I Was Wrong About Israel — Part III

How October 7 and a year of obsessive research turned a godless liberal academic into a Zionist 

Kile B Jones 

 

 

One of the first cracks came from Fox News, which should embarrass me. I’m a liberal, an atheist, a man with no patience left for evangelical politics. Sometime after October 7th, doing the thing I do, checking sources against each other, I noticed their coverage of the Middle East was, article for article, more accurate than the outlets I’d lent some trust to. While NPR and the BBC were demonizing the Jewish state, Fox was at least asking who said what and when. While my liberal outlets ran uncorroborated stories, Fox would track Hamas or mention the PIJ. When a story broke, I respected an author who noted how it was told under a regime that would kill your family if an unbecoming word slipped out.

If that’s wrong, what else is wrong?

That question doesn’t stay contained, and it doesn’t let you sleep. It found the fifteen years I’d spent inside higher education. Postcolonial theory had stopped being a sub-field and become like air, Palestinian literature was the field’s favorite case study, a liberalism so committed to the language of the oppressed it made itself hospitable to an Islam it would normally avoid. I called out a professor over a syllabus once. You realize this stacks the deck, right? Tariq Ramadan beside Connolly beside Masuzawa, an argument assembled entirely out of books, no lecture required. Ramadan’s grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood. The professor looked at the list and said, “I guess you’re right, I didn’t notice.”

Here’s the part I won’t pretend away: I saw that machinery clearly and kept believing some of what it produced anyway. Seeing a structure is not the same as doubting its conclusions. October 7th made the doubt unbearable to keep deferring, and what followed felt like a religious experience. In the vertigo sense. The ground I’d built a life on turning out hollow underneath and nights spent thinking I was the one who’d come loose. Mentally. Cartesian doubt is elegant in a seminar room. It’s an uglier animal at one in the morning, holding a conclusion nobody around you shares.

I didn’t change sides. I checked the sources.

Here’s some of what turned up.

I once built a financial report tracking IRGC and Hamas income line by line. I spent nights on Google Earth running five years of time-lapse over one strip of Gaza, hunting the pattern that separates a water main hit on purpose from one that sat beside something Hamas was using. You can’t tell from a single crater. You need the same signature repeating in a shape to show it was deliberate.

IRGC money threads into Hamas and Hezbollah through hawala brokers, no wire, no ledger, no paper trail by design, with some seizures showing up as far away as Italy. Qatari funding flows into American universities in amounts nobody disclosed until forced to. Cornell alone north of two billion dollars, Georgetown and Northwestern running branch campuses under contracts bound to Qatari law. Underneath it sits an actual document, entered as evidence in a federal terrorism trial, written by a Muslim Brotherhood official in 1991. It lays out a strategy for settling into Western institutions and dismantling them from within. It’s actually quite genius. 

The Palestinian Authority pays cash for dead Israelis, scaled to the killing: prisoner salaries run from $400 a month for short sentences to over $3,400 for the longest, in a territory where ordinary welfare tops out at $170. Kill more, serve a longer sentence, get paid more. Die doing it, and your family collects. Abbas said he’d ended the program, but he simply renamed it. The payments never stopped. He’s worth 100 million himself, gives utility contracts to his wealthy sons, and wrote his dissertation on a myth of collaboration between Nazis and Jewish leaders. Oh, it was at a Soviet-ran university that marshaled antizionist propaganda for the KGB. Its own rector was an asset.

There is a word for a government that pays bonuses for bodies. It’s not resistance.

The textbooks close the loop. Educational monitors have flagged Palestinian curriculum for years for glorifying martyrdom and demonizing Jews. Many of the October 7th attackers are graduates of that school system, most of it taught in UN classrooms. You don’t build a force that disciplined by accident. You build it in first grade when you teach them about two kids who go to Haifa to become martyrs.

Hamas deploys female suicide bombers because a woman draws less suspicion at a checkpoint. It digs its command tunnels under hospitals not despite the people overhead but because of them. Human shields are a doctrine, chosen by men who had other options. Men, incidentally, worth billions: Mashaal’s fortune is estimated between two and five billion dollars, and Haniyeh registered his wealth in the names of his children, a dozen relatives holding million-dollar homes in a strip where the median household has nothing.

None of this required decoding. Hamas wrote it down in its 1988 charter, quoting scripture: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews.” Not Israelis. Jews. And after the massacre, Ghazi Hamad went on Lebanese television and promised, “We will repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated.”

Then I did the thing Part II left undone. Was Israel starving Gaza on purpose? No. Were the strikes indiscriminate? No. Were the casualty figures reliable? Almost never, and never Israel’s: researchers coded thirteen hundred articles across major English-language outlets and found Hamas’s Ministry of Health cited constantly, without a caveat, while Israeli figures barely appeared. The seventeen thousand dead fighters vanished from the sentences entirely. A three-hundred-page study out of Bar-Ilan, did the work nobody else bothered to do, and the genocide case didn’t survive contact with it.

I can show you how the accusations survive anyway. A claim originates under Hamas’s media office. Al Jazeera runs it unquestioned. AP and Reuters file it as sourced reporting. The Times and the BBC cite the wire copy. UNRWA takes it into a briefing, Amnesty cites the briefing, the Human Rights Council cites Amnesty, and the circle closes where it opened: a claim nobody outside Gaza ever checked, now stamped with UN authority. None of it’s new. Fayez Sayegh coined “Zionist settler colonialism” in a 1965 PLO monograph built on Soviet theory, and ten years later the same man authored the UN resolution declaring Zionism as racism.

So take the standing charges in order. Colonizer: colonies have a mother country, and the Jews had none; they fled the countries that were killing them, and half of Israel’s Jews descend from the 850,000 expelled from Arab lands after 1948. Refugees from Baghdad and Cairo and Sana’a are not agents of any empire. A settler ships the wealth home. There was no home.

Apartheid: two million Arab citizens vote, sit in the Knesset, run hospital departments, and sit on the Supreme Court, where an Arab judge named George Karra convicted a sitting Israeli president of rape and sent him to prison. An Islamist party sat inside the governing coalition in 2021. South Africa never seated a Black justice. Keeping them off the bench was the entire point.

Genocide: the crime turns on intent, and campaigns of extermination don’t text evacuation warnings, pause offensives so children can be vaccinated against polio, or truck food into the territory they’re supposedly emptying. They don’t preside over a population that has multiplied several times across the accusation’s lifetime.

Jewish supremacy: a state whose founding declaration promises full equality without distinction of race or creed, and whose courts let that Arab judge jail that president, is a strange method for supremacy. The supremacist document in this war is the charter that sanctifies the land to one faith until Judgement Day.

Statehood has been offered and refused at least six times since 1937, from Peel to the partition to Camp David, where Arafat walked away, to Olmert’s 2008 map, which Abbas never answered. In 2024, nine UNRWA staff were dismissed after the UN’s own investigation into their part in October 7th, while watchdogs documented a three-thousand-member staff Telegram group cheering the massacre in real time. It was in the same threads where they asked about their salaries. That’s not one bad actor. 

That’s just part of the ledger.

I know where the obsession goes next. I’ve turned it on antizionism, because it’s insidious and it’s spreading through campuses, city councils, places that would stay clear of any other hatred. The language is how it covers itself: decolonization, settler, Zionist entity, a vocabulary built to make an old hatred read as a new analysis. That’s why I study the words. Not because the words are the thing. The words are the camouflage. The march is the thing, and the march keeps ending at the synagogue, not the embassy.

Antizionism is not a critique of a state. It’s a hatred of a people.

None of it has let me stop caring about the people paying for all this. My family has a Mexican side, relatives who never left the poorest parts of that country, and death and terrorism unfortunately reminds me of them. Hamas is very much like the cartels and their law enforcement are more than corrupt. My heart breaks for people used by their own leadership.

I check myself daily, afraid this ledger might burn the compassion out of me.

I’m not a believer and I’m not a conservative, and I’ve spent a year worried that having no home in either direction meant nowhere left to stand. I’ve never trusted authority, not the state, not law enforcement, and here I am having built the case for one anyway.

Who does a godless liberal Zionist even vote for?

I got my friend on a video call last night, the one from Part I, the one who got marked. He moved to the country deliberately, to a small town that leans conservative. He’s growing plants now. He raised the irony before I could: how strange to feel safer among conservatives than he ever felt among the people who were supposed to be his own. We talked about Israel for a minute.

I’m pro-Israel now, not because of the fear that I’d gone crazy as every group I ever studied, and not due to what it cost. I’m this way because of what I found and because of what was still standing in me afterward.