Prepared by Elder Kepha Arcemont

Founding Voice, Miqdash Bethel Assembly

Silent Founding Member, Counsel of Peace

DOCTRINAL NOTE: This report is produced from the perspective of Miqdash Bethel, a Hebrew covenant scripture-based assembly. The Tanakh is the sole source authority for doctrinal conclusions. Historical, political, and scholarly sources from multiple traditions are cited to examine facts, but they do not constitute Miqdash Bethel’s doctrinal authority. Christian, Islamic, and Judaic rabbinic writings may be referenced to meet recipients where they are, but never as Miqdash Bethel’s own authority.

Section I.  What Is Antisemitism — And What It Is Not

Section II.  Germany After World War I — The Economic Context That Made Nazism Possible

Section III.  The Origins of Political Zionism

Section IV.  The King David Hotel, the Nakba, and the Founding of Israel

Section V.  The Six-Day War and the Subsequent Occupation

Section VI.  Zionism vs. Hebrew/Jewish Identity — A Critical Distinction

Section VII.  AIPAC, Media, and Political Influence

Section VIII.  Free Speech, Antisemitism Legislation, and the Constitution

Section IX.  Project Esther, Federal Enforcement, and the Suppression of Dissent

Section X.  Witness I: Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum — Covenant Theology Against Political Zionism

Section XI.  Witness II: Edward W. Said — Historical Documentation of Displacement

Section XII.  The Tanakh Standard: Yehezkel 47–48 and the Covenant Land Boundary

Section XIII.  Implications for the Iran-Israel-USA Peace Covenant

Section XIV.  The Scholarly and Jewish Institutional Debate

Section XV.  Conclusion — Truth, Covenant, and the Path to Peace

This report is produced in the interest of truth, covenant integrity, and the right of all people to examine history without accusation or intimidation. As a Hebrew Elder grounded in the Tanakh, the author neither hates the Jewish people nor shies from examining the political movement of Zionism — a 19th-century nationalist ideology that must not be confused with the covenant identity of the Hebrew or Jewish people.

The weaponization of the charge of ‘antisemitism’ to silence political speech is a documented phenomenon, acknowledged even by the original drafters of the most widely used antisemitism definition in the world. This report examines that phenomenon alongside the actual history of what antisemitism is, where it came from, and what distinguishes legitimate historical and political critique from genuine hatred.

This is a report of facts. Sources include primary documents, declassified government archives, Israeli historians, United Nations records, and peer-reviewed scholarship from multiple perspectives.

Antisemitism is, at its core, hatred, prejudice, discrimination, or violence directed against Jewish people as Jewish people. Historically, it has included blood libel accusations (fabricated claims that Jews murder Christian children), forced ghettoization, expulsion from countries, systematic exclusion from professions and property ownership, and ultimately state-sponsored genocide.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition, adopted in 2016, defines antisemitism as: ‘a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,’ manifested through words and actions against Jewish individuals and institutions.

Crucially, the IHRA definition itself states: ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.’ This is the definition’s own language, frequently omitted by those who weaponize it.

The following are not antisemitism by any honest scholarly or legal standard:

• Criticizing the political policies of the State of Israel
• Criticizing Zionism as a political and nationalist ideology
• Documenting the historical displacement of the Palestinian people
• Critiquing AIPAC’s documented lobbying influence over U.S. Congress
• Questioning the founding violence of the Israeli state
• Advocating for a single democratic state with equal rights for all people in Palestine/Israel
• Drawing historical comparisons between Israeli policies and other documented systems of ethnic displacement
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Scholarly consensus: The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021), signed by over 200 Holocaust scholars and Middle East specialists, explicitly states that ‘even contentious, strident, or harsh criticism of Israel for its policies and actions, including those that led to the creation of Israel, is not per se illegitimate or antisemitic.’

The weaponization of antisemitism accusations to silence political speech is not a fringe claim — it is documented by the very people who created the definitions.

Kenneth Stern, the lead drafter of the IHRA working definition, testified before Congress that right-wing Jewish organizations were weaponizing his definition to suppress political speech on university campuses. He stated they were working to ‘hunt political speech with which they disagree and threaten to bring legal cases.’

A 2023 report by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies analyzed 40 cases where UK academics were accused of antisemitism under the IHRA definition between 2017 and 2022. In 38 of 40 cases, the accusations were dismissed. This is not a definition protecting Jewish people — it is an instrument being used against political speech.

In January 2026, New York City formally revoked the IHRA definition, with its administration stating that future policy would distinguish between hate speech and protected political expression. This is a significant acknowledgment at the governmental level that the definition had been systematically misused.

To understand how National Socialism rose to power, one must understand the economic catastrophe deliberately imposed on the German people following World War I.

The 1919 Treaty of Versailles assigned Germany complete and sole blame for the war under Article 231, the so-called ‘war guilt clause.’ This was historically contested even at the time — the economist John Maynard Keynes, who attended the Paris peace conference, called the treaty a ‘Carthaginian peace’ and warned that the reparations demanded were economically impossible and would destabilize all of Europe.

The treaty imposed the following upon Germany:

• Loss of 13% of Germany’s pre-war territory, including 10% of its population
• Total disarmament and foreign occupation of the Rhineland
• Reparation payments set in 1921 at approximately 132 billion gold marks — the equivalent of over $600 billion in 2025 currency
• Surrender of all overseas colonies
• Prohibition of merger with Austria

The economic consequences were catastrophic. Germany had already borrowed heavily to finance the war, accumulating 156 billion marks in debt by 1918. The reparation demands pushed the Weimar Republic to the breaking point.

By 1923, Germany was in hyperinflation of staggering proportions. A loaf of bread that cost 20,000 marks in the morning would cost 5,000,000 marks by nightfall of the same day. Workers were paid twice daily because money lost value by the hour. By November 1923, one U.S. dollar was equivalent to one trillion German marks!

When Germany defaulted on coal deliveries in 1923, France and Belgium sent 80,000 troops into the Ruhr industrial region — the heart of German manufacturing — and began seizing goods as payment. The German government responded by printing more currency to pay striking workers, accelerating the collapse.

Scholars note that the hyperinflation destroyed the personal savings of the German middle class more completely than any socialist revolution could have. A lifetime of savings could not buy a subway ticket. Pensions were wiped out entirely. This mass economic humiliation, combined with the shame of the ‘war guilt’ clause, created the psychological and political conditions that made Adolf Hitler’s nationalist promises credible to millions of desperate people. Are we about to repeat history?

After the Weimar Republic collapsed and Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933, Germany underwent a rapid and genuine economic recovery that is documented by mainstream economic historians. Unemployment, which had reached approximately 30% by 1932, dropped dramatically. Infrastructure programs were launched. Industrial output recovered.

This recovery is a matter of historical record. It is not evidence that the Nazi regime was morally good, nor that its racial ideology was justified. Economic policy and moral character are separate categories. Nations have achieved economic growth under deeply evil governance throughout history. The documented economic recovery does not rehabilitate the regime’s crimes; it helps explain why millions of ordinary Germans supported it.

Critical scholarly note: Historians debate how much of the recovery was sustainable versus built on deficit war spending and predatory seizure of Jewish-owned businesses and property, which transferred wealth to non-Jewish Germans and fueled apparent growth.

Political Zionism is a 19th-century nationalist ideology, not a biblical mandate. It was founded by Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist, in his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Herzl was motivated primarily by the antisemitism he witnessed in Europe — particularly the Dreyfus Affair in France, in which a Jewish French army officer was falsely convicted of treason.

Herzl considered multiple territories for a Jewish national homeland, including Uganda under British colonial auspices. The first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 declared that the goal was a Jewish home specifically in Palestine, though it was then an Ottoman territory with a large Arab Muslim and Christian majority.

It is essential to note: many of the most devout Jewish communities in Europe and the world, including prominent Orthodox rabbinical authorities, strongly opposed Zionism at its founding. They argued that the return to the land of Israel was a divine act that could not be accomplished through nationalist politics and armed settlement. This opposition continues among groups such as Neturei Karta today.

Herzl’s own diary entries are also on record. In 1895, he wrote of antisemites as potential strategic allies, noting that their desire to remove Jews from Europe aligned with the Zionist aim of Jewish emigration to Palestine. The logic was instrumental: antisemitism, redirected, could serve the Zionist project. This convergence of interest — documented in primary sources — is directly relevant to the Haavara Agreement that followed four decades later.

The most consequential document in the creation of the modern State of Israel is the Balfour Declaration — a single letter, 67 words long, sent by British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, head of the British Zionist Federation, on November 2, 1917. The letter declared that ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ and would ‘use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.’

Several critical facts about this declaration must be understood:

• Palestine was not Britain’s territory to promise. It was part of the Ottoman Empire, which Britain was fighting in World War I.
• The 700,000 Arab residents of Palestine — the overwhelming majority of the population — were not consulted.
• Balfour himself wrote in a 1919 memorandum: ‘In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.’
• The declaration contradicted prior British promises to Arab leaders. Britain had already promised Arab independence across the region to Sharif Husain of Arabia in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence of 1915, which included Palestine.
• Britain’s motivations were primarily strategic, not humanitarian: they sought Jewish support for the Allied war effort, particularly to keep Russia engaged after its 1917 revolution and to help draw the United States deeper into the conflict.
• Lord Rothschild himself was directly involved in drafting the declaration’s language and lobbying the British Cabinet to adopt it.
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The King-Crane Commission, an American fact-finding mission sent to the region in 1919, found that the majority of Palestinians expressed strong opposition to Zionist immigration and settlement. The commissioners recommended modifying the Mandate’s goals. Their findings were ignored.

One of the most historically significant and least discussed chapters of this period is the Haavara Agreement, a formal arrangement negotiated between the Nazi German government and Zionist leadership in 1933.

Under this agreement, Jews who emigrated from Germany to Palestine could transfer a portion of their assets by depositing them into special accounts in Germany, which were then used to purchase German export goods sold in Palestine. The proceeds were paid to the emigrants upon arrival. Approximately 60,000 German Jews emigrated to Palestine under this program between 1933 and 1941.

The existence of this agreement is not disputed. It is documented in Israeli archives and acknowledged by mainstream historians, including Israeli ones. Its implications are significant:

• It demonstrates that the Nazi regime, in its early years, had a policy of Jewish emigration rather than immediate annihilation.
• It demonstrates that Zionist leadership entered into a formal transactional relationship with the Nazi government.
• It was condemned by many Jewish leaders and organizations at the time, including those who advocated for an international economic boycott of Germany.

Some Zionist historians have argued this arrangement saved tens of thousands of lives; critics have argued it broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi goods and provided the Nazi regime with economic and propaganda benefits.

The British Mandate administration of Palestine was headquartered in the southern wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. On July 22, 1946, members of the Irgun — a Zionist paramilitary organization led by Menachem Begin, who would later become Prime Minister of Israel — disguised themselves as Arab workers and detonated a bomb in the hotel’s basement.

The explosion killed 91 people: 41 Arabs, 28 British, 17 Jews, 2 Armenians, and 1 each of Russian, Egyptian, and Greek nationality. It remains the deadliest attack carried out against the British during the entire Mandate period.

The Irgun and its sister organization the Lehi (known to the British as the Stern Gang) were designated as terrorist organizations by both the British and American governments. Their leaders — Begin and Yitzhak Shamir respectively — both became Prime Ministers of Israel.

In 2006, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended a ceremony at the hotel to unveil a plaque honoring the bombers. The British government sent a formal letter to the Mayor of Jerusalem stating: ‘We don’t think it is right for an act of terrorism to be commemorated.’

The Nakba — Arabic for ‘the Catastrophe’ — refers to the mass expulsion and flight of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes during the 1947–1949 Palestine war that established the State of Israel. This is not a contested fringe claim; it is documented by Israeli historians using Israeli military archives.

On March 10, 1948, the Zionist leadership approved Plan Dalet (Plan D), a military strategy designed to seize maximum territory before the British Mandate ended in May 1948. Israeli historian Benny Morris, who researched the events from declassified Israeli Defense Forces archives in the 1980s, documented what occurred:

• Between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were depopulated and in many cases destroyed
• Dozens of documented massacres of Palestinian civilians were carried out by Zionist militias
• Village wells were deliberately contaminated as part of a documented biological warfare program to prevent Palestinian return
• Properties were looted and many sites were renamed with Hebrew names
• By the war’s end, Israel controlled approximately 77% of Mandatory Palestine — well beyond the 55% allocated by the UN partition plan
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The Deir Yassin massacre of April 9, 1948 — in which Irgun and Lehi forces killed between 107 and 250 Palestinian men, women, and children in a village near Jerusalem — is particularly documented. The massacre was deliberately publicized by Zionist forces to spread terror and accelerate the Palestinian exodus. It worked.

By the end of the war, approximately 90% of the indigenous Arab population had been expelled from or had fled the territory that became Israel. The new state denied their right to return, and their villages were depopulated and resettled by Jewish immigrants.

Prior to the wave of mass immigration under the Mandate and the founding violence of 1947–48, Palestinian Arab communities had coexisted with smaller Jewish communities in the region for centuries. The sudden and politically organized nature of mass European Jewish immigration — encouraged by the Balfour Declaration and subsequent British Mandate policies — transformed the demographic and political reality of the region in ways the existing population had not consented to and could not absorb.

Accounts of Palestinian families returning home to find doors chained and guns pointed at them, their homes confiscated, are consistent with documented accounts from the 1948 period. This is recorded in Israeli archives, in firsthand Palestinian testimonies, and in the work of Israeli historians such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and Tom Segev.

The 1967 Six-Day War is often presented in Western media as a purely defensive war by Israel against Arab neighbors seeking its destruction. The historical record is more complex.

By June 1967, Israel struck first against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In six days, Israel seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The Sinai was later returned to Egypt under the 1979 Camp David Accords.

UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in November 1967, called for the ‘withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from occupied territories’ and the right of ‘every state in the area… to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.’ Israel has never fully complied with this resolution. The West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights remain under Israeli control, with the West Bank and Gaza housing millions of Palestinians under ongoing occupation now approaching six decades.

Following 1967, Israel began building civilian settlements in the occupied West Bank. These settlements are considered illegal under international law by the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the overwhelming consensus of international legal scholars, as they violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory.

As of 2024, over 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in settlements connected to Israel by roads from which Palestinians are excluded. This system — separate roads, separate legal systems, separate rights based on ethnicity in the same territory — has been characterized as apartheid by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and in a 2022 report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory.

This distinction is the foundation of the entire discussion. Zionism, as a movement, was invented in 1896 by a secular European journalist as a nationalist political project. It is no more ‘Jewish’ in its essence than the Christian Crusades were the inevitable expression of all Christian faith.

The covenant identity of the Hebrew people — rooted in the Tanakh, in the brit (covenant), and in the relationship between YHWH and His people — long predates and is categorically distinct from a 19th-century nationalist movement.

As Elder Kepha Arcemont and Miqdash Bethel affirm: to critique Zionism is not to hate Jewish or Hebrew people. It is to critique a political movement that has used the language of covenant and scripture to justify actions — dispossession, displacement, military occupation — that are inconsistent with the Torah’s commands regarding the treatment of the stranger, the widow, the fatherless, and the sojourner among Israel.

Opposition to Zionism from within Jewish and Hebrew communities is substantial and historically deep:

• Neturei Karta, an Orthodox Jewish movement, has opposed Zionism since the movement’s founding, arguing that the establishment of a Jewish state by political and military means is a theological violation.
• At the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, prominent Anglo-Jewish leaders including David Lindo Alexander and Claude Montefiore publicly opposed it, warning that it would ‘stamp the Jews as strangers in their native lands’ and undermine Jewish citizenship rights worldwide.
• Israeli ‘New Historians’ such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and Avi Shlaim, working from Israeli military archives, have documented the ethnic cleansing of 1948 — challenging the founding mythology of their own state.
• Many Jewish Americans, including large numbers of younger Jews, have increasingly distinguished between their Jewish identity and support for Israeli state policy, particularly regarding Gaza.
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The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the most powerful foreign policy lobbying organization in the United States by most measures. This is not a conspiracy theory — it is a documented political science finding.

AIPAC does not register as a foreign agent under FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act), despite its primary mission being to align U.S. foreign policy with Israeli government interests. Researchers John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard documented AIPAC’s influence extensively in their 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which generated significant controversy precisely because it applied standard political science methodology to a topic that had been treated as untouchable.

Criticizing AIPAC’s influence over U.S. foreign policy is the same category of political speech as criticizing the NRA’s influence over gun legislation, the pharmaceutical lobby’s influence over drug pricing policy, or the fossil fuel industry’s influence over climate legislation. It is political critique, not ethnic hatred.

It is factually accurate that Jewish Americans are disproportionately represented in senior positions in the entertainment industry, major news networks, and the financial sector relative to their approximately 2% share of the U.S. population. This is documented and not seriously disputed.

What the facts do NOT support is the conclusion that this represents a coordinated ethnic conspiracy to control media. The reasons for disproportionate representation are historically rooted: for centuries, European law excluded Jews from land ownership, military service, and most professions, channeling them into finance, trade, and intellectual professions. When those legal barriers fell, the accumulated skills, networks, and capital in those fields produced generational advantages. This is a sociohistorical explanation, not a conspiratorial one.

The critical distinction is this: identifying demographic patterns in industry representation is an empirical observation. Attributing those patterns to a coordinated conspiratorial agenda is a leap that the facts do not support — and historically, it is exactly that leap that has led to persecution, pogroms, and genocide.

From a Miqdash Bethel perspective: The Tanakh warns repeatedly against judging entire peoples by the actions of their rulers or elites. The covenant people are called to discernment, not collective accusation.

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects political speech — including speech that is offensive, uncomfortable, or critical of powerful groups and institutions. This protection is not incidental; it is the core purpose of the First Amendment. It is precisely unpopular speech that requires constitutional protection. Popular speech needs no protection.

The attempt to codify the IHRA working definition of antisemitism into American law — and to use it to punish criticism of Israel on university campuses and in public discourse — is a direct challenge to First Amendment protections. This is not a partisan position; it has been raised by the American Civil Liberties Union, by legal scholars across the political spectrum, and by the original drafter of the definition itself.

In 2021, over 200 Holocaust and Middle East scholars produced the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism as a more precise and less weaponizable alternative to the IHRA definition. It defines antisemitism as ‘discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews’ while explicitly protecting political speech about Israel, Zionism, and Palestinian rights.

The Jerusalem Declaration explicitly states that the following are NOT antisemitism, even if people find them controversial: supporting the Palestinian right of return, describing Israel’s founding as involving expulsion and dispossession, and using concepts like apartheid or settler colonialism to analyze Israeli policy.

Project Esther is a 10,000-word policy document produced by the Heritage Foundation — the same conservative think tank behind Project 2025 — released in October 2024 and described as ‘a national strategy to combat antisemitism.’ In practice, it is a blueprint for using the legal and investigative power of the federal government to silence, defund, deport, and dismantle any organization critical of Israel by classifying that criticism as terrorism.

The document declares that all pro-Palestinian groups in the United States are part of a ‘Hamas Support Network’ (HSN) — including Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and American Muslims for Palestine. It calls for: anti-terrorism and anti-racketeering prosecutions, deportations, public firings, removal of tax-exempt status, blocking of funding, and campaigns to sow internal discord within targeted movements. Politico described it as ‘a lesser-known blueprint from the same creators of Project 2025.’ By May 2025, the New York Times found that the Trump administration had already moved to implement more than half of Project Esther’s 47 proposals.

A clear-eyed analysis of Project Esther reveals its nature:

• No major Jewish organizations participated in drafting or publicly endorsed Project Esther. Its core supporting organizations are evangelical Christian groups including the Family Research Council and Faith and Freedom Coalition.
• The Forward, a Jewish-American publication, reported that Heritage ‘struggled to attract Jewish supporters’ and that the plan ‘focuses exclusively on left-wing critics of Israel, ignoring the antisemitism problems from white supremacists and other far-right groups.’
• The Heritage Foundation’s own head of antisemitism operations stated when asked why the plan ignored right-wing antisemitism: ‘White supremacists are not my problem because white supremacists are not part of being conservative.’ This alone reveals the plan is a political instrument, not a Jewish safety program.
• The document incorrectly identifies the Book of Esther as being in the Torah. It is in the Ketuvim — the Writings. This basic scriptural error in a document claiming biblical grounding is significant.
• Project Esther accuses American Jews who do not support its agenda of ‘complacency’ — effectively declaring which form of Jewish identity is acceptable to a Christian nationalist think tank.
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From a Miqdash Bethel perspective: A document produced by Christian nationalist organizations that misquotes Jewish scripture, has no major Jewish organizational support, ignores documented right-wing antisemitic violence, and classifies political speech as terrorism is not a defense of the Hebrew or Jewish people. It is a political instrument wearing the garment of Jewish safety.

President Trump signed EO 13899 in December 2019, and the expanded EO 14188, ‘Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,’ on January 29, 2025. Together, these orders direct every federal agency to use ‘all available and appropriate legal tools’ to address antisemitism — using the IHRA definition, which conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

The practical effects have been sweeping:

• The Department of Education opened civil rights investigations into more than 60 universities, threatening to revoke federal funding.
• $400 million in federal grants and contracts were revoked from Columbia University.
• The Department of Justice formed a multi-agency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, with campus enforcement as its first priority.
• Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student and lawful permanent resident at Columbia, was arrested by ICE in March 2025 and held for 104 days solely for political organizing activities — no criminal charges were filed.
• The executive order’s own White House fact sheet warned: ‘To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.’
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Kenneth Stern, the original drafter of the IHRA definition being used to enforce these orders, testified that Trump’s use of it is ‘an attack on academic freedom and free speech.’ The ACLU has alleged the White House is using it ‘to pressure university officials to target immigrant and international students, faculty, and staff.’

On April 9, 2025, USCIS announced it would immediately begin screening all immigrants’ and visa applicants’ social media accounts for ‘antisemitic activity’ — using that content as grounds for denying green cards, student visas, and other immigration benefits. The policy affects green card applicants, foreign students, and anyone affiliated with institutions the government deems linked to antisemitic activity.

The Brennan Center for Justice analyzed the policy and found it built on undefined, vague terms capable of sweeping in a social media like, retweet, or being tagged in another person’s photo. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) responded: ‘By surveilling visa and green card holders and targeting them based on nothing more than their protected expression, the administration trades America’s commitment to free and open discourse for fear and silence. That chill appears to be the administration’s aim.’

DHS Secretary Noem’s office stated that people should not think they can ‘hide behind the First Amendment’ to criticize Israel. The phrase ‘hide behind the First Amendment,’ used by a Cabinet secretary to describe the exercise of a constitutional right, is itself a constitutional alarm.

Carrie Prejean Boller, a Catholic and Trump-appointed member of the White House Religious Liberty Commission, was removed from the commission after she asked whether her Catholic faith’s rejection of Zionism made her an antisemite, defended Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens against antisemitism charges, and posted quotes from Pope Leo about suffering in Gaza. A White House official indicated that posting a Tucker Carlson interview featuring a Green Beret discussing civilian deaths constituted antisemitic activity. She was removed for asking documented, factual questions about the definition of antisemitism — the same questions that 200 Holocaust scholars raised in the Jerusalem Declaration.

Tucker Carlson has been named by Zionist organizations as the number one enemy of Zionism in American media, and has questioned on his platform whether Christian support for Israel has a biblical basis. Candace Owens has documented Palestinian deaths and challenged the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Jimmy Dore has consistently challenged the Israel lobby’s influence over U.S. foreign policy. All three have faced antisemitism accusations for this speech. The accusations are not supported by the standard of documented ethnic hatred.

Two other names frequently cited in these discussions — Kanye West and Nick Fuentes — require honest separate treatment. Kanye West’s public statements have included conspiratorial ethnic framing and associations with openly white nationalist figures, which cross the line from political critique into territory that legitimately earns the antisemitism charge. Nick Fuentes holds and promotes openly white nationalist ideology. This report does not cite either as sources. The credibility of this report depends on maintaining a precise distinction between legitimate political critique — which is broad, protected, and documented — and genuine ethnic hatred, which is real and must not be minimized. Mixing these two categories is exactly how the weaponization of antisemitism succeeds.

BACKGROUND

Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887–1979), the Satmar Rebbe, was one of the most influential Orthodox Jewish halachic authorities of the twentieth century — founder of the Satmar Hasidic dynasty and leader of one of the largest Haredi communities in the world. He was a posek, a decisor of Jewish law, whose rulings carried the weight of centuries of covenant tradition. He was not a politician or activist. He was a Torah scholar operating from within the deepest stream of Orthodox Jewish life.

HIS POSITION

In VaYoel Moshe (1961), Rabbi Teitelbaum argued that the establishment of the modern State of Israel by the Zionist political movement constituted a violation of what he identified as the Three Oaths — an aggadic tradition from Tractate Ketubot 111a in which the nation of Yisrael was bound not to ascend to the Land en masse by force before the divinely appointed time of redemption. His critique was not a rejection of the covenant Land or the Hebrew people’s eternal connection to it. It was a rejection of the movement — human-engineered political nationalism substituting statecraft for covenant faithfulness.

"The Zionists have made the name of G-d and His Torah into something loathsome and contemptible in the eyes of the nations... and they have caused great suffering to Jews throughout the world."  — Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, VaYoel Moshe

RELEVANCE TO THIS REPORT

The Rebbe’s testimony is significant precisely because it originates from within the most traditional stream of Jewish scholarship. It establishes that the critique of political Zionism is not foreign to the Jewish people — in its oldest and most authoritative form, it is a position held by Torah-observant Jews themselves. This directly answers anyone who claims that opposing political Zionism is an attack on Jewish identity or Jewish people.

Note on authority: Miqdash Bethel’s own doctrinal authority is the Tanakh, not the Talmud. Rabbi Teitelbaum is cited as corroborating testimony — a witness from within the Jewish people’s own tradition — not as Miqdash Bethel’s doctrinal source.

BACKGROUND

Edward W. Said (1935–2003) was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His foundational work Orientalism (1978) reshaped the field of postcolonial studies and is now standard academic reading across multiple disciplines. He was a Palestinian Christian born in Jerusalem — a primary historical witness to displacement and a rigorous textual analyst. He is cited here not as a political authority but as a documented scholar whose analysis of Zionism as a colonial movement rests on extensive primary source research.

HIS POSITION

In The Question of Palestine (1979), Said undertook a systematic analysis of Zionism as a colonial settler movement from the standpoint of the indigenous population the movement displaced. He distinguished carefully between Jewish history and identity — which he treated with consistent scholarly respect — and Zionism as a modern European nationalist political program that pursued its aims through demographic engineering and the erasure of an existing people’s presence, history, and rights.

"Zionism... was a colonial settler movement... and what it meant for the native population was not liberation but replacement."  — Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine

RELEVANCE TO THIS REPORT

The covenant land boundaries of Yehezkel 47–48 are not silent on the question of the non-Israelite inhabitants of the land. Yehezkel 47:22–23 explicitly grants inheritance within the covenant boundaries to the foreigner (ger) who dwells among Yisrael and has children there. Any peace covenant grounded in this text must engage honestly with the historical record of displacement that Said documented. Citing him is an act of historical honesty that the covenant text itself requires.

The covenant land boundaries described in Yehezkel (Ezekiel) 47–48 are not coextensive with the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan boundaries, nor with any subsequent Israeli territorial expansion. They are the boundary of the covenant as given in the Tanakh — the standard by which Miqdash Bethel assesses all territorial and political claims in this region.

Yehezkel 47:13–23 describes the land boundary from the Mediterranean coast in the west to the eastern border, divided among the twelve tribes of Yisrael. Yehezkel 47:22–23 then states explicitly:

“It shall be that you will divide it by lot as an inheritance for yourselves and for the strangers who dwell among you... they shall be to you as the native-born among the children of Yisrael; they shall have an inheritance with you among the tribes of Yisrael."  — Yehezkel 47:22–23"

This text is unambiguous. The covenant does not envision ethnic exclusivity. The foreigner who dwells within the covenant land and has children there is given inheritance alongside the children of Yisrael. A political state whose foundational ideology privileges one ethnic group and systematically dispossesses another is not operating within the covenant framework of this text — regardless of what name it uses or what scriptural language it borrows to justify itself.

This is the covenant standard. All historical analysis, all scholarly witnesses, all institutional debates documented in this report are presented in service of one purpose: to demonstrate how far the current political reality has departed from this standard, and what a covenant-based peace would actually require to bring it back into alignment.

The Iran-Israel-USA Peace Covenant framework proposed by the Counsel of Peace and grounded in Yehezkel 47–48 requires all three parties to engage with the land question honestly.

Acknowledging that its political founding ideology — Zionism — is historically distinct from the covenant identity of the Hebrew people, and that the covenant text itself mandates equal inheritance for those who dwell within the land, regardless of ethnicity. A state cannot claim covenant authority for its founding while violating the covenant’s own explicit terms for the treatment of the foreigner dwelling within the land.

Acknowledging that the genetic and historical evidence for Hebrew covenant identity is real, that the presence of a Hebrew covenant people in the land is not a political invention of European colonialism, and that a covenant framework — not a military or diplomatic framework alone — is the only structure capable of producing durable peace in this region.

Acknowledging that its financial, diplomatic, and military support for policies that violate the covenant standard of Yehezkel 47:22–23 implicates it in the ongoing breach, and that a genuine covenant peace requires a different posture than unconditional political support for any state’s actions regardless of whether those actions are consistent with the covenant text.

The distinctions documented in this report — between Zionism and Jewish identity, between anti-Zionism and antisemitism — are not peripheral to the peace covenant proposal. They are structural prerequisites. A peace built on a falsified history is not peace; it is postponed conflict with a longer fuse.

This section presents the formal academic and institutional debate over the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. All sources are identified with their credentials. The report’s assessment is stated at the end of each subsection so the reader encounters the evidence before the conclusion.

CREDENTIALS

Norman G. Finkelstein holds a doctorate in political science from Princeton University (1988). He is the son of two Holocaust survivors — both parents were concentration camp inmates. Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, the pre-eminent academic authority on the Holocaust, stated that Finkelstein’s place in the history of writing history is assured and that he will be among those proven right. Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim, whose Iron Wall scholarship is cited in this report, described Finkelstein as having a most impressive track record in exposing spurious American-Jewish scholarship on the Arab-Israeli conflict and praised his erudition, originality, meticulous attention to detail, intellectual integrity, courage, and formidable forensic skills.

HIS MOST RELEVANT CONTRIBUTION

In Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (2005), Finkelstein documents with extensive primary source research the systematic construction of antisemitism allegations as a political tool to protect Israel from legitimate criticism. His analysis traces the institutional actors, the rhetorical strategies, and the specific academic works deployed in this function.

Finkelstein’s own biography is evidence for the weaponization thesis: after the publication of Beyond Chutzpah, Alan Dershowitz conducted a direct lobbying campaign against his tenure case at DePaul University, contacting DePaul’s president and administration. Finkelstein was denied tenure in 2007. His own academic department had voted to grant tenure. DePaul’s college committee had voted to grant tenure. The denial came from the administration under external pressure. This sequence is a textbook illustration of the mechanism this report describes.

ON THE ANTISEMITISM ACCUSATIONS AGAINST FINKELSTEIN

Finkelstein has been accused of antisemitism by critics including Dershowitz. His department at DePaul investigated those accusations and found them unsubstantiated. Finkelstein has publicly criticized the BDS movement as legally and strategically untenable and has criticized Hamas’s targeting of civilians. He applies his standards consistently across parties.

CREDENTIALS

Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University (PhD 1998). His book The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (2006) was praised by Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi of Harvard as thoroughly researched, powerfully argued, and often brilliantly insightful. He publishes in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Palestine Studies and the Middle East Journal.

HIS MOST RELEVANT CONTRIBUTION

Massad has documented that Zionism and European antisemitism shared a common ideological premise: that Jews did not belong in Europe and should be removed to a national homeland elsewhere. Zionism offered Jewish people a solution fully complicit with antisemitism — one predicated on voluntary self-expulsion from Europe rather than the achievement of equal citizenship within it. This provides the intellectual framework for the Haavara Agreement analysis in Section III.

A NECESSARY CAUTION

Massad’s broader rhetorical framing — that Zionism is itself a form of antisemitism — is a minority position even among Israel’s critics. This report uses his historical analysis selectively. The documented convergence of Zionist and antisemitic political logic is cited; the rhetorical equation of Zionism with antisemitism as a category is not adopted as Miqdash Bethel’s own position.

CREDENTIALS

Peter Beinart is an associate professor at CUNY, former editor of The New Republic, and a contributing writer to The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Haaretz. His book The Crisis of Zionism (2012) was endorsed by President Bill Clinton and former Israeli Knesset deputy speaker Naomi Chazan, and received favorable reviews in the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Beinart is an Orthodox Jew and former committed Zionist who has publicly documented his movement away from Zionism.

STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE

Beinart came from within the Zionist establishment and his movement toward a democratic binational state is a conclusion reached from within. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and other prominent American commentators who question Israeli policy are routinely accused of antisemitism. Peter Beinart makes the same criticisms from within the Orthodox Jewish establishment. If criticizing Israeli policy toward Palestinians is antisemitism, then Peter Beinart is an antisemite — and no serious observer has made that accusation. Beinart is exhibit A that these criticisms fall within the bounds of legitimate discourse.

"The new American Jewish establishment has made support for Israeli policy... the litmus test of Jewish identity itself. That equation is false, and it is dangerous."  — Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism

ORGANIZATIONAL PROFILE

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is a national Jewish organization founded in 1996, led and staffed primarily by Jewish Americans. It explicitly opposes antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all forms of racism while also opposing Israeli policies toward Palestinian people. JVP has formally adopted an anti-Zionist position, stating that Zionism is incompatible with its understanding of Jewish ethics and values.

RELEVANCE

JVP was designated by Project Esther as part of a Hamas Support Network — a designation applied to a Jewish organization whose membership is entirely Jewish and whose stated mission explicitly opposes antisemitism. This is the clearest available illustration of how the weaponization mechanism operates: the accusation is not that JVP’s members hate Jewish people. They are Jewish people. The accusation is that their political opposition to Israeli policy makes them, by definitional fiat, supporters of terrorism. JVP’s existence and its formal anti-Zionist position directly answers the claim that anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Jewish.

THE 3D TEST

The most widely deployed framework for arguing that criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism was developed by Natan Sharansky and popularized by Alan Dershowitz. It identifies three criteria: Delegitimization (denying Israel’s right to exist); Demonization (applying uniquely evil characterizations to Israel); and Double Standards (applying to Israel standards not applied to other states).

This report’s response: 

On Delegitimization — this report argues that the covenant boundaries of Yehezkel 47–48 are the governing standard, not the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan. Holding a political state to the covenant text is the application of the highest available standard of legitimacy. 

On Demonization — this report applies historical and textual analysis to documented events and documented policies. Political critique is not demonization. 

On Double Standards — this report holds Israel, Iran, and the United States to the same standard: the covenant text. That is not a double standard. It is a single standard applied without exception.

THE ADL’S INSTITUTIONAL POSITION

This report does not dismiss the ADL’s concern with actual antisemitism, which is real, documented, and growing. However, the ADL’s position on this specific question has been challenged by former ADL national director Abraham Foxman, who has stated that criticism of Israeli policies is not inherently antisemitic, and by the consistent scholarly findings of the Jerusalem Declaration. When the IHRA definition’s own author (Stern), a former ADL director (Foxman), and over 200 Holocaust scholars all express reservations about the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, that conflation is a contested institutional position — not a scholarly consensus.

Journalist and podcaster Katie Halper has argued publicly that equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is itself antisemitic, because it holds all Jewish people collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli state. This argument is valid. However, it is already covered more authoritatively by the Jerusalem Declaration signatories and by Kenneth Stern’s Congressional testimony, both cited in this report. She is noted here for completeness and set aside.

The record shows:

• Antisemitism is real, historical, and deadly. Its core is the ethnic hatred of Jewish people as Jewish people. This report does not minimize it, rationalize it, or excuse it.
• Political Zionism is a separate ideology, founded 1896, that must be subject to the same scrutiny as any other political movement. It is not coextensive with Jewish identity, Hebrew covenant identity, or Jewish faith.
• The Palestinian displacement of 1947–1948 is documented historical fact, confirmed by Israeli archives and Israeli historians, not contested fringe claims.
• The antisemitism charge has been systematically weaponized to silence political speech critical of Israeli state policy — acknowledged by the definition’s own architects, documented in academic research, and recognized at the governmental level with New York City’s formal revocation of the IHRA definition in January 2026.
• The equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is not a scholarly consensus. It is opposed by the definition’s primary drafter (Stern), a former ADL director (Foxman), over 200 Holocaust scholars (Jerusalem Declaration), and prominent Jewish voices from Orthodox theology (Teitelbaum), liberal journalism (Beinart), and formal Jewish organizations (JVP).
• Project Esther, Executive Orders 13899 and 14188, DHS social media screening, and the removal of Carrie Prejean Boller from the White House Religious Liberty Commission are documented evidence that the weaponization of antisemitism accusations is not theoretical — it is an active federal enforcement mechanism.
• The covenant boundaries of Yehezkel 47–48 do not support ethnic exclusivity in the land. Yehezkel 47:22–23 explicitly grants inheritance to the foreigner who dwells among Yisrael. A political state whose foundational ideology violates this covenant text cannot claim covenant authority.
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For those of us rooted in the Tanakh — in the words given to Moshe, to the Prophets, to the covenant people — the call is not to hatred of any people, but to truth, to justice, and to the covenant of peace (brit shalom). The false accusation of antisemitism against those who speak documented history is itself a form of injustice. The silencing of Palestinian testimony is itself a form of injustice.

A peace built on falsified history is not peace. It is a postponed conflict with a longer fuse. The covenant demands more. The covenant can deliver more. But only if all parties are willing to read what it actually says — and act accordingly.

This report is offered in that spirit — as an instrument of truth in the service of covenant peace.

Elder Kepha Arcemont  |  Founding Voice, Miqdash Bethel Assembly

Silent Founding Member, Counsel of Peace

 miqdashbethel@gmail.com  |  Pearl River, Louisiana 70452