On May 6th the New York Post published an editorial full of the crudest Stalinist style smears against protestors who had just battled police outside Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the protestors objected to the synagogue hosting a real estate fair featuring properties in Israel which included a presentation by the real estate company Harey Zahav advertising Jewish owned property on the West Bank. 

The Post editors focused particular venom on Mayor Mamdani, their pet hate whom they portrayed as “dispicably” on the side of the protestors–”a hundred violent thugs with keffiyah rags tied around their faces…. [an] anti-semitic mob [which] came prepared for war.” 

Mamdani supported the protestor’s contention that the Israeli sale of land in the West Bank was illegal under international law–but the editors instructed readers that this was a “falsehood” because international law “says nothing about private land sales anywhere.” 

The editors elaborated that “as best we can tell Mamdani [is] confusing ‘international law’ with the century old ravings of Amin al Husseini, the Hitler Allied Grand Mufti of Jerusalem” who issued a fatwa in 1935 declaring all of Palestine to be an Islamic land for eternity.

At this point let me make an observation: in a society with a broad level of minimum intellectual standards in its media (and a minimum level of civilization in general), the printing of such idiotic babbling as above would lead to mass ridicule falling upon the New York Post and advertisers abandoning the paper in droves because they did not want their brand to be associated with such stupidity. Unfortunately, of course, we live in no such society. 

The Post editors are persons with access to a range of information infinitely greater than the average American. They surely are at least faintly aware that Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (to which Israel and the United States are signatories) describes the settlement of territory conquered in war (as the West Bank was by Israel in 1967) by civilians of the conquering power as a war crime. 

Indeed, Theodor Meron, the Israeli government’s top international law specialist after the 1967 war, privately advised Israel’s cabinet several months after the war that Israeli Jewish civilian settlement of the West Bank was illegal under Article 49. Meron advised that Israel could skirt around the letter of Article 49 by publicly claiming that it was seizing Palestinian land in the West Bank for military purposes–and then over time gradually convert these military posts to civilian settlements. This was, in fact, the course that the Israeli government followed to a large extent over subsequent decades as it established settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. As the International Court of Justice stated in a 2024 advisory opinion, the 700,000 Israeli Jewish civilians presently living in the West Bank are residing illegally. The fact that these civilians privately own West Bank land under Israeli law is completely irrelevant, as the Post editors surely know. 

The Post editors are gutter demagogues–one would expect nothing less from a publication owned by Rupert Murdoch. Instead of making their argument–however incorrectly–by addressing the substantive issues of international law involved in Israeli West Bank settlements, they resort to the immeasurably cheap tactic of bringing up the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was indeed a Hitler ally and an execrable figure–although probably not the man who was Hitler’s chief inspiration for the Final Solution as Mr. Netanyahu has had the audacity to claim for many years. 

The Post editors, like Netanyahu, reference a figure like Haj Amin to distract from Israel’s decades long dispossession and reign of terror against the Palestinian people. With the Gaza genocide hammering Israel’s credibility within its chief bastion of support (the United States)–most recently around the issue of Israel’s systematic sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees– Israel’s most diehard supporters, such as the New York Post editors, are resorting to more and more desperate attacks. 

 Meanwhile, the massive escalation in KKK style terror by far right Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7th recently led Israel’s top West Bank commander Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth to publicly warn of the potential explosion of a new Intifada in the West Bank and call on the full mobilization of Israeli society to stop settler terrorism–while Bluth has also bragged privately that his soldiers have been “killing like we haven’t since 1967” in the West Bank and producing a lot of  “limping monuments” in the territory’s villages (persons who have been shot or injured by Bluth’s forces). 

There has undoubtedly been a tangible rise in consciousness in the United States about Israeli crimes and Palestinian suffering since October 7th. But the fact that the New York Post can produce the editorial quoted above and not be blacklisted from respectable society is just one measure of how deep the Israeli narrative is embedded within this country. It is just one measure of how far we have to go to reach a minimum level of civilization in so many areas of life. 

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