On why the Israel-Palestine debate is not really about Israel-Palestine
There is a room. In it sit Jews and Muslims who want to do the right thing. The desire matters; it may be everything. But the room is not sealed. Outside it, machinery operates that determines which voices survive the door, and the machinery is not, in any simple sense, Israeli.
This is the first thing to understand: Israel does not drive this global discursive regime alone. What makes criticism of Israeli policy so costly—what turns nuanced critique into presumptive antisemitism, what transforms a Muslim scholar into a threat before he opens his mouth—is a transatlantic network of specific actors with concrete names. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its European analogues have built lobbying infrastructures that channel political funding toward candidates who adopt hardline pro-Israel positions and punish those who deviate. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), originally founded to combat antisemitism, has expanded into monitoring and campaigning against critics of Israel, including Jewish ones. The European Jewish Congress and organisations like the Campaign Against Antisemitism have pressured governments, universities, and professional bodies to adopt the IHRA working definition and to enforce its most expansive interpretations. These are not shadowy forces. They publish annual reports, hold press conferences, and celebrate their legislative victories. They have created the conditions under which a university administrator, a journal editor, or a funding body encounters a Muslim name attached to criticism of Israel and reaches for the complaint form before reaching for the argument.
I sit in that room, and I know that when I leave it, this apparatus awaits me. I know this not as theory but as positionality. I am a Muslim scholar. I have spent decades studying power, radicalisation, and the spatial dynamics of exclusion. I know how to be precise. But precision is not protection. The apparatus reads identity first.
The European origins of the present
If we strip away the contemporary scaffolding, what remains is a European story. Modern antisemitism—by which I mean the racialised, ideological, eliminationist form that culminated in the Holocaust—was primarily forged in the crucible of European modernity: nationalism, imperialism, the pseudo-science of race, and the bureaucratic capacity for mass death. This is not to deny that hostility toward Jews existed in pre-modern societies, including Muslim ones. It is to insist that the specific configuration that made Auschwitz possible was a European invention.
What follows from this is less often stated: the Muslim-Jewish relationship, for most of history, was not structured by this European formation. Under Muslim rule in al-Andalus, in the Ottoman Mediterranean, in North Africa and the Middle East, Jewish communities experienced periods of significant intellectual and cultural flourishing. Coercion existed; dhimmi status was subordinate, and persecution occurred—pogroms in Fez, forced conversions in Yemen, and the Granada massacre of 1066. The Golden Age was not a utopia. But the systematic racialisation, the genocidal logic, the industrial-scale exclusion—these took their modern form in Europe and were exported outward.
This matters because the present debate is so often framed as an ancient, intractable religious hatred between Muslims and Jews. It is not. It is a recent phenomenon, intensified by the Holocaust and its afterlives; globalised through European and American power; and complicated by the fact that Zionism drew Jewish migrants from multiple directions—not only European refugees fleeing persecution, but also Mizrahi communities expelled from Arab states after 1948, Ethiopian Jews, and Soviet Jews, each with distinct relationships to the land, the state, and the idea of Israel as refuge.
The Jews who fled or were expelled from Europe made Israel a home because it offered safety from European violence. And the Muslims who migrated to Europe over the last seventy years—my parents among them—arrived into a landscape already structured by that violence, carrying identities that had not been formed by it but would be read through it. We are, all of us, caught in a European story that predates us and that we did not choose.
The transatlantic concentration of voice
The apparatus I described earlier has a geography. Its institutional weight is American: the foundations (Adelson, Marcus, and Milstein); the lobbying organisations (AIPAC, CUFI, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies); the academic monitoring groups (the AMCHA Initiative and the Louis D. Brandeis Center); the congressional resolutions; and the state-level mandates that ripple outward to universities and corporations worldwide. Europe adopts these frameworks—often with less democratic deliberation than the United States itself—because of a complex of Holocaust guilt, strategic alignment with American power, and the structural dominance of Anglophone media and academic networks.
This concentration of power is not hidden. It is documented by investigative journalists, by critical scholars, and by the organisations themselves in their own promotional materials. What is less visible is its effect on Jewish communities. The conflation of Jewish identity with Israeli state policy, enforced by the very institutions that claim to protect Jews from antisemitism, flattens the extraordinary diversity of Jewish political, theological, and cultural life. It positions Jewish communities as monolithic defenders of a specific geopolitical project, erasing the internal dissent that has always characterised Jewish intellectual tradition.
I am not alone in observing this. Kenneth Stern, who drafted the original IHRA definition, has warned explicitly against its weaponisation to silence political speech. Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and Jewish Voice for Peace have all argued that the definition’s institutional deployment damages both Palestinians and Jews. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé and the American rabbi Brant Rosen have made similar cases from within Jewish religious and scholarly frameworks. These are not fringe voices; they are part of a substantial Jewish tradition of critique that the apparatus works to marginalise as “self-hating” or beyond the pale.
I see the diversity this apparatus erases in the Jewish-Muslim group I sit in. The nuance within the Jewish voice is remarkable: political Zionists and anti-Zionists, religious Jews and secular Jews, those for whom Israel is central and those for whom it is peripheral, those who agonise and those who are simply exhausted by the topic. The Muslim voice is equally diverse: theological, cultural, political, indifferent, engaged, angry, and hopeful. There is no one voice that carries either community. But this nuance does not survive the door. Outside, the apparatus compresses us all into types.
2026: The acceleration of distortion
And then there is the present moment, which compounds everything. We are, in 2026, caught in a media ecology that would have been unrecognisable even two decades ago. Social media has not merely created echo chambers; it has dissolved the distinction between news and propaganda, between reporting and curation, between human voice and synthetic content. AI-generated material floods the channels. Biased content is shared, reinforced, and amplified by algorithms designed for engagement rather than accuracy. Groupthink is not a bug but the operating system.
This matters for the Israel-Palestine debate with particular force because the topic is already so heavily policed by the institutional apparatus I have described. When the formal channels are constrained—when certain arguments cannot be made in universities, in parliaments, in mainstream media without immediate accusation—the discourse migrates to informal channels. But these channels are themselves poisoned: not liberated spaces of free speech but algorithmically distorted environments where the most inflammatory content rises, where nuance is punished by the engagement metric, and where synthetic outrage displaces genuine analysis.
The result is a terrible paradox. We are more connected than ever, yet more polarised. We have access to more information than any previous generation, yet our epistemic environment is more degraded. The apparatus of formal silencing and the machinery of informal distortion work together, not against each other. They produce a public sphere in which genuine encounter between Jewish and Muslim perspectives—an encounter that acknowledges power, acknowledges history, and acknowledges the real fears and real grievances on all sides—becomes almost impossible.
I am part of this story. I am a child of Muslims who migrated to Europe, who became a scholar, who studies power and its abuses, and who sits in rooms with Jews and Muslims trying to do the right thing. And I am also someone who has learned, through painful experience, that my voice on this topic carries costs that others do not face. The apparatus reads me before I speak. It does not matter how articulate I am, how historically grounded, how careful in my distinctions. The suspicion is structural.
What remains
So, what is possible? I do not have a programme. I am sceptical of programmes in this domain; they tend to become new forms of the same apparatus. But I can say what I observe and what I refuse.
I refuse the conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israeli state policy. Antisemitism is real; it is lethal; it has a European history that must never be forgotten. But its weaponisation as a tool of geopolitical enforcement—by AIPAC, by the ADL in its expanded mandate, by the European Jewish Congress, and by the governments they have lobbied—degrades the very concept and endangers the very communities it claims to protect. This is not a fringe position. It is held by Jewish scholars, rabbis, and activists who have paid professional costs for stating it.
I refuse the flattening of Jewish or Muslim identity into political positions. The diversity within both traditions is not a complication to be managed; it is the reality that any honest politics must begin from.
I refuse the retreat into strategic silence that my own fear counsels. I have made it my life’s work to challenge power, to name the human degradation that results from its concentration, to insist on the connections between exclusion, humiliation, marginalisation, and racism. To say nothing about the elephant in the room—the specific configuration of power that makes Israel-Palestine unspeakable for someone in my position—is to let the apparatus win. But to speak is to be consumed by it, to become the observed rather than the observer, to risk becoming precisely the caricature that justifies the apparatus’s existence.
This is the bind. It is not unique to me, but it is mine.
What I can do—what I have done—is to write about the structures. About conflict. About how power operates when it is concentrated. About the degradation that follows. This is not avoidance, or not only avoidance. It is an attempt to shift the frame, to make visible the machinery itself rather than becoming caught in its gears. But I am increasingly aware that this too is a position, and that it carries its own costs: the cost of never quite saying the thing directly, of always writing at an angle, and of becoming an expert on the architecture of silence without ever quite breaking it.
The room with the Jews and Muslims who want to do the right thing: it matters. It is not nothing. But it is not enough. The apparatus awaits us all when we leave. And the question—for me, for anyone in a similar position—is whether there is a way to speak that neither surrenders to the apparatus nor is destroyed by it.
I do not know the answer. I am still in the room.