The Long Brief: The Fifty-Year Front
Israel won the war with Iran. The war that started against it in 1975 remains undecided — which, on current trajectory, is a problem.
Friends, Shabbat shalom — this one runs without a paywall.
Usually we gate the Long Brief, but this week the argument is too operational to keep behind one. Consider it open — forward it, post it, send it along. Keep it moving (the reader who needs this hasn’t seen it yet).
Just this past Monday at Yad Vashem, Benjamin Netanyahu told the world that Israel had fulfilled its post-Holocaust pledge. Stated plainly, Operation Roaring Lion and the joint American-Israeli campaign had broken what he called “the industry of death” — Iran’s nuclear plants, its missile arsenals, its UAVs, the Revolutionary Guards’ senior command, the naval fleet, the air force.
Those were his words: “This year, we turned that promise into reality.” Raw, no hedge — no “signals,” no “shifts.” Every beat landed declarative: the thing was done, and the Prime Minister said so in front of the names of six million dead.
Enter today.
The coalition that existed to deny him that achievement had grown. Italy — Meloni’s Italy, until this week the most reliably pro-Israel government in Western Europe — suspended automatic renewal of its 2005 defense cooperation memorandum. Eighteen European foreign ministers plus Australia issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s April 8 strikes on Hezbollah infrastructure in Lebanon “in the strongest terms.” Forty of forty-seven Senate Democrats voted to block a $295 million sale of Caterpillar D9 bulldozers to Israel — thirty-six voted to block a $150 million bomb package — and Mark Kelly, the putative centrist 2028 contender, stood on the floor and introduced the Sanders resolutions himself. And two weeks earlier, at a DSA forum in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had announced she would no longer support U.S. funding for Iron Dome — the purely defensive system — followed days later by J Street [the Washington lobby that keeps the “pro-Israel” label for as-a-Jew marketing purposes] calling for the 2028 MOU to phase out direct financial assistance for Israeli defense systems altogether.
Victory didn’t travel. It couldn’t. The ground between Tel Aviv and the West was taken fifty years ago, and Israel seemingly never went to contest it.
Every Israeli broadcast asset now deployed — press conferences, ministries, spokespeople, a NIS 500 million public diplomacy budget — is performing on terrain laid by an adversary coalition that started building in 1975 and has never stopped.
Broadcast fights the last news cycle. Terrain owns the next. This Long Brief is about the difference.
Iran Lost. Israel Still Got Hit.
Netanyahu’s declaration was an operational claim: Iran’s nuclear weapons program has been destroyed, its senior IRGC leadership killed, its strategic air defenses collapsed, its missile infrastructure crippled. The claim is broadly correct. Iran broke. The Arrow system — evolved from Arrow 1 through nearly Arrow 4 across twenty years — held against one of the largest missile salvos in the history of air defense. The 700,000 American citizens resident in Israel stayed alive because of a system J Street now wants to defund.
And the diplomatic arithmetic ran in the other direction.
Italy — the Meloni coalition, until this week one of the three most reliably pro-Israel governments in Europe — notified Israel through Defense Minister Guido Crosetto that the 2005 defense cooperation memorandum would not automatically renew.
Meloni’s own statement: “In view of the current situation, the government has decided to suspend the automatic renewal of the defense agreement with Israel.” The trigger she cited was Israeli warning shots at an Italian UNIFIL convoy in Lebanon and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani’s condemnation, from Beirut, of “unacceptable attacks against the civilian population.” The operation under discussion — Eternal Darkness, April 8 — hit over 100 Hezbollah targets including headquarters, intelligence centers, missile infrastructure, and Radwan Force sites. Hezbollah had continued firing rockets into Israel through then (and beyond). The professional military reality of the strike does not appear in the Italian statement because the Italian statement is not about the strike. It is about distance.
The same day, nearly twenty “Western” governments issued the now-standard joint condemnation, this one citing “more than 350 persons” killed and “more than 1000” wounded per Lebanese figures [the OHCHR’s own numbers the next day were 303 and 1,150; the IDF count of Hezbollah combatants killed in the strike was at least 180, and the ministers used the Lebanese Ministry of Health figure, which treats those combatants as civilians by definition]. None of the eighteen governments noted that Hezbollah had been firing into Israel through the hours before the strike. None noted that the November 2024 ceasefire had been broken by Hezbollah rearmament across the intervening sixteen months. The purpose of the statement was not to describe an event. It was to mark territory.
Then the Senate. On Wednesday, Bernie Sanders’s two joint resolutions of disapproval — one targeting the bulldozer sale, one targeting the bomb package — failed 40-59 and 36-63. Both failed. Both should have failed by larger margins. Some eighty-five percent of the Senate Democratic caucus voted to block arms sales to a U.S. ally during an active war with Iran-backed forces. In July 2025, the comparable vote drew 27 Democrats. In the year before that, 19. The line is linear and steep.
The senator who walked Sanders’s resolutions to the floor was Mark Kelly — a former astronaut, an Arizona Democrat, a candidate who seems like he intends to run for president in 2028 — whose strategists have concluded that opposing weapons sales to Israel is the safer position in the Democratic primary. Chuck Schumer voted no on both. Kirsten Gillibrand voted no on both. That is the rearguard.
On Tuesday, David Horovitz — founding editor of the Times of Israel, a man who does not write from the left flank — published a column under the headline “Netanyahu claims to have prevented an Iranian-wrought second Holocaust. If only we could be so sure.” Ian Bremmer, on the American side, observed in TIME that Netanyahu has engineered a political comeback that “may have exceeded Trump’s.” Both are true. Netanyahu won the war and is winning his politics. Even if it makes for an inconvenient narrative. And in the same few days, allied governments contracted, legislative majorities flipped, and the Iron Dome funding line — which had passed the House some 420 to 9 in September 2021 — became a discarded Democratic orthodoxy.
Kinetic victory and institutional collapse ran on parallel tracks in the same week. That is the diagnostic.
When They Came for the Shield
Iron Dome intercepts short-range rockets fired at civilian population centers. It has no offensive capacity. It cannot strike Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, or any other adversary. It does one thing: it destroys inbound munitions. You know, those ones aimed at schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and bomb shelters. The ones Iran resorted to trying to bypass by using cluster bombs. In September 2021, the House of Representatives passed a $1 billion supplemental appropriation for the system. Dissenters included the likes of Ilhan Omar. Rashida Tlaib. Ayanna Pressley. Cori Bush. Marie Newman. Raúl Grijalva. Thomas Massie. And two “present” votes including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That was the ceiling of opposition to defending Israeli civilian lives four years ago.
On April 1, 2026, at a DSA event in New York City, Ocasio-Cortez announced she would no longer support Iron Dome funding. Her 2025 rationale — that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Iron Dome amendment “did nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel” — had required the defensive-offensive distinction to do real work. The 2026 rationale dropped the distinction entirely: “The Israeli government is well able to fund the Iron Dome system. I will not support Congress sending more taxpayer dollars and military aid to a government that consistently ignores international law and U.S. law.” Ro Khanna — another presidential-tier Democrat — followed: “We should not be subsidizing them, especially given their egregious violations of human rights law.” Brad Lander, running to unseat Dan Goldman in June, executed the identical pivot from his 2025 mayoral-race position. Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of New York, publicly agreed with Ocasio-Cortez. The Democratic presidential bench, the Democratic congressional bench, and the country’s largest Democratic city government had converged on the same position inside three months.
Then, on April 12, J Street.
Jeremy Ben-Ami announced that the organization — which has spent fifteen years calling itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace” — will no longer support assistance for Israeli defense systems when the current $38 billion MOU expires in 2028. His reasoning, pre-written for circulation: “With a per capita GDP higher than countries like the United Kingdom, France and Japan, Israel is more than capable of paying for its own defense — just as America’s other wealthy allies already do.”
The GDP argument is selective by design.
Nobody at J Street is publicly calling for an end to security cooperation with Japan, South Korea, Germany, or the United Kingdom on per-capita GDP grounds.
The principle only applies to the Jewish state.
Ben-Ami’s argument is the DSA argument with fifteen years of additional Washington polish. The branding has now caught up to the position.
Ben-Ami is not defecting. He is reporting. For fifteen years, “pro-Israel, pro-peace” functioned as a license to oppose every concrete Israeli security measure under cover of supporting Israel in the abstract.
The abstraction has now run out, because the concrete measure under attack — Iron Dome — is the one that keeps Israeli children alive in bomb shelters.
An organization that will not defend the interceptor above a kindergarten in Sderot is not a pro-Israel organization whose pro-Israeli-ness has been tested by a hard case. It is an anti-Israel organization whose brand is older than its current position and needs updating.
Ritchie Torres, one of the diminishing number of House Democrats still willing to defend the line on a defensive weapon, said: “Even the most committed pacifist should have no objection to the Iron Dome, because its only purpose is to prevent civilians from being killed.” Dan Goldman added: “The Iron Dome provides critical protection to millions of civilians and saves hundreds of innocent lives every day.”
Sen. Chris Coons, inadequately defending his no vote on the bulldozer sale, said: “My votes should be taken neither as an endorsement of the actions of the Netanyahu government nor as an abandonment of the state of Israel, the Jewish people, or the US-Israel relationship.” That is the sentence produced when someone is voting against Israel and trying to avoid saying so. We can see what it is.
The intellectual architecture for defunding a defensive weapon didn’t come out of nowhere. The foundations are in plain sight. Dylan Saba, writing in Jewish Currents in May 2023: “the Iron Dome cannot meaningfully be considered ‘life-saving’ in any value system that recognizes Palestinian life alongside Israeli.”
Read that sentence again. It is not an argument for restraint. It is an argument that Israeli lives saved by interception ought to be balanced, on some moral ledger, against Palestinian lives that Hamas’s own rocket targeting decisions put at risk.
The “defensive systems enable aggression” frame requires, at its foundation, an acceptance that indiscriminate rocket fire at Israeli population centers has legitimate deterrent function — that dead Israeli civilians ought to be baked into the strategic calculus. This is no longer on the fringe.
This is the reading that has moved, in under five years, from Jewish Currents to the floor of the United States Senate to the statement of the Washington lobby that still insists, against all logic, on calling itself pro-Israel. Absurd.
The Iron Dome was the cleanest test of whether the defensive-offensive distinction Israel depended on for two generations could still hold. It shouldn’t surprise us to learn that it no longer holds.
The underlying objection — then and now — was to Israel, and the reasons given would rearrange themselves around whatever concrete object was available to oppose.
The Iron Dome was just the object in reach. When the object is a defensive interceptor and the opposition holds, the advocacy was never about offense.
What 1975 Actually Changed
On November 10, 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The vote was 72-35 with 32 abstentions, sponsored by twenty-five Arab and Muslim-majority states. The Soviet information apparatus had been constructing the Zionism-racism equation since the mid-1960s, first introduced during debates on the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, when the Soviets proposed it as a counter to a U.S.-Brazilian effort to condemn antisemitism in the same instrument.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the American ambassador, delivered the response that most Western diplomatic commentary still quotes. “The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”
Chaim Herzog, then the Israeli ambassador, called 3379 “based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance.” The text was eventually revoked. The revocation was Resolution 46/86 on December 16, 1991. 111 for and still 25 votes against the revocation —some sixteen years later.
This is the episode Western foreign-policy writing generally treats as concluded. 3379 existed. 3379 was revoked. The UN no longer equates Zionism with racism (ha!). Chapter closed.
Chapter not closed. 3379 was the text. The institutional architecture 3379 authorized was separate, passed the same day, and was never revoked.
On November 10, 1975 — the same day the assembly adopted the Zionism-racism text — it adopted Resolution 3376, establishing the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.
In 1977, Resolution 32/40 B established a Special Unit on Palestinian Rights within the Secretariat to support CEIRPP’s work and “prepare studies and publications on the issue and to promote maximum publicity for them.”
The Special Unit was expanded into the Division for Palestinian Rights, which sits today in the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. CEIRPP’s mandate was most recently renewed by the General Assembly in November 2022.
The DPR’s mandate was most recently renewed in December 2024. The Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967 — established by the Commission on Human Rights in 1993 — is the only country-specific rapporteurship in the entire UN system whose mandate is not subject to periodic review. Every other country-specific Special Rapporteur mandate — for every other jurisdiction, including active genocide contexts — is renewable on one- to three-year cycles. This one is permanent.
Agenda Item 7 of the Human Rights Council — the standing agenda item requiring the Council to address Israeli human rights violations at every session — is the only standing country-specific agenda item in the Council’s procedural architecture.
There is no Agenda Item 7 for China, Russia, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Sudan, or Nicaragua. The procedural asymmetry is glaring. That is the 1975 architecture operating in 2026. It does not need 3379’s text to operate. The text was only ever the permission slip.
Look at what runs on these rails. Francesca Albanese, the current Special Rapporteur, holds an affiliation with the Georgetown Institute for the Study of International Migration, serves as Senior Advisor on Migration and Forced Displacement to Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development, and co-founded the Global Network on the Question of Palestine. She consistently reasserts the central Goldstone Report claim — that Israel intentionally targets civilians as a matter of policy — which Richard Goldstone himself retracted more than a decade earlier. Albanese’s three predecessors — John Dugard, Richard Falk, Michael Lynk — produced output consistent enough in framing and conclusion that the individuals were largely interchangeable.
Resolution 46/86 did what it said. It revoked a sentence. But. The machinery that sentence authorized has been renewed, expanded, and staffed continuously for fifty years. Across Israeli governments from Rabin to Netanyahu. Across American administrations from Ford to Trump. Across every conceivable set of facts on the ground.
The kinetic war with Iran cannot alter it. Israeli hasbara cannot penetrate it. Italian defense memoranda cannot compensate for it.
Until the nature of that architecture is named, every Israeli response to its outputs is rearguard.
The Massacre Playbook Was Written in Jenin
The operational mechanism the 1975 architecture produces is the manufactured-massacre cycle. The template has four beats: Amplify a claim beyond its evidentiary support. Secure institutional adoption before investigation can catch up. Extract diplomatic cost on the claim. And ignore retraction when retraction eventually arrives.
The cycle was written in Jenin, April 2002. It has run functionally unchanged through every subsequent Israeli operation.
April 7, 2002. Palestinian Authority official Saeb Erekat told CNN that “some 500 Palestinians had been killed in the [Jenin] camp.” Five days later, PA Secretary Ahmed Abdel Rahman told UPI the number was “in the thousands.” The Guardian ran “massacre of 500” framing for two weeks.
On July 30, 2002, the UN Secretary-General’s own report concluded: “Allegations by Palestinian Authority officials in mid-April that 500 or more persons were killed in Jenin camp were not substantiated by the evidence that subsequently emerged.”
The IDF withdrawal, by that point, had left 52 Palestinian bodies — of whom up to half were civilians, the remainder combatants — and 23 Israeli soldiers.
Amnesty International: “No matter whose figures one accepts, ‘there was no massacre.’” Human Rights Watch: 52 Palestinian deaths, at least 27 suspected militants.
Peter Beaumont — the Guardian’s own reporter — conceded on April 21, 2002: “what happened in Jenin was not a massacre.” The Guardian published no correction. It never has.
September 2009. The UN Human Rights Council’s Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict — the Goldstone Report — concluded that Israel had “intentionally” targeted civilians during Operation Cast Lead as a matter of policy. On April 1, 2011, Richard Goldstone himself, writing under his own byline in the Washington Post, retracted the central finding: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document… civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.” The report’s three co-authors — Chinkin, Jilani, Travers — refused to join the retraction. The Human Rights Council did not withdraw the report. The finding remains, to this day, the authoritative UN framing of Cast Lead. The retraction had no institutional consequence because the institution was never running on facts.
October 31, 2023. Israeli forces struck the Jabalia refugee camp. The IDF announced it had killed Ibrahim Biari, one of the senior Hamas architects of the October 7 massacre, by collapsing a tunnel complex beneath civilian buildings.
Hamas denied the operation, denied Biari had been present, and accused Israel of inventing the target to justify civilian deaths.
Within 48 hours: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, the Arab League, UNICEF, and Scotland’s First Minister had issued condemnations.
The UN humanitarian chief called the strike “the latest atrocity to befall the people of Gaza.”
Fifteen months later, during the January 2025 ceasefire, Hamas finally got around to confirming Biari’s death — along with his son and other commanders killed in the tunnel collapse.
No Arab government retracted. No UN official retracted. The Scottish First Minister did not retract. The condemnation had done its job; the truth arriving fifteen months later was no longer an event the system needed to process.
October 17, 2023. The Gaza Ministry of Health announced within ninety minutes that an Israeli airstrike on the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital had killed 500 people. The figure was globally amplified before the first responders arrived.
Within twelve hours, Jordan had canceled its scheduled summit with Biden, Sisi, and Abbas. Pope Francis issued a condemnation. Hezbollah called for a “global day of jihad.”
Antisemitic incidents surged in Western capitals. IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari identified the cause — a failed Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket — within three-and-a-half hours.
U.S. intelligence, French DRM, British intelligence, Human Rights Watch, and AP open-source analysis all subsequently converged on the same conclusion: a failed PIJ rocket landed in the hospital parking lot. Real casualty estimates: 100 to 300 per U.S. intelligence, dozens per the European diplomat count. Not 500. Not an Israeli airstrike. Not a hospital strike at all — a parking-lot impact from Palestinian munitions. Biden said so in Tel Aviv on October 18.
But, the diplomatic damage had already been paid. And in April 2025 — eighteen months after the facts were known — Reuters, AFP, and CAMERA were documenting ongoing Western media coverage that still framed Al-Ahli as “an attack on the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital [that] killed hundreds of people.”
The cycle runs on pre-investigation amplification because that is when the pricing window is open. By the time the facts arrive, the institutional balance has shifted and cannot be moved back.
IDF briefings from Gaza describe what the amplification pipeline omits. Rockets stored inside scout troop buildings. Two rockets under a child’s bed. An IDF soldier killed by a booby-trapped teddy bear. The 28,000 rockets fired at Israel since the 2005 Gaza disengagement. Forty foreign militaries sending officers to learn urban warfare from the IDF, because Gaza is, operationally, the most complicated urban battlefield any Western military has been asked to fight.
None of that is in the Special Rapporteur’s report. None of that is in the April 14 joint statement. None of that enters the cycle because the cycle is not built to process it.
The Jenin template persists because it works. It has extracted costs from every Israeli operation for twenty-four years. The cycle’s inputs are Palestinian claims. Its outputs are institutional condemnations. Facts enter only as exogenous noise after the cost has been paid.
When a system runs stably for twenty-four years on inputs it was never testing, the honest conclusion is that facts were never what it was processing.
The Money That Buys the Ground
The Jenin pipeline has to be staffed, translated, placed, and published.
The staffers have to be trained, the outlets funded, the conferences hosted, the academic credentialing maintained, the translation networks that move the frame from Arabic to English to French to Spanish kept operational.
As of February 2026, Qatar has disclosed approximately $8.8 billion in gifts and contracts to U.S. institutions of higher education under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act — making the Qatari state the single largest foreign funder of American universities, ahead of China. Cornell alone has received roughly $4.2 billion in aggregate foreign funding. The single largest contract in Section 117 history — $1.1 billion, award period beginning January 1, 2026 — is a restricted Cornell-Qatar agreement. These are the disclosed figures. A 2020 investigation found universities had failed to report over $6.5 billion in additional foreign funds. Texas A&M’s disclosed Qatari reporting doubled after forced disclosure, from $131 million to $244 million.
The real Qatari number is higher. We can see it and we can infer it.
Qatar hosts numerous American branch campuses in its Education City complex — Virginia Commonwealth, Weill Cornell Medicine, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and Northwestern, whose journalism program operates in direct partnership with Al Jazeera.
Qatari owned Al Jazeera’s own annual operating budget runs approximately $1 billion.
The Iranian state officially allocated at least $600 million between 2024 and 2025 for propaganda activities — a figure that does not include IRGC-linked cutouts, whose activity the Clemson and Oxford Internet Institute research programs have documented at scale.
Turkey’s Maarif Foundation, established by law in 2016 specifically to conduct Turkish educational operations abroad, now runs 467 or more institutions across 52 to 55 countries, serving 50,000 to 70,000 students. The Turkish Diyanet directorate controls a multi-billion-dollar budget and oversees 90,000 mosques and 140,000 imams worldwide.
Israel’s equivalent line — the combined Foreign Ministry, Diaspora Ministry, and IDF Spokesperson public diplomacy allocation — was approximately $6 to $7 million annually as recently as 2023.
In FY2025 Gideon Sa’ar negotiated an increase to roughly 500 million shekels, or $135 to $150 million — more than twenty times prior allocations.
That is the new, historic, post-October-7 Israeli hasbara budget.
Al Jazeera alone runs on roughly six-and-a-half times that figure. Iran’s declared propaganda allocation is four times it. Qatar, in a single year of single-program Cornell funding, can obligate more than Israel’s entire annual public diplomacy line.
The arithmetic is not close. Not even in the same conceptual category.
This is the math held by the people who recycle the oldest lie in the Western anti-Jewish repertoire — that disproportionate Jewish money controls Western institutions.
The balance sheet is public. The Section 117 portal is open.
Qatar’s $8.8 billion in disclosed American university funding is one filing away from any reporter, legislator, or activist who wants to check.
Nobody in the coalition that mobilizes the trope is embarrassed by the arithmetic, because the trope was never descriptive. It was always a pre-emptive accusation deployed by the actual dominant funder to prevent its own funding from being reviewed.
Even the new $150 million Israeli allocation [the emergency budget that was going to fix everything] has largely failed to move.
Israel Hayom’s Great Hasbara Report (August 2025) found the PMO, Foreign Ministry, and IDF Spokesperson together produced no response in four of fifteen communication crises. In the other nine, response averaged a 19-hour delay. As of mid-2025, only a small portion of the new allocation had been utilized. The head of the National Public Diplomacy Directorate position had been vacant for over a year following Moshik Aviv’s resignation. Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli twice proposed that his ministry take operational responsibility for the national hasbara apparatus. Netanyahu rejected the proposal twice, without explanation. Avi Cohen-Scali, the Diaspora Ministry director-general, on the record: “This activity has failed by every conceivable parameter.”
The Israeli structural problem is not underfunding. The Israeli structural problem is that even with funding increased twentyfold, no directorate exists to spend it. No strategic concept governs its deployment. And no category of adversary action has been correctly identified.
Qatar spends and Israel does not, because Qatar knows what it is buying. Israel, even with the money in hand, does not.
Broadcast Loses to Terrain Every Time
The Israeli public diplomacy apparatus is built around events. The PMO Public Diplomacy Directorate, the Foreign Ministry Public Diplomacy Directorate, the IDF Spokesperson Unit, and the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism all operate on a strategy that is event-driven or reactive. A press conference responds to a headline. A spokesperson rebuts a claim. A delegation flies to brief a congressional staff.
These are all broadcast functions. `they produce content in response to events that have already occurred.
The adversary apparatus operates in a different category.
It produces the frame before the event.
The Special Rapporteur mandate is not a response to Israeli actions — it is a standing interpretive machine that processes Israeli actions, whatever they are, into a pre-existing framework.
The UNRWA journalism training pipeline in Gaza does not respond to the latest news. It gives press credentials to terrorists and it produces the next generation of reporters who will write the next cycle’s first drafts.
The Qatar Foundation International K-12 curricula shape how American middle-schoolers will read Middle Eastern news a decade from now.
Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies — founded in 1975, the same year as UNGA 3379 — trained the Foreign Service officers and policy analysts who are now deciding, decades later, how to read an Israeli briefing.
Georgetown’s CCAS was founded with initial funding from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and $750,000 from Libya — the Libyan tranche endowing a chair that went to Hisham Sharabi, a close associate of Yasser Arafat.
Over two-thirds of CCAS funding continues to come from Arab governments. The current director, Fida Adely, holds the Clovis and Hala Salaam Maksoud Chair in Arab Studies, funded by the Qatari Embassy in Washington.
The Qatari Embassy also funds CCAS’s Qatar Post-Doctoral Fellowship.
According to the Middle East Forum’s January 2026 report, Qatar has given Georgetown nearly $1 billion over twenty years, funded four endowed chairs, and seated Sheikh Abdulla bin Ali Al Thani — son of the former emir — on the university’s Board of Directors.
Ian Almond, a Georgetown-Qatar professor who publicly justified the October 7 attacks, sits as a voting member of the Main Campus Executive Faculty. CCAS programming under Adely has included workshops titled “Weaponizing Antisemitism to Stifle Criticism of Israel,” “Genocide in Gaza,” and “Deconstructing Western Media Narratives: Israel’s War/Genocide in Gaza.”
Columbia runs on an analogous framework.
The Edward Said Professorship in Modern Arab Studies and Literature — $2.5 million endowed, with $200,000 directly contributed by the UAE — was held by Rashid Khalidi from 2003 to 2024. Khalidi called the October 7 attacks “inevitable” and left Columbia citing the university’s IHRA adoption, which he described as conflating Jewishness with Israel “deliberately, mendaciously, and disingenuously.”
Joseph Massad, still on the Columbia faculty, described Israel as a “racist” state unworthy of existence and used the word “racist” five times in a single sentence about Israel in Al-Ahram Weekly in 2003.
The department that housed Khalidi and Massad — MEALAC, renamed MESAAS in 2007 — expanded fastest immediately after the 2004 Columbia Unbecoming film documented classroom intimidation of pro-Israel students. Rewarded, not sanctioned.
Columbia trains journalists, diplomats, and UN staff. Georgetown trains Foreign Service officers. The terrain between an IDF briefing and a Western ministry’s decision whether to treat that briefing as credible was shaped in these classrooms, by faculty whose chairs were endowed by the governments on the other side of the briefing.
This is what the MFA recognizes internally. Senior diplomatic staff describe the current conflict as having an “eighth front” — a public relations war — and are routing resources toward counter-delegations, legislator tours, and lone-soldier programs on Nova-site bus routes.
The analytical frame is correct. The scale is not.
A 150-legislator delegation flight is a broadcast event. An endowed chair is terrain.
The delegation lands, produces a news cycle, and leaves.
The chair stays for thirty years and trains the analysts whose careers will shape the next thirty years of Middle East reporting.
The structural failure is not that Israel is slow to respond. The structural failure is that the category Israel is funding — response — cannot, by its nature, take ground. It cannot give it up, but it must do more.
And the asymmetry is about to accelerate, not narrow.
From an IDF official: “AI age will be hard on us. Al Jazeera will use AI to be fast.”
Al Jazeera’s billion-dollar operational budget, applied to AI-scale content generation, will produce interpretive frame at a velocity Israeli broadcast functions were never designed to meet.
The next iteration of the Jenin pipeline will run on synthetic media generated in the hours between an event and the first wire-service correction. Israel is not building for that.
The only institutions building for that — Palantir, specific DARPA-adjacent research programs, a handful of Israeli tech firms operating outside the government apparatus — are not part of the hasbara architecture.
They are, at best, adjacent. The broadcast loses to terrain now. In five years, it will not even be competing.
The Ceiling Nobody Admits
Israel could have invested in academic chairs after 1975. It did not. Israel might have been able to contest the Special Rapporteur mandate at UNHRC’s founding successfully. It did not. Israel could have built translation networks, journalist training programs, and counter-institutional NGO infrastructure across thirty years of post-revocation opportunity. It did not. Each of those is a strategic miss and every one is, in principle, correctable.
The deeper structural problem does not correct.
There is a ceiling on what any Israeli strategy, however well-funded and well-conceived, can achieve inside the existing Western institutional frame, because the frame itself carries a pattern of institutional hostility toward Jewish sovereignty that predates the UN, the modern academy, the NGO sector, and the modern information environment — and operates across regimes and centuries regardless of Jewish conduct.
The argument for this is not theological. The evidence is empirical, secular, and sitting in the historical record. Here’s an abridged portion of that historical record:
1290: Edward I of England issues the Edict of Expulsion on the ninth of Av. Three thousand Jews expelled. Return banned for 366 years.
1306: Philip IV of France, the same measure, the same assets-seizure structure.
1492: Ferdinand and Isabella, the Alhambra Decree — the demographic seed, among other things, of the Sephardic communities that would be expelled again from Arab states in 1948-1970.
1881: over 250 pogroms across the Russian Empire following Alexander II’s assassination. 2.5 million Jews emigrate. Political Zionism is born from this wave.
1933-1945: Germany.
1948-1970: the Arab and Islamic world. The Jewish population of the Middle East and North Africa outside Israel falls from approximately 900,000 in 1948 to under 8,000 today.
Egypt: emergency law passed May 15, 1948. 250 Jews killed or wounded in 1948 Cairo bombings. Fewer than 400 Jews by 1971. Three Jewish residents total as of 2022.
Libya: eighteen killed in 1967 pogroms. A population of 7,000 reduced to fewer than 100.
Iraq: the 1941 Farhud pogrom killed 179 Jews and orphaned 242 children while British officials and pro-Axis Iraqi officials stood aside.
The specific political justifications given by each regime — religious, economic, racial, colonial, anti-imperialist — are incompatible with each other. The cycle was identical.
The scholarly literature that treats this as a continuous pattern, rather than a sequence of discrete prejudices, operates in entirely secular analytical vocabulary.
Robert Wistrich of Hebrew University: “A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad” — the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism awarded it Best Book of the Year.
David Nirenberg’s “Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition” tracks anti-Jewish framing as a foundational Western rhetorical structure rather than a sequence of local hatreds.
Anthony Julius’s “Trials of the Diaspora” documents the durability of antisemitism across English political regimes regardless of political character.
Bernard Lewis on the Arab-Muslim case.
Four substantial scholarly frameworks, converging on a single empirical claim: the thing is continuous, operates regardless of regime type, and reconstitutes in whatever idiom the dominant culture of the period will license.
The persistence of specific falsehoods past their refutation is the same pattern we’ve already seen.
The blood libel, originating in twelfth-century Norwich, has persisted for 900 years across regimes and languages. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — proven a Russian forgery in 1921 — circulates today in Iranian state media, Turkish state broadcasting, Arab state curricula, and algorithmically amplified online ecosystems globally. The 2009 “Israel harvests Palestinian organs” story, reanimated by Iranian Press TV and Hamas and Hezbollah messaging, is structurally identical to the medieval blood libel — the specific claim that Jews kill non-Jewish people to harvest their body parts. A European newspaper printed it in 2009. Press TV reprints it now. The vehicle changes. The falsehood is recognizable.
The Midrash knew. God told the tongue: I imprisoned you behind two enclosures — one of bone, one of flesh — and still you do damage. The rabbis said a word of lashon hara leaves a mark that cannot be erased. Nine hundred years of blood libel is the secular proof.
The Tel Aviv University Annual Report on Antisemitism, released a couple of days ago, documented that violent antisemitic attacks in 2025 killed the highest number of Jews globally in thirty years — twenty Jews killed, fifteen of them in a single attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney.
The report is not theological. It is actuarial.
No Western communication strategy operating inside the existing institutional frame has reduced the contemporary physical risk to diaspora Jewish populations below the baseline of 2010, 2000, or 1990.
We don’t have to be fatalists about it, however. Identifying this ceiling is the precondition for any strategy that is not merely absorb-and-retreat.
A strategy that acknowledges this will allocate toward the things the ceiling does not constrain — bilateral security relationships with states outside the Western institutional frame, diaspora infrastructure that does not depend on Western NGO accreditation, legal warfare architecture operating on state sovereignty rather than universal-jurisdiction claims, technology platforms that route around the Qatari-Iranian information-operations terrain rather than contesting it on its own ground.
Scenarios: Four Paths Forward, Two That Matter
Israel’s information posture over the next two to five years will move along one of four paths. The default path is the most probable and the most dangerous. The middle two are the live contest — the places where actual strategic choice is made. The fourth is genuine and time-sensitive and depends on conditions Israel does not control.
Absorb-and-retreat.
The Israeli apparatus continues broadcast investment, accepts declining returns as the cost of doing business, and treats each new diplomatic contraction as an individual event to be managed rather than a pattern to be addressed. The new 500-million-shekel budget remains largely unspent. Italy re-suspends every cooperation agreement. The eighteen-country statements accumulate. Senate Democratic blocks of arms sales rise from 40 to 50 to 60 across the next two election cycles. J Street’s 2028 position normalizes to the remainder of the Democratic caucus by 2032.
Probability: roughly 40-50 percent. This is the path institutional inertia selects unless displaced. And nothing currently in the Israeli political system is organized to displace it.
Reformist investment.
Israel’s existing institutional framework receives increased resources and modestly improved execution. A Public Diplomacy Directorate director is appointed. Response latency falls from 19 hours to 9 hours. More delegations. More legislator tours. Better IDF Spokesperson content. A modest pilot in counter-academic chair funding, run through the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs or a MFA-linked foundation. The category being optimized is broadcast. Terrain continues to move. The ceiling holds.
Probability: roughly 25-35 percent. This is the scenario most Israeli decision-makers will prefer because it feels like action while requiring no structural choice. The worst possible outcome lives here, because it generates enough motion to prevent radical redefinition without generating enough effect to alter the trajectory.
Radical terrain redefinition.
Israel, through some combination of government action, diaspora-organized philanthropy, and coalition partners, begins building the institutional category the adversary has been building since 1975. Endowed chairs in Jewish history, Zionist thought, and the legal foundations of Israeli sovereignty at major American universities, placed by donors who understand the difference between a one-time gift and a 99-year endowed professorship. Journalist-training infrastructure — not a sponsored fellowship, a journalism program with its own accredited credential pipeline. Legal warfare architecture on the scale of NGO Monitor but with an order of magnitude more resources, coordinated across jurisdictions. A parallel NGO ecology capable of absorbing the UN Human Rights Council’s output at the rate the Council produces it, and of systematically contesting each item in front of member-state parliaments rather than allowing the UN framing to go unchallenged into domestic legislation. Lawfare reversal using IHRA adoption in jurisdictions where it has not yet been adopted. ICC response architecture operating on state sovereignty grounds rather than ad-hominem delegitimization of the court. Technology-native platforms — Palantir-adjacent work, open-source intelligence verification, distributed journalism networks — built for the AI-generated content environment Al Jazeera will enter next.
Probability: roughly 10-15 percent of becoming dominant posture. The pieces exist. They have not scaled because no Israeli government has treated terrain as the strategic category. This is a choice, not a capacity question.
Civilizational realignment.
Under Trump-era alliance geometry, Israel formalizes integration with a coalition — the United States, the Abraham Accords states, potentially Saudi Arabia if the political conditions align — that has collectively rejected the existing Western institutional frame rather than continuing to seek reform within it. The MFA knows: “For the first time the division is between countries which want stability and those that want chaos and power. Palestine is basically not relevant to joining the stability camp.” The probability of this scenario as a dominant posture over five years is genuine but fragile, because it depends on U.S. political conditions that April 15’s Senate vote shows are eroding at the base of the Democratic coalition. If the 2028 presidential election returns a Democratic administration elected on a platform that includes the positions Ocasio-Cortez, Khanna, and Sanders hold openly, the coalition framework collapses on inauguration day.
Probability: roughly 10-15 percent of dominant posture, contingent on U.S. political continuity through at least 2032. The Senate vote is a leading indicator.
Two of these scenarios matter strategically. Reformist investment is the default Israeli choice and produces the result we are already observing — motion without effect, budget without ground. Civilizational realignment is the biggest external opportunity and carries the largest upside, but the shelf life is the Trump administration and whatever political infrastructure survives the 2028 election. Radical terrain redefinition is the one Israel can choose unilaterally. It does not depend on U.S. political cycles. And it addresses the category problem rather than the execution problem. It is also the one least likely to be chosen, because Israeli political culture treats five-year horizons as long-term and thirty-year horizons as fantasy — and the terrain category, by its nature, runs on thirty-year horizons.
Israel will probably do some of the first two, hope the third materializes on its own, and not do the fourth.
Iran broke this year. The kinetic war was won. The Supreme Leader is dead. The IRGC’s senior command is dead. The nuclear program is functionally destroyed. The regional proxy architecture is degraded across every axis Israel could reach. You might not know that if you get your news from the legacy media channels.
This week the Prime Minister stood at Yad Vashem and named the achievement. Italy walked. Eighteen governments condemned. Forty Senate Democrats voted to deny a U.S. ally weapons in wartime. And the Washington lobby that still prints “pro-Israel” on its letterhead announced it would phase out support for the interceptors that keep Israeli children alive in their own bedrooms.
The coalition that existed to deny Israel the victory did not lose ground. It gained it.
The ground it gained was taken fifty years ago and has been compounding since, and no quantity of broadcast. However well-funded. However fast. However well-delivered. Can or will take it back — because broadcast was never the category that held it.
The adversary bought terrain. Israel rents studio time. Until Israel builds ground it owns, it will keep winning the wars and losing the ground around them
— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief