Ruth Laveman

I'm a politics geek, a foodie and a musician who loves to have fun in work and in play. My tweets are my own.

[Rebecca 🇮🇱 🇬🇧 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @RebeccaShetland]

This photo has been flagged as hate speech by X. I think they’ve completely lost their minds.

[Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow]

Lesbians For Israel beats Queers for Palestine every day.

[Matthew Feinberg @thewebbie]

The Missing 19 Years

The strangest part of the “Israel prevented a Palestinian state” argument is that it comes with a 19-year loading screen nobody wants to discuss.

From 1948 to 1967, Egypt controlled Gaza. Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem, formally annexing the West Bank in 1950.

Israel controlled neither territory.

No Israeli settlements.
No Israeli checkpoints.
No Israeli military administration.

These were the territories we are now told were desperately waiting to become the Palestinian state Israel refused to allow.

Except Israel was not there.

And no Palestinian state emerged.

There was an attempt to create an All-Palestine Government in Gaza in 1948, under Egyptian auspices. It was moved to Cairo within months and never became an independent sovereign state. Jordan went in the opposite direction, annexing the West Bank and extending Jordanian citizenship to its Palestinian population.

That history matters because it reveals something much more complicated than the modern story of “Palestinians wanted a state and Israel prevented them from having one.”

For 19 years, Arab governments controlled the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Creating an independent Palestinian state in those territories somehow never became the great moral emergency we are told it always was.

Then something even more revealing happened.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964. Not 1967. 1964.

Three years before Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza.

And the original Palestinian National Charter did something rather extraordinary. It declared the establishment of Israel null and void while explicitly disclaiming PLO territorial sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza, which were still controlled by Jordan and Egypt.

The organization created to “liberate Palestine” was founded while Israel did not control the West Bank or Gaza, and its charter was aimed at undoing Israel while specifically not claiming sovereignty over those territories.

That is a fairly inconvenient detail if your entire understanding of the conflict begins with “occupation” in 1967.

Apparently the liberation problem was not primarily that Palestinians lacked sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza.

The problem was that Jews had sovereignty next door.

Then came 1967.

Israel survived another war and took control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Suddenly the territories that had spent 19 years under Arab rule without becoming an independent Palestinian state became the center of an international crusade for Palestinian self-determination.

Mazel Tov! Very moving. Remarkable timing.

There had been no comparable international movement demanding that Egypt “Free Gaza” or that Jordan surrender the West Bank for an independent Palestinian state. Once Jews controlled those territories, however, Palestinian sovereignty acquired an urgency it somehow never possessed under Arab rule.

Funny how that works.

This does not mean Palestinian identity did not exist. It means the neat historical story we are constantly sold is backwards.

The conflict was never simply about Palestinians wanting sovereignty and Israel refusing to give it to them.

For much of the Arab world and the Palestinian national movement, the struggle was also about preventing or reversing Jewish sovereignty.

That distinction changes the entire conversation.

Because “Palestinians should have a state” and “Jews should not have a state” are not the same proposition.

The first is an argument about Palestinian self-determination.

The second is an argument against Jewish self-determination.

And for decades, the two have been conveniently packaged together as though nobody should notice the difference.

Pretending the Arab world spent 1948 to 1967 patiently waiting to construct Palestine until Israel arrived and ruined everything is not history.

It is fan fiction with footnotes.

Jordan had the West Bank. No independent Palestinian state.

Egypt had Gaza. No independent Palestinian state.

The PLO appeared in 1964 and directed its liberation project toward the territory where the Jewish state already existed, while disclaiming sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza.

Then Israel took those territories in 1967, and suddenly the world discovered an almost theological devotion to Palestinian sovereignty there.

Baruch Hashem for timing.

Because geography was never the entire issue.

Jewish sovereignty was.

And somehow, after 3,000 years of Jewish history, exile, return, prayer, archaeology, language, memory, and blood, the Jewish people are still expected to stand before the world and justify why we are entitled to exist as a sovereign people in our ancestral homeland.

No.

We are not guests in our own story.

We are not squatters in our ancestral home.

And we are not going to apologize because Palestinian statehood became infinitely more urgent to the world once it could be wielded against Jewish statehood.

[Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow]

You are the “ongoing threat”, motherfucker.

[Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow]

The Free Palestine movement is the biggest scandal of the 21st century.

[Tafsik Organization @Tafsikorg]

Perhaps the dumbest accusations people still make about Israel is how it’s an evil ethnostate. This of course suggesting that Israel only allows or exists for one culture/religion/race.

The level of stupidity and parroting of idiots is shocking.

Here are the facts:

Israel's population is roughly 73.6% Jewish, 18.1% Muslim, and 1.9% Christian. Druze and unaffiliated citizens make up the remaining 6.4%.

Egypt is approximately 90.0% Muslim and 10.0% Christian. Fewer than 100 Jews remain in the country.

Iraq is 97.0% Muslim and less than 1.0% Christian. The historic Jewish population is gone.

Syria is about 87.0% Muslim and between 1.0% and 3.0% Christian. The Jewish community has been completely erased.

Jordan is roughly 97.0% Muslim and 2.0% to 3.0% Christian. There is no active Jewish population.

Libya is 99.0% Muslim. The remaining population of less than 1.0% is Christian, consisting almost exclusively of foreign transit workers. The historic Jewish community completely extinguished.

If you call Israel the ethnostate, you are displaying an unprecedented level of stupidity.

[Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow]

How Hamas used a bot army to build the Free Palestine movement and DARVO the Jews. Mother of g-d. @kinsellawarren

[Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow]

The fastest way to secure political success now is to pivot to an extreme view against Israel, the Jewish state.

Antizionism has become the greatest success story of the 21st century. Jew hate is the most certain ticket to a bright future.

It didn’t end in 1945. It just got started.

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

BREAKING: UNICEF confirms that Gaza has the lowest rate of malnutrition in the Middle East.

The Gaza famine was a complete hoax.

[The Jerusalem Post @Jerusalem_Post]

A B'nai Brith Canada review alleges advisers to the CMHR's Nakba exhibit publicly justified or minimized Hamas' Oct. 7 attack.
https://t.co/Cgw37zddaL
✍️ @MathildaHeller

[Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ ل بن @elicalebon]

THIS IS A CALL TO ACTION.

Alireza Sepahi was supposed to be hanged among the other two protesters, who were since executed.

While being transported to his execution, Alireza became extremely distressed and suffered a heart attack.

He was taken to the hospital and treated. You might ask why they didn’t just let him die. The cruelty is unfathomable. The point is not for him to die. The point is for people to see him being killed by medieval style torture to prevent future uprisings.

Once recovered, his execution will resume.

The only way I can see this being prevented is if @realDonaldTrump demands that the regime overturn his death sentence.

Please join me in asking the President to save #alirezasepahi

The Iranian people aren’t just protesters. They are the ONLY force that can topple the regime.

The future of the Middle East, and the rest of the world, lies in their hands.

[Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow]

One day it will be as shameful to be an antizionist during this period as it was to be a Nazi in the 1930s.

[Naya Lekht 🇮🇱 🇺🇸ניה לכת @LekhtNaya]

Antizionsim is not the “new antisemitism.” It does not “cross the line into antisemitism.” It is, full on, a new form of Jew-hatred. The longer we wait and clutch to an old paradigm, the longer it will take for all of us to confront this hate. This is why this framework that I developed will shape new methodologies for understanding the emergence of new forms of anti-Jewish hostility. Naming matters. It is phenomenological. It is for this reason that when, in the Torah, G-d spoke (“daber”), he created (“davar”). The relationship between language and object is concretized when we use the right word to describe an object.

[Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow]

This is to ALL of you who liked Mamdani’s viral speech about arresting Netanyahu. I’m not going to call you out by name. Be thankful.

Ask a Jew from Soviet Russia. Or a Jew from the Middle East. Ask them what happened AFTER the Holocaust. Ask them about how their societies safeguarded against “antisemitism” but created something instead called “antizionism”. Ask them what “antizionism” did to them. It stripped them of rights. It stripped them of safety. It led them into exile. It’s why they now live in America.

You think you’re against Nazism. You’re not. You’ve reinvented it.

[Michael Orr @YehiOrr]

For those questioning the details here’s a summary of Adam Katz article in the NP. Worth reading the full article.

Adam Katz, after visiting the “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg (which opened June 27, 2026), criticizes it as one-sided propaganda. He argues it:
• Frames the 1948 Palestinian displacement (“Nakba”) as the sole/ongoing tragedy caused by Israel’s creation, while downplaying Arab rejection of the UN Partition Plan, invasions by Arab armies, Palestinian leadership decisions, and Jewish expulsions from Arab countries (850,000+).
• Omits or minimizes context like terrorism prompting Israeli security measures, the full scope of the October 7, 2023 attacks, and Palestinian agency/internal issues.
• Positions the exhibit at the end of the museum’s human rights narrative (after the Holocaust), implying moral equivalence or continuation that serves a political narrative rather than balanced history.
• Reflects failures in the museum’s consultation process and endorses a divisive view with Canadian state authority. https://t.co/ME3WgR9LO1
The piece emphasizes that a national, federally supported museum should prioritize accuracy, balance, and truth over advocacy. It sparked related commentary and criticism from Jewish organizations. https://t.co/L9CplCfIOs

[dahlia kurtz ✡︎ דליה קורץ @DahliaKurtz]

Canada has spent $500+ MILLION DOLLARS on "Palestine."

Can anyone think of any better ways Canada could've spent it?

Because I'm pretty sure $500M buys a lot of water bombers and slightly less post-apocalyptic cities.

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

The 'about' section for the Nakba exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights paints a grim, one-sided picture.

They mention a "regional war,” but leave out how it started: with 5 Arab armies attacking Israel.

They also leave out the regional context. Across the Middle East, Jewish communities that had existed for centuries were uprooted.

My grandmothers, from Iraq and Tunisia, both became refugees as their neighbors turned on them. Their story is shared by 850,000 Mizrahi Jews.

Israel was the only country that would take them in.

All displacement is tragic. But we cannot have an honest dialogue when history is based on narrative instead of truth.

[Casey Babb @DrCaseyBabb]

It will never make sense — not now, and not in a 100 years — that after being invaded by barbarians, raped, slaughtered, and kidnapped, Jews are treated as the guilty ones. And for what — surviving?

[dahlia kurtz ✡︎ דליה קורץ @DahliaKurtz]

Remember the principled principal who removed a student’s keffiyeh at graduation?

She's received tens of thousands of threatening messages — and now fears for her safety.

I know this hate well. It always originates from the exact same end...

A faction that relies on a toxic cycle of manufactured mass harassment, heavily cloaked in a performance of victimhood to justify the destruction they cause.

Bullying people into hiding whilst crying about safe spaces. How heroic.