Lena Elsinger

Pragmatist. Center-Left Zionist. Liberal Nationalist.
Skeptical AI Optimist. Zero contradictions therein.

Pro-Tribes, Anti-Tribalism.

[Lena Elsinger @LenaElsinger]

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a better summary of why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so intractable — both for intrinsic reasons (why Jews cannot and will never agree to “dismantle” Israel), and extrinsic reasons (why this conflict is so deeply misunderstood by the world).

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

This is, as the Jews say, their whole Torah. All the rest is commentary.

The Jews of Israel are Algerie Francaise -- and will be defeated in the same way.

Alas, it is only when they begin to ask whether in some vital ways we might be different from Algerie Francaise -- differences that make us a bit "stickier," a bit harder to remove -- that their movement will finally transform from a campaign of never-ending brutality and self-destruction into a movement for actual real-world liberation.

They could begin that shift right here in this historical analogy they love so much. They could notice that for the majority of the 132 years that France ruled Algeria, Algerians scarcely thought of themselves as Algerians. They only organized a resistance movement in 1954 -- 124 years into French colonial rule. And once their resistance was underway, the French were gone in eight short years. A million white French Europeans literally got on boats and left.

The Palestinian effort, meanwhile, has had a rather different trajectory. If we set its beginning in the 1964 founding of the PLO, which was modeled in many ways on the Algerian FLN, it's been going for 62 years. If we date it to the Arab Revolt or the 1920 riots, it's been going for even longer: 90 years and 106 years respectively.

All of which suggests that the Algeria analogy probably offers stronger evidence that we're *not* French Algeria than that we are. Something isn't working like the analogy suggests it should.

What if -- forgive the length, dear reader, I'm coming to the point -- we're not really French colonialists, no matter how much they insist we are? What if we're something altogether more real and rooted and desperate and grimly determined to cling to our land, a trait Palestinians celebrate in themselves as "sumud" and assume we Jews can't possibly possess the same?

What if we're exactly what we think we are: a long-suffering people who arrived here as desperate refugees fresh out of any other options, and who found and built a home here after millennia of brutal and vulnerable wandering? What if the demand that we be erased from this place amounts to a demand that we be erased from the world -- and thus closes our ranks, unifies us and mobilizes us to action? What if the PLO/Hamas narratives about the inevitability of our destruction have done more harm to the cause of Palestine than to the existence of Israel?

What if their refusal to seriously learn our historical experience and culture and identity -- understanding us feels to them like legitimizing us; it is so taboo in their culture that Palestinian scholars face literal violence for teaching our history -- what if this purposeful ignorance makes it vastly more likely that they will fail in their effort to destroy us?

So what if, in the end, like it or not, the only viable path to Palestinian liberation lies in accepting that we're not going anywhere, and thus ending the forever war and sending the ball -- the question of Palestinian freedom -- squarely back into our court?

What then?

Anyway, back to the great war against sunburned French colonialists...any minute now we'll all be taking those boats to, erm, wherever our France might be...

[Lena Elsinger @LenaElsinger]

@piersmorgan Piers, you’re one of the most talented broadcasters of this century.

I will never understand why you feel the need to platform C-listers like this.

[Lena Elsinger @LenaElsinger]

@dasmadchengyal Or maybe she’s too feckless for that and she’ll just block me.

[Lena Elsinger @LenaElsinger]

@dasmadchengyal I’m half expecting her to accuse me of racism for doing to Black Americans in the above comment what she just did to Israeli Jews.

And now that I’ve said that, I fully expect her to fire off some polemic about why the former is egregious but the latter is permissible, somehow.

[Cillian @CilComLFC]

I’m not Jewish, but I am genuinely distressed by the sheer amount of antisemitism in the World right now.

It is incredibly disturbing to see people I once respected turn to the “Dark Side” and embrace one of humanity’s oldest forms of hatred.

What the hell is wrong with people?

[Lena Elsinger @LenaElsinger]

@K_AminThaabet You’re onto something here…

[Kamel Amin Thaabet @K_AminThaabet]

The savagery of October 7 caused too much cognitive dissonance with the progressive image of noble white-hearted Palestinian and wicked Israeli. They NEED the genocide narrative as a psychological corrective to return equilibrium to their internal worldview.

[Lena Elsinger @LenaElsinger]

There’s something to this. This explains the desperate, obsessive need to define the Gaza War as a genocide.

[Kamel Amin Thaabet @K_AminThaabet]

The savagery of October 7 caused too much cognitive dissonance with the progressive image of noble white-hearted Palestinian and wicked Israeli. They NEED the genocide narrative as a psychological corrective to return equilibrium to their internal worldview.

[Ruxandra Teslo 🧬 @RuxandraTeslo]

During the Bronze Age Collapse, within roughly a century, several powerful kingdoms fell, cities were abandoned, and long-distance trade shrank dramatically. The transformation in social order was driven by technology: the rise of iron, which democratized access to violence.

This is an absolutely fascinating article that I think has much to teach us today, when we have just entered another technological revolution: the AI revolution.

The main reason that iron caused widespread collapse of social and political order was that the technology that preceded it, bronze, was concentrated in the hands of an elite, naturally favouring powerful states. Producing bronze required copper and scarce tin, which often traveled thousands of miles through trade networks. Large states could secure supplies and stockpile weapons more reliably than smaller communities. This gave their rulers a lasting military advantage.

Iron production made weapons accessible to more communities. Bloomery furnaces allowed smiths to extract usable iron from ores without fully melting the metal. And even though early iron was not necessarily better than bronze, its widespread availability allowed much smaller communities to produce weapons, destabilizing more established states and encouraging political fragmentation.

I am fascinated about the ways in which technological changes drive shifts in the distribution of power between groups. Imo, this is a relatively neglected topic, including when we think of AI risks.

The first order question is how will the institutional order change? We are already seeing how AI is challenging the status of old institutions including universities. What will come instead?

The second order question for me is whether decentralization is always good. It has a positive valence, at least to me, but the decentralization that was driven by iron during the Bronze Age Collapse led to widespread violence and the collapse of social order.

Much to think about!

[Lena Elsinger @LenaElsinger]

@coldxman Or as I put it to Nathan:

Why let your kids shit in a toilet when most children in the world don’t have access to indoor plumbing?

Funny as it is to make light of this, I’m… genuinely concerned about parents who engage in this line of reasoning.

[Lena Elsinger @LenaElsinger]

@NathanJRobinson I hope you don’t have children, Nathan.

Because much of parenting boils down to securing opportunities for your children that most other children don’t have access to.

Why let your kids shit in a toilet when most children in the world don’t have access to indoor plumbing?

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

This is not a small detail. It isn't Israeli propaganda or some minor factoid to add to the litany of Gazan suffering.

This is part of the larger cause of Gaza's situation: the Islamist radicalization of Gazan society and politics that began in the 1970s, begat Hamas in the 1980s and reached its apotheosis in Hamas's theocracy and Sinwar's mass-martyrdom strategy.

This is a story about the mass-exploitation of women in Gazan society. (And perhaps also about the comprehensive silence from UN agencies and Western progressives.) But it's mostly a story about the brutal totalitarian theocracy that Hamas's brand of Islam represents, and the self-destructive impulses it continues to foster in Gazan culture and politics.

A society that systematically oppresses its women cannot rebuild into a better future, no matter how much pressure is ever brought to bear on the Israelis.

[Maya Sulkin @SulkinMaya]

One of the most glaring instances of alleged bias detailed in the lawsuit is the viral photograph of a Gazan child named Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, which ran under a headline alleging “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation.”

The photograph, which ran July 25, 2025, was captioned that he was “born healthy,” insinuating that his emaciated appearance was a result of the ongoing conflict.

Four days after the piece was published, the Times issued an editors’ note, clarifying that “after publication of the article, the Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had preexisting health problems.”

A company photo editor recorded in the article’s editing system that a standards editor and two photo managers ‘have all okayed the photo edit,’ and that a second editor recorded that the standards editor ‘has also given it a standards read. ”

A photo of the same child was publicly available on Getty Images, which describes the toddler as having “preexisting congenital health issues, including brain complications and muscle atrophy.”

The suit argues that the Times inserted the “born healthy” caption “without any confirmation from a medical professional . . .in direct violation of its editorial standards and for the explicit purpose of driving a specific narrative.”

[Maya Sulkin @SulkinMaya]

Shareholders of The New York Times filed a lawsuit today, arguing the paper has failed to meet its most basic obligation: to tell readers the truth and correct itself in a timely fashion when it doesn’t.

Exclusive for @TheFP here:
https://t.co/jw5nYHLv3m

[Lena Elsinger @LenaElsinger]

This.

[Hussein Aboubakr Mansour @HusseinAboubak]

Contrary to common misconceptions, it is Palestine that is a clear continuation of a colonial political identity. And even that is fine. There is nothing wrong with having a colonial past. There is everything wrong, however, with dishonesty and with moral huckstering.

[Hussein Aboubakr Mansour @HusseinAboubak]

Contrary to common misconceptions, it is Palestine that is a clear continuation of a colonial political identity. And even that is fine. There is nothing wrong with having a colonial past. There is everything wrong, however, with dishonesty and with moral huckstering.

[Lena Elsinger @LenaElsinger]

👇

[Armed Liberal @TheArmedLiberal]

As a not-Jew, I find the desire of the "yes it's genocide" team to both throttle Israel's ability to defend it's citizens and to assume that the bloodthirsty - there's no other word for it - ideology of Israel's neighbors as natural and inevitable, while seeing Israel's choices driven by responses to that ideology as wholly voluntary and sui generus.