Bondi showed what happens when untruths go unchallenged

A month on from the Bondi attacks, a hard truth remains: antisemitism is nourished when untruths about Israel go unchallenged. Much of this misinformation spreads easily because many who consider themselves neutral remain uninformed out of complacency or the belief that the issue is simply too complex to engage with. Others fall into false moral equivalence that blurs the line between atrocity and response. 

The level of misunderstanding is often astonishing. Joe Rogan recently guessed that there are “500 million Jews in the world”. The real number is 15 million. 

In this environment, where algorithms deliver information designed to provoke rather than clarify, ignorance, to paraphrase Joseph Goebbels, is what allows a lie repeated often enough to become accepted as truth. In this sea of disinformation, some facts remain beyond dispute. These are not matters of interpretation or ideology, but facts that anyone engaging in this debate should understand. 

Fact one: denying the Jewish connection to Zionism is antisemitic 

For most Jews, Zionism is an expression of identity and faith. The Jewish people have long understood themselves as a nation with an enduring historical, cultural, and spiritual connection to the land of Israel. Nationally, Israel is to many Jews what Armenia is to Armenians or Greece to Greeks. Religiously, the longing for Zion is woven into Jewish prayers, holidays, and scripture much as Mecca anchors Islam and Rome anchors Catholicism. 

To insist that Judaism be defined without Zionism is an attempt to dictate to Jews how they understand their own faith and identity. No-one claims the right to redefine any other religion or identity in this way. 

Zionism is simply the belief that the Jewish people, like any other nation, have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. To deny that right uniquely to Jews isn’t progressive. It’s prejudice. 

Fact two: 7 October wasn’t resistance. It was terrorism. 

Hamas terrorists carried printed orders explicitly instructing them to kill as many people as possible and to target schools and civilian communities. They raped women, burned families alive, and executed children. These weren’t acts of desperation or liberation, but war crimes. Those who justify or “contextualise” such crimes reveal moral bankruptcy. 

Fact three: Israel didn’t occupy Gaza 

In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew completely from Gaza in the hope that the territory would become a peaceful, self-governed Palestinian entity. It was a real opportunity for Palestinian self-rule, however Hamas used it to wage war on Israel. 

To limit the flow of weapons, Israel and Egypt jointly controlled Gaza’s borders – a policy often misrepresented as a “blockade”. The massacres of 7 October proved how ineffective that measure was. The claim that Gaza was “occupied” isn’t a legal or factual reality. 

Fact four: the conflict isn’t about borders, it’s about Israel’s existence 

If the Palestinian cause were really about ending the “occupation” and achieving statehood, it would have been resolved decades ago. Palestinian leaders were offered independence repeatedly – in 1937; 1947; 1967; 2000; and 2008 – and rejected each proposal. 

At Camp David in 2000, under then United States President Bill Clinton, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairperson Yasser Arafat was offered a state comprising most of the West Bank and all of Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. Arafat walked away, and the Second Intifada followed. In 2008, Mahmoud Abbas rejected a similar offer. 

The record is clear: the conflict has never been about the size of Israel. It is rooted in an ideological refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state in any borders. 

Fact five: Hamas isn’t a resistance movement 

Hamas’s founding charter calls for the annihilation of Israel and the murder of Jews. Its leaders openly promise to repeat massacres like that of 7 October. In its own words, it “loves death more than life”. 

This isn’t a movement of resistance, but a jihadist regime whose worldview is fundamentally opposed to liberal democratic values. Hamas enforces Sharia law; suppresses dissent; persecutes LGBTQ+ people; and strips women of basic rights. 

This ideology isn’t confined to Hamas. Repeated polls show broad public support for Hamas and for the 7 October atrocities in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority continues its “pay-for-slay” policy, paying salaries to the families of terrorists, with higher payments for killing more Jews. Schools are named after “martyrs” who murdered Israeli civilians, and children are taught to idolise them. This isn’t a fringe phenomenon but an institutionalised worldview that is taught, celebrated, and rewarded. 

Author and philosopher Sam Harris captured the core asymmetry of the conflict, saying, “If the Palestinians laid down their weapons, there would be peace. If the Israelis laid down theirs, there would be genocide.” Israel is fighting a jihadist ideology that openly calls for genocide. 

Fact six: the Palestinian refugee system keeps Palestinians stateless by design 

After World War II, refugee crises involving millions were resolved through resettlement. Twelve million Germans expelled from Eastern Europe; 14 million Hindus and Muslims displaced by the India-Pakistan partition; and three million Koreans separated by the Korean War were all resettled and rebuilt their lives. 

The Palestinian case is unique. In 1948, roughly 750 000 Palestinians became refugees and a comparable number of Jews were expelled from Arab states. Yet today, the number of Palestinian “refugees” exceeds five million, while the number of Jewish refugees is zero. This is because the United Nations via UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) applies a unique system used for no other refugee population: Palestinian refugee status is inherited indefinitely, even by those who hold full citizenship elsewhere. And unlike every other post-war refugee crisis, not one Palestinian refugee has ever been resettled under UNRWA’s mandate. Each generation is kept stateless by design. 

The absurdity is obvious. Omar Yaghi, the 2025 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, was born in Jordan to Palestinian parents and left for the United States at age 15. Today, he holds American, Jordanian, and Saudi citizenship. Under UNRWA’s rules, he could still be classified as a Palestinian “refugee” if he had been registered with UNRWA before he emigrated and if so, his children could also inherit that status. 

This is an institutional system designed to keep the refugee issue alive indefinitely. It ensures that it is never resolved, and it leads directly to the next fallacy: the so-called “right of return”. 

Fact seven: the “right of return” is a demographic weapon 

The so-called “right of return” – the demand that more than five million Palestinians and their descendants be allowed to resettle inside Israel isn’t a humanitarian proposal but a demographic weapon. 

No other refugee population makes such a demand. The descendants of Germans expelled after World War II or of Hindus and Muslims displaced in 1947 don’t claim a “right” to return to homes their ancestors left generations ago. This demand exists only in the Palestinian case because it serves a political goal: to undo Israel’s existence through demographic means. 

If implemented, Israel would be transformed into a Palestinian majority entity. A solution that includes a “right of return” isn’t a peace plan. It’s a political impossibility. 

Fact eight: Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East 

According to the 2023 Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index, Israel ranked 30th in the world, between the United States and Portugal. Australia ranked 14th; and South Africa, one of Israel’s harshest critics, 47th. The Palestinian Territories – ranked 115th – and every Middle Eastern state were classified as authoritarian. 

Israel stands as the region’s only democracy, with free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, and a free, critical press. 

Fact nine: the UN applies double standards to Israel 

No country has faced more condemnation by the UN than Israel – a level of scrutiny that reflects an institutional fixation while the UN has very little to say about countries such as Venezuela, Sudan, North Korea, and Iran. From 2015 to 2023, the General Assembly passed 154 resolutions censuring Israel, and only 71 against all other nations combined. At the Human Rights Council, Agenda Item 7 exists solely to debate Israel’s alleged violations, while no other state faces comparable treatment. 

This bias extends to the officials leading these supposedly neutral bodies. Francesca Albanese, the UN’s “Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories”, has had her positions on Israel condemned by France, Germany, and the US as “disgraceful”, “scandalous”, and “antisemitic”, yet remained in her post. The UN’s “independent” inquiry into Israel is chaired by Navi Pillay, who took the position after publicly branding Israel an apartheid state. 

These patterns reveal a culture within the UN and its agencies that legitimises Israel’s detractors and fuels modern antisemitism. 

Fact 10: Israel is falsely portrayed as a settler-colonial state 

Israel and Zionism aren’t colonial projects. Jewish presence in the land stretches back thousands of years, and as academic Dr Einat Wilf notes, one need not be Jewish or religious to recognise that few relationships between a people and a land are as deep and enduring. 

The return of Jews to their homeland bears no resemblance to colonialism in which a foreign power conquers territory to extract resources. From humble beginnings, Israel has built one of the world’s most open and diverse societies and has the 18th-highest GDP (gross domestic product) per capita in the world, between Belgium and Germany. 

The descendants of the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries after 1948 now comprise more than half of Israel’s Jewish population, meaning that the majority of Jewish Israelis are from the Middle East, not Europe. 

Israel also has more than two million Arab citizens who enjoy full and equal legal rights. Arab representatives serve in the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) and on the Supreme Court. The Arab population has grown from 156 000 in 1948 to more than two million today. This demographic reality is incompatible with claims of colonialism or apartheid. 

Before you decide what the truth is 

The debate about Israel is, at its core, a debate about moral clarity. The loudest anti-Israel movements draw on a familiar convergence of ideas. Some of their leading figures openly support jihadist violence, presenting it as resistance. Others on the far left reframe the conflict through distorted theories of settler-colonialism and race. And on the far right, there are those who promote antisemitic conspiracies, minimise the Holocaust, or revive old-fashioned Jew-hatred. 

Before you decide where you stand, ask yourself whether these voices reflect your values. 

Bondi starkly demonstrated the cost of indulging such narratives. In the war for truth, ignorance isn’t neutrality. It’s a choice. 

• Allan Joffe is a businessman based in Johannesburg. He is husband to Sandi, and father of their three children.