Stop Letting Israel’s Enemies Write the Dictionary

David E. Firester

The Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

When people chant “From the river to the sea,” they pair it with familiar phrases: “Palestinian” land, “occupied Palestinian territories,” “indigenous Palestinians,” and “settler-colonial Jews.”

Most people argue about the slogans and maps. Far fewer ask a prior question: Who wrote the dictionary that makes those slogans sound plausible?

For decades, Israel’s enemies have understood something many Jews and Israel-supporters have missed: if you control the language, you control the story. Define the key terms and you can turn an ancient indigenous people into supposed foreign invaders and recast repeated wars of annihilation against Israel as “anti-colonial resistance.”

To say that “Palestinian” is a political brand is not to deny that there are real Arabic-speaking people who today live under that name. The question is how this identity was framed and to what end.

During the latter half of the 20th century, “Palestinian” was carefully positioned as the indigenous victim of Zionist “intruders,” even though the Jewish people’s presence in the Land of Israel predates Islam, Arab nationalism, and the modern state system by millennia.

For centuries, under various empires, Jews and Arabs lived in the broader region that Europeans later (and briefly) called “Palestine.”

There was no sovereign “Palestinian” state and no distinct “Palestinian” nationality in the modern sense. Those constructs were shaped in the mid-20th century as part of a strategy to turn repeated Arab attempts to destroy the Jewish State into a moral story of dispossession.

“Palestinian” was not simply discovered; it was branded, a label that let Arab leaders and their allies invert reality: the side that tried, again and again, to wipe out the Jews of Israel would now be cast as the timeless victim of “foreign” Jews who supposedly have no home there at all.

How “occupied Palestinian territories” rewrites history

The phrase “occupied Palestinian territories” flows off the tongue so easily that people rarely ask what it means.

Before 1967, Judea and Samaria were annexed by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control. Neither Arab state created a sovereign “Palestinian” entity there.

Before that, the area was “owned” by the British Mandate, and before that, the Ottoman Empire. There has never been an independent “Palestinian” state whose recognized sovereign territory Israel is supposedly occupying.

Yet by repeating “occupied Palestinian territories,” these activists import a package deal: that there once was a “Palestinian” state; that the land in question is inherently and exclusively “Palestinian,” despite its deep Jewish history; and that Israel’s presence there is automatically illegal, regardless of how it came about or what the real legal debates are.

The phrase “occupied Palestinian territories” is not neutral; it is a weapon. It erases Jewish indigeneity to places whose Hebrew names — Judea and Samaria — tell their own story. It suggests that Jews crossing an invisible line on the western bank of the Jordan River are “settlers,” while Arabs are always “natives,” no matter when their families arrived. On campus and in much of the media, this vocabulary is treated as settled fact. But that’s not truth — it’s narrative.

From the seminar room to the street

Weaponized language does not stay confined to UN resolutions or academic journals. It shapes how ordinary people think and feel. When a student hears, year after year, that Israel is a “settler-colonial” project oppressing “indigenous Palestinians,” he or she is being given a moral script: Jews are the guilty party; Arab violence is an understandable reaction to “occupation”; and terrorism against Jews is justified “resistance.”

So what can be done? We cannot force hostile actors to abandon terms that serve their agenda. But we can stop doing their work for them.

First, we must recognize that words like “Palestinian,” “occupation,” and “settler-colonialism” are not neutral. They come packaged with stories about history, power, and morality. If those stories are false or one-sided, we have a responsibility to say so.

Second, we should speak accurately about the land itself. Instead of reflexively saying “West Bank,” we can talk about Judea and Samaria, or at least about disputed territories captured in a defensive war, rather than “occupied Palestinian territories.” Rather than treating “Palestinian” as a synonym for indigeneity, we can speak of Arab residents of Judea and Samaria and Arab Israelis, alongside Jewish communities with deep roots there. Third, we should unapologetically affirm Jewish indigeneity. Jews are not recent “European imports” into the Middle East. Our ancestral language, scriptures, and rituals are woven into the geography of Israel itself. The burden of proof should not rest on Jews to justify their presence in Jerusalem, Hebron, or Shiloh.

Finally, communal leaders, journalists, and educators must become more intentional about the language they use. It is not pedantic to insist on accurate terminology. It is strategic.

If we care about truth — and about the safety and legitimacy of the Jewish people — we cannot afford to keep speaking in our adversaries’ vocabulary. In every generation, Jews have had to push back against efforts to write us out of our own story. Today, that effort happens with hashtags, slogans, and selective “human rights” language, as much as with bullets and rockets.

We do not have to accept a dictionary written by those who want to annihilate us. We can tell the truth plainly: Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel, and we will not surrender that reality to anyone’s branding campaign — no matter how sophisticated their propaganda might be.

David E. Firester, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC, and the author of Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception (2025).

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Hamas Expands European Reach, Posing ‘High Likelihood’ of Terror Attack in Next Six Months, Intel Report Warns

Ailin Vilches Arguello

Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard at a site as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Dec. 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

Hamas operatives have pushed far beyond Gaza, embedding themselves across Europe — and now posing a growing threat inside the United Kingdom, where covert arms caches and active attack plots have put intelligence services on high alert, according to a new report. 

Even though Hamas has traditionally focused its operations in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, the Palestinian terrorist group has been steadily cultivating foreign attack capabilities — a trend highlighted in a new report obtained by The Daily Mirror, which warns of a looming threat of Hamas-led attacks in Europe.

Intelligence assessments indicate that the terrorist group, backed for years by Iran, Qatar, and Turkey, has been gradually expanding its presence in Europe through a network of charities, NGOs, and criminal gangs, with Israeli diplomatic missions, Israel-linked businesses, and Jewish religious sites among its top targets.

The report also notes that the group has not only stockpiled weapons such as AK-47s and ammunition but is increasingly turning to drone warfare, bolstered by backing from Lebanon and Iran and supported by Eastern European crime networks that help it acquire advanced weaponry.

“The Oct. 7, 2023, assault fundamentally altered Israel’s threat perceptions, but also reshaped Hamas’s calculations,” the report says, referring to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel. 

“Following catastrophic damage to its infrastructure in Gaza and significant leadership attrition, the group’s remaining command nodes particularly those in Lebanon began activating contingency plans long under development,” it continues. 

“The organization’s leadership now appears more willing to accept the strategic risks of external operations. If Hamas sustains further attrition, external operations may grow in relative importance within the group’s strategy,” the intelligence report adds. 

According to the United Kingdom’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, MI5, and the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center, the current threat level of a terror attack in the UK is assessed to be “substantial.”

Over the next six months, the report warns, there is a “high likelihood of continued attempts at external operations, particularly in Europe, as Hamas seeks to demonstrate resilience.”

This assessment comes amid multiple intelligence findings showing that Hamas has expanded its terrorist operations beyond the Middle East, leveraging a long-established network of weapons caches, criminal alliances, and covert infrastructure quietly built across Europe over the years.

In October, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center released a study detailing how Hamas leaders in Lebanon have directed operatives to establish “foreign operator” cells across Europe, collaborating with organized crime networks to acquire weapons and target Jewish communities abroad.

For example, a failed Hamas plot involved an alleged operative in Germany traveling to Lebanon to “receive orders from the Qassam Brigades [Hamas’s military wing] to set up an arms depot for Hamas in Bulgaria,” part of a broader, multi-year effort to cache weapons across Europe. 

German authorities foiled the plan, detaining four Hamas members in late 2023 on suspicion of planning attacks.

Earlier this year, the four suspects went on trial in Berlin in what prosecutors described as Germany’s first-ever case against members of the Palestinian terrorist group.

During the investigation, German authorities also found evidence on a defendant’s USB device showing that the Hamas operatives were planning attacks on specific sites in Germany, including the Israeli embassy in Berlin.

Similar weapons depots were established in Denmark, Poland, and other European countries, with Hamas members repeatedly trying to retrieve them to support their operations and plan potential attacks.

‘Paucity’ of Columbia courses that aren’t anti-Israel, Ivy’s task force says

JNS Staff

Columbia University subway station. Credit: Charlotte May/Pexels.

Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism released its final report on Tuesday, drawing praise from Claire Shipman, acting president of the Ivy League school, for what she said was a “series of rigorous and thoughtful analyses and recommendations that cover a very difficult and painful period in the history of this university.”

“While we know there is more work to do, we’re very grateful to be in a new and much better place today,” she stated. “For that, we owe a debt of gratitude to many, with the co-chairs and members of our Task Force on Antisemitism at the very top of that list.”

Although Shipman’s statement didn’t mention the words “Israel” or “Israeli,” illegitimate criticism of the Jewish state and of Israelis was a central part of the 70-page report, which stated that “many Jewish and Israeli students reported that if they want to study the Middle East at Columbia, there currently are not enough options that don’t treat Zionism and Israel as fundamentally illegitimate.”

“The paucity of such course offerings should be corrected,” the task force stated. “At the same time, as a best practice, we urge instructors to apply the same sensitivity to discussions of Israel that they would to topics that are of high personal sensitivity to students who have other strong primary identities.”

The panel added that the school “lacks full-time tenure line faculty expertise in Middle East history, politics, political economy and policy that is not explicitly anti-Zionist.” It advised the school to “address this imbalance through the establishment of new chairs at a senior level in Middle East history, politics, political economy and policy.”

The report, which devoted significant space to describing academic freedom and detailing its history, decried a recent decision by the American Association of University Professors, one of the most important and powerful academic groups.

The task force stated that boycotts of professors, students, researchers and scholars from other countries “are not consistent with academic freedom,” which “entails openness to scholars and students from other countries.”

“This issue is especially concerning to the antisemitism task force, because the only significant academic boycott movement of the 21st century has been aimed at the only Jewish state, proposing to restrict the research, teaching and studying opportunities available to a cohort whose members are overwhelmingly Jewish,” it said.

The task force noted that there has been a “consistent demand” at the school to boycott Columbia’s partnership with Tel Aviv University, which the panel said “would be a clear violation of the spirit of academic freedom.”

“Until last year, the AAUP consistently and categorically opposed academic boycotts. In August 2024, the AAUP changed its position, declaring ‘academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom; rather, they can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education,’” the report stated. “Although it wasn’t mentioned by name, Israel and its universities were clearly the object of this new policy.”

“We don’t see how this is not a limitation on the academic freedom of Israelis and anyone interested in interacting with them,” the report stated. “It entails permitting political views to enter what was conceived of as a separate, politically protected realm—something the AAUP has long steadfastly opposed in other circumstances.”

Free speech

The panel said that one of its main points was that Columbia ought to “protect freedom of expression to the maximum extent possible while also complying with antidiscrimination laws.”

There ought to be neither censorship nor discrimination at the school, according to the task force. “In balancing these goals, we would err in the direction of protecting free expression, even when it makes members of our community uncomfortable,” it said. “Importantly, however the university decides to strike this balance, it must do so consistently for all protected classes.”

That means that Columbia must be consistent, and “protections afforded to black, Latino, Asian, Arab, female, LGBTQ+ and disabled members of our community must apply equally to other protected classes, including Jewish and Israeli students,” it said.

The task force added that disrupting classes is a “serious violation” of Columbia rules. It said the most egregious violation of academic freedom was when anti-Israel protesters disrupted a class about the Jewish state taught by an Israeli.

Columbia students also shouldn’t have to face “fraught discussions of issues relating to their membership in a protected class” when those issues aren’t related to the course, “such as discussions of abortion in calculus or of correlations between race and incarceration in astronomy,” the panel said.

It stated that free speech means that any government or group can be criticized. It named the “policies of the Israeli government,” the “policies of Hamas” and “the United Nations” as three examples.

“Unfortunately, we heard from many Jewish and Israeli students that their instructors offered critical comments about Israel in classes with subjects far removed from Israel and the Middle East,” the report stated. 

The task force recommended that the university condemn offensive speech rather than limiting it, and it said that when it comes to faculty use of social media or “other outside activities” that it is “wary of empowering administrators to decide what is in and out of bounds.”

‘No orthodoxies’

Per the report, the more than 200 Israeli students at Columbia “is thought to be a greater number than any other Ivy League university.”

“Anyone who is teaching a class at Columbia should be aware that comments about Israel can be highly impactful to students, including Jewish students who are not Israeli,” it stated.

It added that “there should be no orthodoxies at Columbia—not just about Israel—but about race, gender, criminal justice, affirmative action, climate policy, international law, income inequality and any other subjects where the expression of some views may offend members of our community.”

The report stated that there have been “ill-informed statements” in classes that have accompanied “harsh condemnation of Israel.”

“One student told us the instructor in such a class told students that Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, was an antisemite, and Jews of Eastern European origin are not really Jewish,” the report stated. “These are, at best, tendentious statements that are highly contested in the academic literature but were not presented to students that way. The readings in the class generally did not reflect the full range of academic writing on Zionism, only material that was harshly anti-Zionist.”

The task force advised colleagues to remember that Zionism “is a strongly held principle for the great majority of Jews worldwide, including but not limited to those who live in Israel.”

“Anti-Zionism is hardly a forbidden sentiment at Columbia, and that’s as it should be. But it’s an illusion to believe that anti-Zionism expressed as a moral absolute will not make many or even most Jewish and Israeli students here feel unwelcome,” it said. “They deserve the same degree of sensitivity as anyone else at Columbia.”

“We are angry and heartbroken that members of the Columbia community (including some members of the faculty) would condone (or even celebrate) terrorist atrocities, deploy antisemitic tropes and peddle bigoted stereotypes,” the task force said. 

“These statements have been appalling and we condemn them. We have no desire to defend the indefensible,” it said. “But as noted above, we are concerned about relying on administrators to be the arbiters of what tenured and tenure-track faculty members can and cannot say.”

The report also said that students must not be pressured to participate in protests, teachers shouldn’t use stereotypes, “reasonable” religious accommodations are necessary and students ought to be free to disagree with professors.

It also advised Columbia to proceed “as quickly as possible” with its announced plan to open a global center in Tel Aviv.

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