. It was something quieter, a reminder that peace rarely begins with declarations or slogans.

It begins smaller.

A conversation.
A question.
A moment of honesty.

A stranger saying:

“We’ve been waiting for peace.”

On May 17, Calgary will have the opportunity to hear directly from representatives of Sharaka, including voices from across the Arab world and Israel working to build relationships, challenge hatred, and imagine a different future.

If this conversation resonates with you, I encourage you to attend.

Not because everyone will agree.

But because the world needs more spaces where people are still willing to sit together and see each other clearly.

Register at Calgary Jewish Federation https://share.google/rUlBxG2yS8EJ7dz1i

This morning, Calgary lost more than a Holocaust survivor.

We lost a witness.

With the passing of Morris Dancyger, another living bridge between history and memory is gone. And with every survivor we lose, the responsibility shifts a little more heavily onto the rest of us.

For many people, the Holocaust exists as history. Dates in a textbook. Black and white photographs. Grainy footage from another era.

But for those who had the privilege of hearing survivors speak, it was never abstract.

It was personal.

The Holocaust stopped being “six million” when someone like Morris spoke about family, fear, survival, loss, displacement, rebuilding, and resilience. It stopped being statistics and became humanity. That is what Holocaust education, at its best, truly does. It restores individuality to those whom history tried to erase.

And that matters now more than ever.

We are living in a moment where Holocaust distortion, denial, and inversion are becoming increasingly normalized. Social media reduces history into slogans. Extremists manipulate memory for politics. Young people encounter Auschwitz references through memes before they encounter them through education. Terms like “genocide,” “Nazi,” and “fascist” are thrown around so casually that the actual historical meaning begins to dissolve.

And the reality we must confront is this: propaganda evolves.

The antisemitism of the past did not disappear. It adapted.

Once, Holocaust denial spread through fringe pamphlets, obscure meetings, and the corners of academia. Today, it spreads through algorithms, viral clips, manipulated images, influencers, TikTok videos, anonymous accounts, and emotionally charged misinformation designed for instant consumption rather than reflection.

These new tools of propaganda are effective precisely because they overwhelm people emotionally before they engage them intellectually.

That should concern all of us.

When teenagers today can casually repeat the “271,000” Auschwitz lie, a number that once circulated primarily among students influenced by James Keegstra and organized Holocaust deniers, it should give every one of us pause.

Because that tells us something important.

It tells us that ideas we once believed lived only on the fringes are now finding pathways into the mainstream through modern technology and social contagion. Not necessarily because young people are hateful, but because many are historically untethered, digitally overwhelmed, and increasingly vulnerable to propaganda presented as activism, rebellion, or moral certainty.

That is why Holocaust education cannot remain passive.

It cannot simply be a once-a-year assembly or a chapter in a textbook. It must become an ongoing commitment to historical truth, critical thinking, moral courage, and humanization.

And it is why we must continue uniting in the fight against propaganda, distortion, and hatred wherever they emerge.

Not only Jews.
Not only educators.
Not only survivors’ families.

Everyone.

Because Holocaust education was never solely about preserving Jewish memory. It was about protecting society itself from what happens when lies become normalized, when truth becomes negotiable, and when people lose the ability to distinguish between information and manipulation.

That is why survivors like Morris mattered so deeply.

Not because they represented victimhood, but because they represented truth.

No algorithm can replace human testimony.
No documentary can fully replicate eye contact with someone who lived through history.
No textbook can capture the silence in a room when a survivor rolls up their sleeve and reveals a number tattooed on their arm.

Those moments change people.

I have seen it myself through Holocaust education presentations over the years. Students may arrive distracted, skeptical, disconnected, or emotionally distant from history. But when they encounter a real story, when they realize these events happened not to fictional characters but to human beings who later built lives, families, careers, and communities among us, something shifts.

History becomes moral responsibility.

The tragedy is that we are nearing the end of the survivor era. Soon, there will be no firsthand witnesses left to tell these stories directly. And when that day comes, Holocaust education will depend entirely on whether the next generation decides these stories are worth carrying forward.

That burden belongs to all of us now.

Because memory is not passive.
Memory is an act of resistance.

“Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name.”

Hemingway framed the idea as a kind of immortality achieved through memory and legacy.

It is now up to us to ensure that survivors like Morris Dancyger, and the millions who perished in the Holocaust, never suffer that second death.

As long as we continue to say their names, teach their stories, confront the lies, and carry their memory forward, they remain with us.

Forever.

There is a moment that appears often in mediation, though it rarely draws attention to itself.

It is not loud. It is not confrontational. It does not arrive with urgency or demand recognition. Instead, it settles quietly into the conversation, almost unnoticed, and yet it alters everything that follows.

It usually sounds something like this: “This is just what happened.”

At first glance, the sentence feels neutral, even reasonable. It reflects a person trying to make sense of their circumstances, to describe events as they unfolded. But embedded within it is a subtle shift, one that often goes unexamined. In framing the situation this way, the speaker has already begun to relinquish something essential. They have moved, without realizing it, from being a participant in the situation to someone to whom the situation simply occurred.

This is not a moral failing. It is not even unusual. It is, in many ways, deeply human.

But it is also the point at which agency begins to recede.

I found myself returning to this moment while reflecting on our recent conversation on The Schmooze with Michael Westcott. The discussion itself centered on civic engagement, on the sense that something in Canada feels unsettled or shifting, and on the growing number of people who recognize this feeling but are unsure what to do with it. Yet beneath those themes, there was a deeper question quietly taking shape.

Are we living through what is happening, or are we shaping it?

The Quiet Appeal of Passivity

There is a certain ease that comes with believing that events are unfolding around us rather than through us.

When something is happening to us, responsibility feels lighter. Complexity becomes more manageable. We are free to interpret, to react, to express frustration or concern, but we are not required to intervene. The burden of influence rests elsewhere, on institutions, on leaders, on systems that feel distant and, often, inaccessible.

This posture is not born of indifference. More often, it is a function of modern life. People are busy. They are navigating careers, raising families, managing obligations that leave little room for sustained engagement with issues that feel both large and ambiguous. The result is a kind of quiet accommodation. We observe. We comment. We follow developments as they arise, but we remain fundamentally outside the process.

In that space, it becomes easy to confuse awareness with participation.

We read the headlines. We scroll through commentary. We discuss events with those around us. These actions create the feeling of involvement, the sense that we are connected to what is unfolding. And yet, in most cases, nothing has actually shifted as a result of our engagement. No decision has changed. No outcome has been meaningfully influenced.

We are present, but only as observers.

The Illusion of Engagement

The modern landscape has blurred the line between expression and action in ways that are difficult to disentangle.

Social media, in particular, has given rise to a form of engagement that is immediate, visible, and emotionally satisfying. We can articulate our views, align ourselves with causes, and participate in ongoing conversations with remarkable ease. There is a sense of momentum in this, a feeling that something is happening because we are speaking into it.

But speaking into a conversation is not the same as shaping its outcome.

What Michael articulated in our discussion, with clarity and without exaggeration, is that influence tends to accumulate not where the most voices are, but where the most consistent action is. The people who are willing to step beyond expression and into participation, however small that participation may seem, are the ones who begin to shape the environment in which decisions are made.

This is not a dramatic process. It does not announce itself in sweeping terms. It is incremental, often invisible, and at times even mundane.

But it is real.

The Consequence of Absence

When large numbers of people remain in the space of observation, the effect is not neutral.

It creates an absence.

And absence, in any system, invites replacement.

A smaller group, often more organized and more willing to act, steps into that space. Their presence becomes disproportionate to their numbers, not because they represent a majority, but because they are the ones engaging directly with the mechanisms that shape outcomes. They make the calls. They attend the meetings. They persist.

Over time, their influence becomes visible, and for those watching from the outside, the result can feel disorienting. Decisions appear to emerge that do not reflect the broader sentiment. The direction of things begins to feel unfamiliar, even unsettling.

This is the point at which many people say, with a sense of resignation, that things are happening to them.

In a certain sense, they are correct.

But not for the reasons they often assume.

The Threshold of Agency

In mediation, there is another moment, quieter still, but far more consequential.

It is the point at which someone shifts from describing what has been done to them to considering what they might do next. Nothing external has changed in that instant. The facts remain the same. The circumstances are unchanged.

But the posture has altered.

The individual is no longer positioned solely within the past. They have begun, even tentatively, to orient themselves toward the future. They are not yet certain of the path forward, and they may not feel particularly confident in their ability to influence it. But they have crossed a threshold.

They have re-entered the situation as a participant.

This shift is rarely dramatic. It does not resolve the conflict on its own. But it changes the trajectory of what becomes possible.

From Observation to Participation

The conversation with Michael was, in many respects, an exploration of that threshold on a broader scale.

Not as a call to activism in the traditional sense, and not as an argument for any particular position, but as a reminder that participation is both more accessible and more impactful than most people assume. The actions he described are modest. They do not require expertise, and they do not demand that one’s life be reorganized around them.

And yet, when undertaken consistently and collectively, they carry weight.

The difference between something happening to us and making something happen is rarely defined by scale. It is defined by posture.

Are we situated outside the process, interpreting it from a distance, or are we willing, even in small ways, to step into it?

A Different Understanding of Responsibility

There is a tendency to hear conversations like this as an appeal for greater effort, as though the primary message is that more must be done.

That is not quite accurate.

What is being suggested is not that we take on something entirely new, but that we recognize something already true. We are, whether we acknowledge it or not, part of what is unfolding around us. Our presence, our attention, and even our silence contribute to the shape of outcomes.

The question is not whether we are involved.

It is how we are involved.

To remain silent is not to abstain. It is to participate in a different way. To observe without acting is not neutrality. It is a form of engagement that carries its own consequences.

Once this is understood, the conversation shifts. Responsibility is no longer something external that can be accepted or declined. It is inherent.

What remains is the choice of whether that responsibility will be exercised with intention.

Mediator’s Opinion

In mediation, I often remind people that there is a difference between understanding what happened and deciding what comes next.

Understanding gives clarity.
But it does not, on its own, create change.

That requires something else.

It requires a shift in posture. A willingness, even in small ways, to step out of observation and into participation.

What struck me most in our conversation with Michael Westcott was not the scale of what is being asked of people, but the simplicity of it.

You do not need to change everything.
You do not need to become someone else.

You only need to recognize that your voice, when used, is part of how outcomes are shaped.

And when it is not used, that absence shapes outcomes just as much.

If this piece resonates, I would encourage you to listen to the full conversation. It goes deeper into what participation actually looks like, and why it matters.

🎙️ You can listen to the episode of The Schmooze here:
Spotify:

YouTube:

And if you are looking for a practical way to take part, not just observe, there is a clear place to start.

👉 Allies for a Strong Canada
👉 https://theallies.ca

You do not need to do everything.

But doing nothing is still a choice.

And it is one that carries more weight than most people realize. the quietest moments of recognition.

In mediation, I meet people at the point where things have already broken down.

They do not arrive curious. They arrive certain. Certain about what happened, what was said, and who is right. Just as important, they are certain about who the other person is.

By the time they sit across from each other, something has already shifted.

Many of them have known each other for years. They have built lives together. They share history, responsibilities, and memories.

But in conflict, the way they see each other changes. They are no longer encountering the person they once knew. They are responding to a version shaped by frustration, hurt, and mistrust.

Communication becomes filtered. Words are heard through assumption. Intentions are guessed at rather than understood.

They are still talking, often at length.
They are still exchanging information.

But something important is missing.

They are no longer relating to each other as people. They are reacting to positions, defenses, and perceived motives.

As that happens, distance grows.

When connection drops away, assumptions fill the gap. Over time, those assumptions harden into certainty, and curiosity disappears.

That is where conflict begins to take hold.

Not in disagreement itself, but in the distance between people who no longer recognize each other clearly.

This is not unique to mediation. It is simply easier to see there.

I recently spoke on my podcast with Michelle Mather and Kim Kitai from Bridges-YYC.com, a Calgary initiative that works with this same dynamic in a simple way.

They bring people together around a table.

There is no debate and no attempt to convince anyone of anything. People are invited into a shared space where they sit together, share food, and talk.

It sounds simple, almost too simple.

But that is the point.

Something changes when people sit across from each other and share a meal.

The pace slows.
The tone softens.
People listen differently.

More importantly, they begin to see the person in front of them. Not a label or a category, but an individual.

That shift does not solve everything. Some people remain guarded. Some conversations stay uncomfortable. But even a small change in how people see each other can reduce the distance between them.

In mediation, we try to create that same shift in a more structured setting. We guide the conversation and help people hear what has been missed.

When it works, it is not because someone made a better argument.

It is because something human broke through.

Someone pauses.
Someone listens.
Someone recognizes something familiar in the other person.

It may be brief, but it matters.

Once people see each other differently, even slightly, the conflict itself begins to change.

Bridges YYC creates that shift outside the mediation room. They are not resolving disputes in a formal sense. They are reducing the distance that allows conflict to grow in the first place.

What stood out to me most is how it began.

It was not a large program or a formal plan. It began with a simple moment. A conversation, an idea, and a decision to act on it.

There is something worth noticing in that.

We often look for complex solutions to human problems. Sometimes those are needed.

But sometimes change begins with something much smaller.

An invitation.
A conversation.
A willingness to sit together, even when it feels uncomfortable.

This leads to a broader question.

How many conflicts persist not because they cannot be solved, but because the people involved are responding to fixed versions of each other?

That question shifts responsibility. It suggests that resolution is not only about being right. It is also about the effort required to build real understanding.

That work is not easy.

It takes patience.
It takes presence.
It takes a willingness to stay in difficult conversations.

But it is where change becomes possible.

In my work, I have seen how quickly conflict can grow when people remain distant. I have also seen how it can soften when that distance is reduced, even a little.

If we want different outcomes, we need to create different conditions.

Not just for conversation, but for connection.

Because in the end, it is not the strength of our arguments that moves people.

It is the moment they feel seen, and begin to see each other again.

🎧 Related Conversation

If this resonates, I explored this idea further in a recent episode of The Schmooze with Michelle Mather and Kim Kitai of Bridges YYC.

Spotify:

YouTube:

There is a scene in Good Will Hunting that has stayed with me for years.

Robin Williams’ character, Sean, sits across from Will, played by Matt Damon, a brilliant young man convinced that knowledge is mastery. Quote enough, read enough, intellectualize enough, and you understand the world.

And Sean dismantles him.

Not by arguing facts.

But by exposing the gap between knowing about something and actually knowing it.

That distinction feels more urgent now than ever.

We live in a time when fluency is mistaken for depth, vocabulary for wisdom, and ideological certainty for moral seriousness. A person absorbs the right language, the approved frameworks, the polished conclusions, and begins to speak not as someone still exploring, but as someone who has already conquered the subject. Curiosity quietly gives way to performance. Complexity is flattened into confidence.

Nowhere is this more visible than in how so many in the West speak about Jews.

The cadence is familiar. It is confident, moralized, and fully formed, as if recited from a script. Zionism collapses into a slogan. Jewish identity is recast as a political costume. Jewish history is reshaped to fit whatever narrative serves the ideology of the moment. Words like colonialism, apartheid, supremacy, and genocide are deployed with precision, as though the accusation itself were the argument, as though moral posture could replace the slower work of understanding.

Some have devoured books and articles in pursuit of this certainty. Many more have simply consumed thirty-second clips. Snippets of outrage. Decontextualized images. Slogans delivered with cinematic conviction.

Either way, what you are hearing is rarely depth. It is rehearsal.

What Sean understands in that moment is something more profound than a correction of arrogance. He is pointing to the limits of secondhand knowledge. You can read about art, but that does not mean you have stood before a masterpiece and felt the silence it demands. You can read about love, but that does not mean you have known devotion, heartbreak, or sacrifice. You can read about suffering, but that does not mean you understand what it is to carry pain, memory, fear, or loss across generations.

There is a kind of knowledge that can only be approximated from a distance.

And there is another kind that requires proximity, humility, and genuine encounter.

This is the gap so many never recognize.

They have mastered the language that surrounds Jews. The commentary, the analyses, the confident judgments. They know the narratives and the ready-made frameworks into which Jews are expected to fit.

But they do not know Jews.

They do not sense the lived texture of Jewish life. Its contradictions. Its inherited grief braided with reflexive humor. Its resilience and continuity. The way memory functions inside a people that has carried both trauma and responsibility across centuries.

They may have learned the grammar of the conversation, but not the heartbeat beneath it.

That matters.

Because once a people are abstracted, once they become symbol rather than community, they grow easy to theorize, instrumentalize, and morally rearrange. Their complexity becomes inconvenient. Their voice becomes a disruption. Their self-understanding is treated as secondary to the framework imposed from outside.

This is what much of contemporary discourse about Jews in the West often looks like.

It rarely arrives wearing the old, crude language of hatred. Instead, it speaks in the newest idioms of analysis and critique. It presents itself as insight. As ethical clarity. As historically informed judgment. It borrows the vocabulary of justice and wraps itself in abstraction, mistaking sophistication for substance.

Yet dressing ignorance in intellectual clothing does not make it less ignorant. Sometimes it simply makes the ignorance harder to detect.

There is a peculiar confidence that distance affords.

The farther one stands from the human reality of a people, the easier it becomes to sound certain. Friction disappears. Contradictions smooth away. The discomfort that comes when real lives resist neat categories never arrives.

And Jews, perhaps more than most peoples, resist simplification.

To encounter Jewish identity in any meaningful way is to meet a collective reality that defies ideological neatness. Jews are a people, a civilization, a tradition, a memory community, an indigenous continuity, a religious inheritance, and a lived cultural reality all at once.

Jewishness cannot be cleanly separated into the boxes outsiders prefer. It is not merely religion, though religion runs through it. It is not merely ethnicity, though ethnicity is part of it. It is not merely nationality, though national peoplehood has long been woven into Jewish self-understanding. It is a continuity that predates the categories now used to judge it.

This resistance to tidy binaries frustrates those who prefer every story reduced to familiar roles.

Many educated voices believe they have moved beyond older forms of prejudice. They see themselves as morally alert. In their minds, they have done the reading, located the parties in the grand narrative, and placed Jews and the Jewish state accordingly. They believe they are correcting history rather than repeating its patterns.

But the pattern remains.

Jews are defined from the outside.
Jewish identity is explained back to Jews.
Jewish fear is dismissed.
Jewish memory is recoded.
Jewish self-determination is reframed.
Jewish complexity is absorbed into a story written before Jews were allowed to speak as subjects.

What changes is the vocabulary. What remains is the arrogance.

And that arrogance is not merely political. It is epistemological.

Sean says something in that moment, amidst the self-doubt, that always stayed with me:

“I stayed up half the night thinking about it…then something occurred to me. And I fell into a deep, peaceful sleep.”

Not because the world had changed, but because he had seen something clearly.

That realization matters.

Not because the danger disappears, or because ignorance cannot become powerful. It can.

But because what we are seeing is not the discovery of hidden truth. It is the confusion of language for understanding.

And that kind of certainty has limits to how much weight it can bear.

Once you see that clearly, you can sleep just fine.

Instead of turning every exchange into a debate, we can choose something harder.

We can go goodwill hunting for common ground.

In that spirit, if I were sitting across from you, really sitting across from you, I would not argue with you.

I would not try to out-quote you or out-source you or match you article for article.

I would simply say this.

You have read about Jews.

You have absorbed the language and the frameworks that make certainty feel earned.

But you do not know us.

You do not know what it means to carry a history that is remembered in the bones, not studied from a distance.

You do not know what it feels like to recognize patterns others insist are new.

You do not know what it is to sit at a table where identity is not debated, but simply lived.

You can speak about power.

But you have never felt what it means to be a people that survived without it.

You can speak about justice.

But you have never wrestled with being judged by standards applied to no one else.

You can speak about history.

But you have never inherited it the way we have.

And until you are willing to step outside the certainty you have constructed, to risk the discomfort of real encounter, you do not actually know what you are talking about.

Your move, chief.

Yesterday, on Yom HaShoah, I stood in a Calgary high school delivering a Holocaust education presentation through the Here to Tell program.

Every presentation follows a pattern. We thank the students for listening and remind them that not long ago a teacher in Alberta used a similar classroom not to educate but to distort. Jim Keegstra taught Holocaust denial and antisemitic conspiracy theories to his students in Eckville. The scandal forced Canadians to face something uncomfortable. Hate can wear the face of authority and classrooms can shape prejudice as easily as they can challenge it.

That history is why programs like Here to Tell exist. Memory does not sustain itself. It needs teachers, witnesses, and conversations to keep it alive. Classrooms matter, and what is taught or absorbed inside them matters even more.

This time, we had extra time. The session stretched to nearly three hours as we traced the evolution of antisemitism from medieval myths to modern propaganda, from words to laws, from discrimination to annihilation. We explored how ordinary citizens became participants, how bureaucracies mechanized cruelty, and how survivors rebuilt lives after unimaginable loss.

The students were remarkable. They were curious and compassionate and alert. They asked questions about resistance, about the bystanders, about what hatred looks like when it does not announce itself. You could feel the room leaning forward. Empathy seemed to grow with each story shared.

Or at least, I thought it did.

At the end I decided to take a risk and share something personal.

When I was growing up in Red Deer in the mid 1980s, just outside Eckville, there were no signs saying “No Jews Allowed.” Antisemitism moved quietly in those days, a low hum almost never shouted but always present. Most kids had never met a Jew before, so difference had to be imagined. And when imagination fills the space where knowledge should live, distortion follows.

As a child you learn to calibrate identity for social survival. I noticed something simple. If I said I was Jewish, I met hesitation or suspicion. But if I said I was Israeli, the mood softened. In the 1980s, Israel was seen as resilient, a story of renewal after tragedy. To say “Israeli” carried an echo of strength. It made the conversation easier.

So yesterday, near the end of the presentation, I asked the students a question.

“If I were that same kid today, should I tell people I’m Jewish… or should I tell them I’m…?”

Then I said the word.

“Israeli.”

Something shifted. Heads shook. Murmurs flickered. It was not anger, but discomfort. Quiet and unmistakable.

I paused.

“Did I change in the last two minutes?” I asked.
“After three hours of history, empathy, and survivor testimony, what changed?”

Nothing about me had changed. Only the label.

Earlier we had discussed the Nuremberg Laws and how the Nazi state transformed faith into race, opinion into biology, until identity itself became grounds for punishment. Those laws reduced people to categories they could never escape.

And now, at the close of that same lesson, I shared another truth. I was born in Israel. My Israeli identity is not a slogan I adopted. It is part of my birth, my family, and my people’s history after the Holocaust, the chapter that begins when survivors came home to no home at all and rebuilt one from the ashes.

In that moment, it became clear. This too was being judged. Not for what I believe or what I have done, but for what I was born into.

If anti-Zionism is truly distinct from antisemitism, why would the word Israeli, a fact of origin and not ideology, trigger discomfort immediately after hours of humanization?

What exactly is being rejected?

In the 1980s, the bias landed on Jewish.
Yesterday, in that Calgary classroom, it surfaced at Israeli.

The target shifted.
The instinct did not.

This is not about shielding Israel from criticism. No country is beyond scrutiny and every nation must be held accountable for its actions. Recognition does not require abandoning nuance. It requires noticing when discomfort with one identity quietly turns into rejection of another, when sympathy arrives with conditions attached.

If Keegstra once taught denial from the front of the classroom, today’s distortions seep through screens, slogans, and curated narratives. They teach empathy only within approved boundaries. Students scroll through stories that frame identity as ideology, and they learn, often without realizing it, which versions of humanity are acceptable and which are suspect.

It usually begins with a distinction. Jewish but not Israeli.
Empathy but with conditions.

Over time those distinctions collapse.

What I witnessed was not hatred. The students did not reject me. They had just heard a deeply human story. But they had absorbed a new reflex, the idea that one part of who I am can be embraced while another must be disavowed.

That is not progress.
That is translation.

The language has changed.
The pattern remains.

Hatred does not always disappear.
Sometimes it learns the language of the present.

If we are serious about Holocaust education and Never Again, we must go beyond teaching that the Holocaust was evil. We must teach how prejudice hides, how it rebrands itself, and how it adapts its vocabulary while preserving its logic.

Recognition is the real goal of remembrance.

Because the instinct we fear most rarely dies. It waits, translates, and finds new words.

And our task, every Yom HaShoah and every classroom, is to recognize it when it walks back in wearing different clothes.

There has been a shift.

It is not loud at first. It does not announce itself clearly. It does not arrive as a rupture, but as a subtle reorientation. Yet once you begin to notice it, you see it everywhere.

It is no longer enough to disagree with someone. Increasingly, we decide what kind of person they are based on what they believe.

Not wrong. Not mistaken.

Evil.

In a recent conversation on The Schmooze, Rabbi Ilana Krygier Lapides gave language to something that has been quietly reshaping the way we relate to one another.

“People aren’t just disagreeing anymore. They’re starting to see those who think differently as evil.”

This is not merely a shift in tone. It is a shift in moral imagination. It changes not only how we argue, but how we perceive the person in front of us.

Disagreement, in its healthier form, has always existed within the boundaries of shared humanity. It allowed for intensity, even for anger, but it did not require the erasure of the other. You could contest an idea without collapsing the person into it. You could reject a position without rejecting the humanity of the one who held it.

What is changing now is that the disagreement itself is beginning to absorb the person. Belief is no longer something one holds. It is something one is. And once that fusion occurs, opposition is no longer experienced as intellectual friction. It is experienced as moral threat.

And once that happens, something essential is lost.

As a mediator, I spend my time in the presence of conflict. Not the abstract kind, but the lived kind. Disputes over finances, over children, over betrayal and loss. These are not ideological disagreements. They are deeply personal, often painful, and rooted in the realities of people’s lives.

Yet even in the most strained and emotionally charged moments, there is a quiet condition that makes resolution possible. The person across from you must still be recognized as a person.

Not a symbol. Not a category. Not an adversarial construct.

A person.

This recognition is not sentimental. It is functional. It is the precondition for movement. When it holds, even imperfectly, there remains space for listening, for reconsideration, for the slow and often uncomfortable work of softening one’s certainty. The process is not easy, but it remains possible.

When that condition breaks, everything changes.

Conflict ceases to be about issues and becomes about identity. You are no longer engaging with an idea. You are defending who you are. And if the other person embodies something you believe is wrong, then their very presence begins to feel intolerable.

At that point, conversation does not simply become difficult. It becomes structurally impossible.

What makes Rabbi Ilana’s observation so striking is not only its accuracy, but the trajectory it implies. A society in which disagreement collapses into moral judgment cannot sustain meaningful dialogue for long. It becomes rigid in its thinking, fragile in its cohesion, and increasingly prone to fracture.

We begin to lose our ability to sit with complexity. We lose the capacity to hold competing truths without demanding immediate resolution. We lose the discipline required to remain in relationship with those whose views unsettle us.

And perhaps most significantly, we lose sight of one another.

The person disappears, and in their place stands a representation. A position. A threat.

At that point, the conflict is no longer about what is true or even what is right. It becomes about who is good and who is not.

Traditions, particularly religious ones, have long understood this danger. They do not eliminate disagreement. In many cases, they preserve it. But they insist on something deeper than agreement as the foundation of communal life. They orient individuals toward shared responsibility, toward limits on judgment, and toward an understanding of human dignity that precedes opinion.

Not because consensus is achievable, but because without that grounding, disagreement becomes corrosive.

Passover, at its core, is a story of liberation. It is about leaving behind a system that reduces human beings to fixed categories and reasserting the idea that identity is not something imposed from the outside, but something lived from within.

But it is also a story about memory and continuity. About what it means to carry something forward without becoming consumed by it. About how identity can anchor without hardening.

Perhaps one of its quieter lessons, especially in this moment, is that freedom is not only the ability to speak, but the ability to remain in relationship while doing so. It requires restraint. It requires the discipline to engage without erasing. It requires the ability to stand firmly without collapsing into certainty.

To disagree without dehumanizing is not a soft skill. It is a demanding one.

It asks something of us that feels increasingly countercultural. It asks us to tolerate discomfort without resolving it immediately. It asks us to recognize the limits of our own perspective. It asks us to resist the pull toward moral clarity when that clarity comes at the expense of another person’s humanity.

I do not believe we have lost that capacity.

But I do believe we are testing it.

And the question before us is not whether we will continue to disagree. That is inevitable. It is, in many ways, necessary.

The question is whether we can do so without turning one another into something less than human.

🎧 This piece was inspired by my conversation with Rabbi Ilana Krygier Lapides on The Schmooze. You can listen to the full episode here:

Subscribe now

Passover is often told as a story of liberation, yet before liberation there is something far less comfortable to sit with: collapse.

Egypt does not fall in a single moment, nor does it suddenly lose its power or coherence. Instead, it fractured gradually, revealing beneath its strength a system already beginning to fail. What once appeared stable and enduring, from its water, its food, its health, its sense of order, all began to deteriorate, and a civilization that once seemed immovable starts to expose something far more fragile beneath the surface.

We call these moments plagues, but there is another way to understand them. Rather than viewing them as isolated or arbitrary punishments, they can be seen as revelations, as unfolding exposures of a system that has already begun to distort itself. Egypt’s defining turn is not slavery alone, but the moment it chooses to organize itself around fear of the Jews. The Torah captures this shift with striking precision: “Come, let us deal wisely with them…” not because of what they have done, but because of what they might become. That choice, subtle as it may appear, is decisive. From that point forward, Egypt is no longer acting in accordance with its own long-term stability or self-interest. It is reacting, reorganizing itself around anxiety rather than purpose.

When a society begins to define itself through hostility and fear, the distortion does not remain confined to its initial target. At first, these changes are not immediately visible. The institutions continue to function, the machinery of governance remains intact, and the outward appearance of strength persists. Yet beneath that surface, something fundamental has already shifted. Resources begin to flow differently, language becomes reshaped to justify new priorities, and decisions are no longer guided by growth or stability, but by the perceived necessity of managing a threat. Over time, these distortions spread, moving beyond rhetoric into structure, and beyond structure into consequence.

It is in this light that the plagues take on a different meaning. The transformation of water into something undrinkable, the failure of food systems, the collapse of health, and the erosion of social order are not merely external afflictions imposed upon Egypt. They are manifestations of a deeper breakdown, each one revealing a layer of vulnerability that had already been forming. Egypt is not being destroyed from the outside. It is unraveling from within, and the plagues simply make visible what the system has become and what it can no longer sustain.

This pattern does not belong to Egypt alone. History has repeated it often enough that it resists dismissal. Societies that direct their energy toward hating Jews do not strengthen themselves in the process; they weaken, even if that weakening is not immediately apparent. The effects may take time to surface, and they may not always be measurable in obvious ways, but they emerge with consistency. Once distortion is accepted as truth in one area, it does not remain contained. It spreads outward, reshaping institutions, influencing decision-making, and gradually altering the trajectory of the society itself.

It always begins with the Jews, yet it never ends with the Jews. What starts as fixation becomes ideology, and ideology reshapes institutions, which in turn reshape outcomes. The energy that might otherwise have been directed toward building is redirected toward blame, and clarity gives way to narrative. In this process, self-interest is quietly abandoned in favor of a sense of righteousness that feels morally justified, even as it corrodes the very structure that sustains it.

This is not merely a historical observation, but a living pattern. We do not inhabit ancient Egypt, yet we are not beyond the reach of the same dynamics. When societies begin to fixate, when moral language becomes selective, and when hostility is reframed as principle, the early signs appear, not as indications of strength, but as signals of fracture. And as history has shown, those fractures do not remain contained, rather they expand, gradually at first, and then with increasing consequence.

The Passover story does not suggest that responding to such conditions is simple. The Exodus itself unfolds not as a clean or triumphant departure, but as a deeply disorienting process. Pharaoh relents, only to reverse himself. The people leave, only to panic. Standing at the edge of the sea, with the past behind them and uncertainty ahead, they question whether leaving was a mistake. This is not inconsistency or weakness, but the natural experience of transition. Leaving a system built on distortion does not immediately produce clarity. it produces uncertainty, hesitation, and the need to move forward even before a clear path is visible.

Complicating this further is the presence of internal tension, which the story does not attempt to conceal. Figures like Dathan and Abiram do not align themselves with Pharaoh, yet they do not move forward with conviction either. Instead, they challenge the direction of their own people at critical moments, introducing doubt and instability from within. They are not the origin of oppression, but they are shaped by the conditions it creates, and their presence reflects a reality that extends beyond the ancient narrative.

In every generation, similar dynamics emerge. There are voices that blur the line between critique and alignment with distortion, not always out of malice and not always with full awareness, but often with a similar effect. They complicate clarity at precisely the moments it is most needed. They do not create the external pressure, but they influence how it is understood and navigated, adding another layer of difficulty to an already complex path.

Which brings us back to the central insight embedded in the Passover story. The challenge is not the outcome, but the path. Jewish continuity is not presented as fragile, but as enduring. The Haggadah makes clear that in every generation the story continues, not because conditions are easy, but because the direction remains intact. What proves difficult is not survival itself, but the ability to move through periods of distortion and confusion without losing sight of what is true.

That requires vigilance, not only against external forces, but against the internal responses those forces provoke. It requires the capacity to recognize patterns even when they appear in new forms, and the discipline to resist narratives that feel coherent but are built on inversion. It demands a refusal to simplify what is complex, and a commitment to clarity even when clarity is not immediately rewarded.

The Haggadah does not ask us to remember this as a distant historical event. It asks us to see ourselves as if we are living it, because in many ways, we are. The lesson of Passover is not only that liberation is possible, but that when a civilization defines itself through hatred of Jews, it does not ultimately weaken the Jews. It reveals, and accelerates, its own unraveling.

The plagues were never only about Egypt.

They were about what Egypt had become.

And that is why the story continues to be told.

There is a pattern in Jewish history that is too often overlooked because it is uncomfortable to name.

Hostility toward Jews has rarely depended on accusation alone. It becomes far more powerful when it appears to be confirmed from within. When a hostile narrative can point to a Jewish voice, a Jewish name, or a Jewish identity as evidence in its favor, it gains an authority it could not otherwise command.

That is not a rejection of dissent. Jewish tradition has always contained disagreement, argument, and rigorous internal critique. The question is not whether Jews may criticize one another, or themselves, or the institutions that claim to speak in their name. The question is what happens when critique ceases to illuminate and instead becomes a vehicle for confirmation. At that point, the issue is no longer disagreement. It is amplification.

Because once a hostile idea can claim internal validation, it stops looking like prejudice and starts looking like insight.

That is how bias gains cultural force. Not merely by being spoken, but by appearing to be endorsed from within.

Power and Alignment

This pattern is not new. It appears early, and with clarity.

One of the earliest examples is Tiberius Julius Alexander. Born into a prominent Jewish family in Alexandria, Alexander rose within the Roman imperial order and distanced himself from Jewish life in favor of total alignment with Roman authority. His Jewish origin did not disappear. But it became secondary to his position inside a hierarchy that demanded loyalty above all else.

That alignment was not neutral.

During the Jewish revolt, Alexander served as a senior commander in the Roman campaign that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem. His presence did not make the Roman campaign just. But it did make it more legible to those watching. Opposition to the Jewish revolt could now be understood not simply as imperial force, but as force accompanied by a figure of Jewish origin within its ranks.

The outcome was not determined by his identity.

But his identity shaped how the outcome could be received.

In systems of power, acceptance is rarely passive. It is secured through alignment. And sometimes the most visible form of alignment is separation, distance, or even opposition to one’s own origin.

What begins as detachment can, under pressure, become participation.

Distortion as Authority

The same dynamic becomes even more explicit in medieval Europe, where religious power defined legitimacy and dissent was often punished as heresy.

Figures such as Nicholas Donin demonstrate how distortion can become institutional force. Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, brought accusations before Church authorities that the Talmud contained blasphemies and dangerous content deserving suppression. These were not fair or honest representations. They were distortions that fit an already hostile framework.

What gave them force was not their truth.

It was their source.

Because Donin came from within the Jewish world, his claims could be received as informed rather than prejudiced. That perception mattered. It helped transform accusation into authority and helped give cover to measures that followed, including the Disputation of Paris in 1240 and the burning of thousands of Jewish manuscripts.

The accusations did not become powerful because they were accurate. They became powerful because they were believed.

That pattern did not stop there.

Pablo Christiani used Jewish texts in public debates while reshaping them to support Christian theological claims. Abner of Burgos went even further, producing writings that not only attacked Judaism but urged coercive action against Jewish communities. In both cases, proximity to Jewish learning was converted into leverage, and leverage into pressure.

Again, the content was shaped to fit a hostile framework.

What allowed it to travel was the perception that it was not only imposed from outside, but affirmed from within.

Repurposed Ideas

As power changed form, so did the mechanism.

By the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, born into a family of Jewish origin, had become one of the most influential critics of religion and capitalist society. But in On the Jewish Question, his critique was not simply directed at social structures. It repeatedly drew on language that reduced Judaism to money, commerce, and the corrosive force of materialism. Those passages echoed older antisemitic associations and gave them intellectual packaging that made them easier to repeat.

This does not mean Marx invented antisemitic ideas. He did something more durable and, in some ways, more consequential: he gave them philosophical language.

That matters because ideas do not remain confined to the moment in which they are written. They are extracted, simplified, and repurposed. What begins as internal critique can become, in other hands, external validation.

That is the danger.

An idea spreads not only because of what it says, but because of where it appears to come from.

Ancestry and Persecution

Modern history makes this logic even harder to ignore.

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jewish identity was defined not by belief, practice, or self-understanding, but by ancestry. A person could be secular, converted, or fully assimilated and still be marked as a Jew. That is one of the central truths of antisemitic systems: they do not rely on how Jews define themselves. They rely on how Jews are defined by others.

That distinction matters, especially when discussing Jews who were forced into morally impossible roles under Nazi rule. Those conditions were defined by coercion at the most extreme level. They involved choiceless choices, where the alternatives were not clean moral options but forms of survival under threat of death for oneself and one’s family.

Those cases do not belong in the same category as the figures discussed above.

The people examined here were not acting under immediate coercion. They were operating through alignment, positioning, intellectual ambition, or political advancement. That difference is not incidental. It is the foundation of the argument.

The Contemporary Form

The pattern has not disappeared. It has adapted.

In academic and intellectual circles, figures such as Norman Finkelstein have advanced hard-edged critiques of Israel that are often cited in activist environments with nuance stripped away and context discarded. In media and commentary spaces, voices like Dave Smith reduce complex geopolitical realities to simplified narratives that travel quickly because they are easy to repeat.

That is not unique to them. But they are part of a broader ecosystem in which the force of a claim is often measured less by its accuracy than by its portability.

The dynamic becomes more visible in curated spaces, where representation itself is part of the message.

At events such as the “Contextualizing Palestine” panel led by Muhannad Ayyash, the inclusion of figures like Dr. Roberta Lexier illustrates a more subtle version of the same mechanism. Lexier’s presence, as a Jewish academic, carried symbolic weight within the structure of the event. Whether intended or not, it could be read as evidence that the framing being offered was not merely external to the Jewish world.

That is the point.

The issue is not simply that a Jewish voice was included. It is how that inclusion functioned. When a Jewish participant does not materially complicate the dominant narrative, the presence itself can help legitimize the frame. It signals that the message is not purely imposed from the outside. It appears, at least in part, to be ratified from within.

In that sense, representation is not merely descriptive.

It becomes functional.

And once that happens, the line between critique and validation begins to blur.

The Feedback Loop

This is not an abstract concern. It is a social and political one.

Across social media platforms, antisemitic language, imagery, and conspiracy narratives have expanded in reach and normality. These ideas now travel through political discourse with alarming ease, often disguised as higher moral seriousness or anti-colonial insight. The pace of circulation has outrun the pace of contextualization.

On university campuses, similar tensions have become more visible. Jewish students increasingly face environments in which identity, history, and political perspective are not always treated as worthy of equal protection. In some spaces, the question is no longer whether antisemitism exists, but whether it can be named without penalty.

At the national level, the trend is undeniable. Across Canada, antisemitic incidents have risen sharply in recent years, reflecting not only an increase in frequency but a change in atmosphere. What once might have remained marginal now moves more openly through public life.

These developments reinforce one another.

Validation enables spread.

Spread normalizes hostility.

Normalization increases the value of further validation.

That is the loop.

And once it is in motion, representation can do more than challenge a narrative. It can help stabilize it.

From Pattern to Politics

Patterns do not remain theoretical. They harden into institutions.

With Avi Lewis now confirmed as leader of the New Democratic Party, the direction of the party is no longer speculative. It is established.

Lewis has positioned himself as a Jewish anti-Zionist voice, one who frames Zionism as inseparable from Palestinian displacement and who calls for sweeping changes to Canada’s relationship with Israel. That positioning matters not because a Jewish person is expressing a view, but because the identity itself changes how the view is received.

It can function as insulation.

In a political environment where anti-Zionism can be met with suspicion, a Jewish leader offering that critique allows the movement to claim it is not hostile to Jews, only critical of Israel. That may be rhetorically convenient. It does not resolve the underlying issue.

The question is not whether Lewis has the right to hold or express his views. He does. The question is what those views do inside a political ecosystem already shaped by rising antisemitic hostility and increasing pressure to treat anti-Zionist framing as morally incontestable.

This is not a question of intent.

It is a question of function.

If a political environment consistently elevates narratives that contribute to hostility toward Jews, then a Jewish voice inside that environment does not automatically cleanse the movement of its effects. In some cases, it makes those effects harder to confront.

That question sits within a broader transformation of the NDP itself.

The party was founded as a movement rooted in labor, economic justice, and the material concerns of working people. Its historic identity was domestic and practical. It aimed, at least in principle, to speak to the everyday realities of Canadians.

That identity has not vanished. But it has been reframed.

In recent years, the party has increasingly adopted the language of activism that places disproportionate emphasis on international ideological positioning, particularly on Israel. Within that frame, anti-Zionism has not remained one issue among many. In some circles, it has become a defining lens.

That shift has consequences.

When a political movement becomes organized around a single external issue, especially one framed in absolute moral terms, it risks losing sight of its own core purpose. Domestic concerns are pushed aside. Economic questions become filtered through symbolic alignment. The party begins to speak less about the material conditions of Canadian life and more about positioning itself inside global ideological disputes.

Lewis matters because he is not separate from that shift.

He embodies it.

His political stance aligns with the currents that have become more prominent inside the party. More importantly, his identity allows that stance to operate with less friction. It can be presented as proof that the movement’s position is not antisemitic because it is voiced by someone who is Jewish.

But that does not solve the problem.

It deepens it.

A movement does not become insulated from criticism because it can point to one Jewish figure as evidence of its fairness. If anything, that is precisely how the critique becomes harder to make. The presence of internal validation can obscure the external effects of the ideology being advanced.

The issue is no longer only leadership.

It is direction.

And now that the direction has been formalized, the harder question is unavoidable: what does this mean for Jewish life in Canada?

History cannot answer that question with certainty. But it can identify the risk.

Clarity and Responsibility

There is no way to eliminate disagreement within a global people. Nor should there be.

But there is a need for clarity.

Clarity about the difference between critique and reinforcement.

Clarity about the environments in which arguments are made and received.

Clarity about the consequences that follow when internal validation strengthens external hostility.

History does not repeat in identical form. But patterns persist, often long before their full consequences become visible.

The question is not whether individuals will continue to position themselves against the Jewish collective.

The question is whether we are prepared to understand what happens when they do.

Because once we understand that, the conversation changes.

It becomes less about intent.

And more about responsibility.

Subscribe now

There are moments in history when confusion becomes more dangerous than opposition.

We are living in one of those moments.

Across the Jewish world, the conversation feels reactive, fragmented, and often driven by the urgency of events rather than the clarity of strategy. Headlines dictate tone. Emotions dictate response. Yet beneath the noise, a far more important reality is taking shape, one that demands a disciplined and unified understanding.

The Jewish people are engaged in a two-front struggle.

One front is military, geopolitical, and existential.
The other is cultural, ideological, and civilizational.

One is fought by Israel.
The other is fought by Jews everywhere.

They are distinct arenas, but they are not separate. They are expressions of the same struggle, and success on one front cannot be sustained without success on the other.

What is required now is not simply resilience, but strategy.

Israel and the Consolidation of Power

Israel is no longer operating solely within the familiar paradigm of defense and deterrence. It is entering a phase in which it is actively shaping the regional order.

The confrontation with Iran is not another cycle of escalation. It is a structural inflection point. For decades, Iran’s strategy has been built on encirclement, proxy warfare, and the slow erosion of Israeli security through indirect pressure. If that strategy is decisively weakened or dismantled, the implications will extend far beyond the immediate battlefield.

The balance of power in the Middle East will shift fundamentally.

Israel will not simply emerge intact. It will emerge central. A state whose military capability, intelligence reach, and strategic positioning make it the defining stabilizing force in the region. In practical terms, this is what a regional superpower looks like.

But power without direction is not strength. It is volatility.

The challenge facing Israel is not only external. It is internal. Political fragmentation, short-term coalition incentives, and competing sectoral interests have limited the country’s ability to operate with long-term strategic coherence. Governance has too often been shaped by what is necessary to maintain a coalition rather than what is required to define a national trajectory.

This raises a necessary and uncomfortable question.

What could Israeli leadership look like if it were structured around long-term national interest rather than perpetual political negotiation?

What could parties like Likud achieve if they were not consistently constrained by narrower factions whose priorities are not always aligned with broader strategic goals?

This is not an argument for excluding religious voices from Israeli life. Such a position would ignore both reality and the richness of Israeli society. It is an argument for rebalancing priorities so that national strategy is not subordinate to political survival.

If Israel is to step into the role that history is opening before it, it must develop the internal cohesion necessary to act with clarity and purpose.

Regional power demands internal discipline.

The Diaspora and the Battle for Legitimacy

While Israel shapes the physical reality of Jewish security, the diaspora shapes how that reality is understood.

This second front is less visible, but no less consequential.

Across academic institutions, media platforms, and public discourse, the narrative surrounding Israel has undergone a profound transformation. Terms once grounded in specific legal and historical contexts are now deployed as political instruments. Frameworks that claim moral authority are often built on selective interpretation or outright distortion.

This shift has not occurred by accident. It is the result of sustained ideological effort, repeated often enough and confidently enough to create the appearance of consensus.

The consequences are significant.

False accusations travel quickly and take root easily.
Antizionism is increasingly framed as a legitimate and even necessary moral position.
Jewish identity itself is drawn into political narratives that seek to redefine it from the outside.

In this environment, silence is not neutrality. It is surrender.

Yet reaction alone is insufficient. Outrage without structure does not persuade. It exhausts.

What is required is a strategic approach to legitimacy.

This begins with alliances. The Jewish community cannot and should not attempt to navigate this terrain in isolation. Durable relationships with other communities, faith groups, and civic partners are essential. These alliances must be grounded in shared principles such as pluralism, democratic values, and mutual respect, not merely in moments of crisis.

It also requires narrative discipline. Language is not incidental. It shapes perception, and perception shapes reality. Terms such as genocide, apartheid, and settler colonialism carry immense moral weight. When they are misapplied, they do more than distort the truth. They erode the possibility of honest discourse.

Reclaiming narrative clarity is not about messaging. It is about intellectual integrity and moral seriousness.

Finally, it requires a renewed understanding of Hasbara. At its best, Hasbara is not propaganda or public relations. It is the clear and confident articulation of truth in an environment where truth is contested. It must be proactive, consistent, and rooted in both fact and clarity of expression.

The goal is not to win isolated arguments. The goal is to shape understanding over time.

Unity Without Uniformity

If there is a single vulnerability that affects both fronts, it is internal fragmentation within the Jewish world itself.

Disagreement is not new. It has always been part of Jewish life. Nor is disagreement inherently a weakness. It can be a source of intellectual vitality and moral seriousness.

The danger emerges when disagreement becomes disunity.

Unity does not require uniformity of thought, belief, or political position. It does require a shared commitment to collective strength and continuity. It requires the ability to debate without delegitimizing, to challenge without dividing, and to prioritize long-term survival over short-term ideological victory.

External pressures on the Jewish people are coordinated, persistent, and strategic.

A fragmented response is not sufficient to meet them.

From Concept to Action

What this looks like in practice is not theoretical. It is already beginning to take shape at the community level. A recent initiative led by the Calgary Jewish Federation offers a clear example of what intentional organization can achieve when it is approached with structure and purpose. Through a town hall process, the community gathered feedback, identified priorities, and is now moving toward concrete initiatives that strengthen both internal cohesion and external visibility.

The steps themselves are simple, but powerful. A centralized community directory. Short, shareable video introductions that articulate who we are, what we do, and why it matters. A coordinated effort to amplify these messages across networks. Plans for a volunteer hub that aligns needs with capacity. These are not abstract ideals. They are practical tools that build connection, clarity, and presence. They create a community that is not only engaged internally, but legible externally.

This is the model.

If replicated across communities in Canada and beyond, these kinds of structured, intentional efforts can transform the diaspora from a collection of individuals and organizations into a coordinated network. One that speaks more clearly, connects more effectively, and acts with greater strategic alignment.

One Strategy, Two Arenas

Israel and the diaspora are often spoken about as separate spheres. One is seen as political and military. The other as cultural and communal.

This distinction is misleading.

They are not separate stories. They are interdependent dimensions of a single reality.

Israel secures the physical future of the Jewish people.
The diaspora sustains the legitimacy of that future in the eyes of the world.

Power and legitimacy are not interchangeable, but they are inseparable.

A state that is strong but isolated will struggle to sustain its position.
A people that is understood but unprotected will not endure.

The task before us is alignment.

Not rhetorical unity, but operational unity.
Not agreement on everything, but clarity on what matters most.

This is not a moment for fragmentation, hesitation, or internal drift.

It is a moment that demands discipline, coordination, and purpose.

Because this is not only a test of strength.

It is a test of whether we are prepared to act like a people that understands the scale of the moment it is living in.

Subscribe now

This essay is part of a broader effort to examine a recurring pattern in contemporary academic discourse on Israel, particularly in the work of M. Muhannad Ayyash.

These arguments are often advanced under the language of academic freedom and critical analysis. That framing lends them authority. It should not exempt them from scrutiny.

When a set of claims is repeated across multiple platforms, presented as scholarship, and absorbed into public discourse, it becomes necessary to examine not only the conclusions, but the assumptions that produce them.

A recent opinion piece in The New Arab, by Ayyash, offers a useful case study. It argues that the current U.S. and Israeli confrontation with Iran has opened a regional “Pandora’s box,” unleashing instability that will be difficult to contain.

It is a compelling image. It is also a revealing one.

Because it depends on a premise that has quietly become embedded in much of the discourse. It assumes that instability is recent. That escalation begins at the point of visibility. That what came before can be treated as background rather than cause.

This is not a new analytical move. It is part of a broader pattern in which causality is compressed and then reassigned.

For years, the region has not been defined by stability, but by a form of managed and distributed conflict. Iran has built and sustained a network of non-state actors across multiple countries, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. These are not isolated developments. They are elements of a long-term regional strategy designed to project influence and apply pressure across multiple fronts simultaneously.

To describe the current moment as the opening of Pandora’s box is to detach it from that history. It is to suggest that instability began when it became undeniable, rather than when it was constructed.

That distinction matters. When the timeline is shortened, responsibility shifts.

This same compression appears in how the present conflicts are categorized. Gaza is framed as a humanitarian crisis. Lebanon is treated as a separate escalation. Syria is often folded into the same narrative without distinction.

Yet these are not discrete conflicts. They are interconnected expressions of a broader confrontation. What appears as expansion is, in many respects, the convergence of long-running fronts. The infrastructure, the alliances, and the strategic intent did not emerge suddenly. They have been in place for years.

To analyze each arena in isolation is to misunderstand the system it is part of.

At the same time, not every arena serves the same function, and here the flattening runs in the opposite direction. Recent actions in southern Syria, particularly those tied to the protection of Druze communities, do not fit neatly into the same analytical frame as Gaza or Lebanon. The Druze are a distinct minority with longstanding regional ties, including within Israel. Interventions in this context are localized, reactive, and tied to specific security concerns.

To collapse these distinctions into a single narrative of expansion is not clarity. It is moral ambiguity introduced through overgeneralization.

Language plays a central role in sustaining these frameworks, and few terms illustrate this more clearly than the repeated invocation of “genocide.” In legal terms, genocide is defined by specific intent to destroy a people, in whole or in part. That standard is exacting, and it is meant to be.

Yet in much of the current discourse, the term is deployed less as a legal conclusion than as a rhetorical foundation. Civilian suffering, scale of destruction, and the realities of urban warfare are treated as sufficient indicators of intent. The distinction between consequence and purpose is blurred, and often erased.

This shift has significant implications. Once genocide is asserted, the analytical space narrows. Every action becomes evidence. Every counterargument becomes denial. The term does not open inquiry. It closes it.

A similar dynamic can be observed in earlier arguments that define Zionism primarily through the experience of those who view themselves as its victims. While the centering of affected populations is an important part of understanding any conflict, defining a political movement exclusively through its negative impact on one group introduces a structural asymmetry. It privileges one lens as definitive, while excluding others from consideration.

This is not simply a matter of perspective. It is a methodological choice, one that shapes conclusions in advance.

The same pattern emerges in the treatment of agency. Iran is often described in reactive terms, as responding to pressure or escalation initiated elsewhere. Its role as a strategic actor, one that has invested decades in building regional capabilities and alliances, recedes into the background.

What remains is a narrative in which action and reaction are unevenly distributed. One side is analyzed in terms of decision-making and responsibility. The other is contextualized, its actions explained rather than examined.

This is not balance. It is asymmetry.

Critiques of strategy follow a similar trajectory. The claim that the United States lacks coherence is frequently asserted, but rarely interrogated. Modern conflict does not present itself through fully transparent or uniformly articulated objectives. Strategic ambiguity is often deliberate. It allows for flexibility, deterrence, and signaling across multiple audiences.

To interpret this ambiguity as confusion is to mistake opacity for absence.

What is perhaps most striking in these analyses is not what they critique, but what they leave unaddressed. If confrontation is the problem, what is the alternative? What form should restraint take in the face of an entrenched network of armed proxies and expanding capabilities? What mechanisms of deterrence or diplomacy are available, and under what conditions would they succeed?

These questions are rarely answered.

Instead, the argument returns to metaphor. Pandora’s box. A moment of rupture. A warning about consequences.

But metaphors cannot substitute for analysis.

The box was not opened recently. It has been open for years.

What has changed is not the presence of instability, but the willingness to confront it directly and the visibility that confrontation produces.

Recognizing this does not resolve the conflict. It does not eliminate risk or uncertainty. But it does require a different starting point, one that takes history seriously, that accounts for agency across all actors, and that resists the urge to compress complex processes into singular moments.

Academic freedom allows for the development and dissemination of ideas. It does not relieve those ideas of the obligation to withstand scrutiny.

And when recurring frameworks consistently narrow causality, redistribute responsibility, and substitute rhetoric for definition, that scrutiny becomes not only appropriate, but necessary.

Because when analysis begins by removing causality, it will almost always end by misplacing responsibility.

And when responsibility is misplaced, so too are the conclusions that follow.

Once again, a familiar story circulates, polished by new language but carrying an ancient shape.

It presents itself as analysis, but reveals itself, upon closer inspection, as something far older.

It is framed in the language of geopolitics. It speaks of influence, alliances, and strategic alignment. It invokes names, decisions, and conflicts to give itself the appearance of seriousness. But at its core, the claim is simple. That Israel is not merely an ally of the United States, but a hidden force directing its actions. That American presidents, whether it be Donald Trump or others, are acting not out of national interest, but under the influence, or even control, of Israeli power.

It is a claim that feels contemporary.

It is not.

It is, in substance, a modern rendering of an older idea. That Jews possess covert, disproportionate influence over the course of global affairs.

The language has changed. The structure of the argument has not.

What presents itself as geopolitical insight often collapses into something far more familiar: the assumption of hidden control.

Subscribe now

What Control Would Require

To take this argument seriously, however, is to test it against reality rather than dismiss it outright. If Israel truly exercised controlling influence over American foreign policy, one would expect a clear and consistent pattern. American decisions would reliably align with Israeli priorities, even in cases where such alignment would run counter to U.S. strategic or political interests. Control, by its nature, produces consistency.

Yet the historical record does not reflect such consistency.

A Pattern Across Administrations

Across administrations, the United States has repeatedly acted in ways that diverge from Israeli preferences.

Under George H. W. Bush, the United States withheld loan guarantees to pressure Israel over settlement policy. This was not symbolic disagreement. It was the application of financial leverage against a close ally.

During the presidency of Bill Clinton, American leadership pushed Israel toward territorial concessions in the lead-up to the Camp David Summit 2000. The process ultimately failed, but the pressure itself was unmistakable.

Under Barack Obama, the United States entered into the Iran nuclear deal despite sustained and vocal opposition from the Israeli government. The agreement represented one of the clearest strategic divergences between the two countries in recent decades.

Even under Donald Trump, whose administration has pursued close coordination with Israel on Iran, clear divergences have emerged. Reports from major outlets describe moments of friction. Trump has publicly distanced the United States from certain Israeli actions.

One example is the strike on Iran’s South Pars natural gas field, one of the largest in the world. He signaled that such actions would not be repeated. He has emphasized limited American objectives focused on degrading nuclear and missile capabilities, without committing to indefinite military engagement or full regime change.

Israel, by contrast, has at times pursued broader aims, including leadership eliminations and the possibility of regime collapse. Differences have also surfaced over the pace and duration of escalation, with Trump indicating a willingness to wind down operations as objectives are met, while Israeli leadership has pushed for sustained pressure.

These frictions, over targets, end goals, and escalation timelines, are not anomalies. They echo patterns seen across previous administrations. They demonstrate alliance dynamics with real pushback, not unidirectional hidden control.

American engagement with regional actors, including those hostile to Israel, has proceeded on its own terms. This is not incidental. It reflects a consistent pattern of independent strategic calculation.

These examples span parties, ideologies, and geopolitical contexts.

They do not suggest control.

They suggest independence within an alliance.

A system of control does not produce decades of documented disagreement.

What Is Openly Stated

It is important, at this stage, to separate what is true from what is imagined. Israel does have a clear and longstanding position on Iran.

For decades, Benjamin Netanyahu has warned about the dangers posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions. These warnings have not been subtle, nor have they been hidden. They have been articulated openly, in international forums, media appearances, and policy discussions. Israel’s strategic assessment is grounded in its perception of existential threat, shaped by Iran’s nuclear development, its network of regional proxies, and its openly hostile rhetoric toward Israel.

One may agree or disagree with this assessment. One may debate the appropriate response. But nothing about Israel’s position on Iran is covert. It is not whispered behind closed doors. It is declared in public view, repeatedly, consistently, and often in direct address to American audiences and leaders.

The very transparency of these advocacy efforts makes the leap to secret domination implausible.

The suggestion that American policy is secretly shaped by Israeli influence becomes increasingly difficult to sustain when the supposed source of that influence is itself transparent.

There is a difference between influence argued in public and control that must remain hidden.

The Question of American Involvement

The question of American involvement in regional conflict further complicates the narrative. It is often suggested that the United States is being “drawn into” confrontation on Israel’s behalf. This framing, however, overlooks a fundamental reality of the strategic environment.

Iran itself has indicated that escalation involving Israel could extend to American targets in the region. In doing so, it has effectively acknowledged that U.S. assets, personnel, and infrastructure fall within the scope of potential retaliation.

The United States maintains a significant presence across the Middle East. Its military bases, naval deployments, and diplomatic installations are not abstract symbols. They are tangible points of vulnerability in the event of escalation.

Under such conditions, American involvement is not something that must be engineered by an external actor.

It is an inherent consequence of its own strategic footprint.

To suggest that the United States requires Israel to bring it into a conflict in which it is already exposed is to misunderstand the nature of deterrence, escalation, and regional security dynamics.

When your assets are in range, involvement is not a favor. It is a consequence.

Why This Narrative Endures

The endurance of this narrative lies in its simplicity.

It offers a single explanatory framework for complex events. It replaces competing interests with a centralized force. It removes agency from global actors and consolidates it into an unseen hand.

In doing so, it transforms geopolitics into a story of manipulation rather than interaction.

That simplicity is not just persuasive. It is scalable. It fits neatly into headlines, segments, and soundbites. It rewards repetition over nuance and certainty over complexity.

Some commentators present these ideas as straightforward policy critique. And at times, they are. But when those critiques rely on the suggestion of a uniquely hidden influence, they begin to echo something far older. This dynamic can be seen not just in anonymous online forums, but in mainstream commentary.

Figures such as Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson often frame their commentary in the language of questioning and skepticism. For example, segments that repeatedly ask why the United States appears to act “on behalf of Israel,” or imply that American decision-making is being shaped by external pressure, including suggestions that the war serves Israeli dreams more than U.S. interests, may present themselves as inquiry.

Taken in isolation, such questions can sound reasonable. In aggregate, however, a pattern emerges. A pattern that leans not toward complexity, but toward insinuation.

It is a pattern that does not illuminate geopolitical dynamics. It flattens them.

And increasingly, it is amplified not because it is rigorous, but because it is effective. Because it draws attention. Because it rewards outrage.

Because it revives centuries-old slanders for clicks.

When one alliance is singled out for the language of hidden control while others are understood as normal expressions of strategy, the distinction often lies not in evidence, but in perception shaped by longstanding narratives.

Modern language has refined the presentation. It has replaced overtly prejudicial terminology with the vocabulary of international relations.

The underlying structure, however, remains recognizable.

When one alliance is labeled control while others are accepted as strategy, the difference lies not in policy, but in perception.

Alignment Is Not Control

A more coherent understanding of current events requires accepting complexity rather than collapsing it.

Israel acts within its perception of security and survival. Iran advances its regional ambitions and deterrence strategies. The United States responds to threats against its assets, interests, and alliances.

These are independent actors operating within an interconnected system.

Their actions may align at times. At others, they conflict.

But alignment is not evidence of control.

It is evidence of intersecting interests.

Recognizing the Difference

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about criticizing Israeli policy.

There is nothing improper about questioning American foreign policy decisions.

Such critiques are not only valid. They are necessary within any serious political discourse.

But when criticism gives way to claims of hidden control, of secret direction and disproportionate influence, it ceases to function as analysis.

It becomes something else.

Something older, and far more familiar than we may be willing to admit.

And if we are serious about understanding the world as it is, rather than as it is imagined, we must be willing to recognize that distinction.