Ilan Preskovsky: Wikipedia's Israel and Zionism pages are ideologically captured

Ilan Preskovsky argues that Wikipedia's entries on Zionism and Gaza have been shaped by a small, organised group of editors pushing an anti-Israel framing, citing investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg's research into the platform's editing culture. It's relevant to South African readers because the piece explicitly names the ANC's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice as part of a broader pattern the author sees as ideologically driven rather than evidence-led. Given BizNews's readership includes many who have followed South Africa's ICJ case closely, this piece offers a contrarian, sharply argued counter-narrative worth flagging as opinion, not news reporting..By Ilan Preskovsky.One of the great challenges of talking about Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Qatar, and any other Middle Eastern country caught up in the ongoing conflict is that it is extremely difficult to break through the mountains of disinformation under which the actual truth is buried. And for all the talk of Israeli “propaganda”, even the most meticulous, evidence-based basic truths released by Israel or her supporters are overwhelmed, almost instantly, by a much better funded and much, much better organised anti-Israel (and more often than not, anti-Western or anti-liberal-democratic) apparatus. The simple truth is that while the Israeli government is absolutely, unforgivably terrible at explaining itself, anti-Israel forces - especially those based in Qatar and Iran - have been exceptionally good at framing every Israeli action, no matter how justified, as a crime against humanity, and every action by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, no matter how horrific, as “justified resistance”. And it’s been even better at making sure that its disinformation is spread as widely as possible and through as many “respectable” agents as possible. From Qatar spending billions of dollars on Western universities (to the point, in fact, that the UAE has been clamping down on bursaries for Emirati kids to go study in the UK in fear that they’ll come back radicalised!), to the United Nations’ undeniable bias against Israel and its capture by anti-liberal-democratic countries, to the ANC’s baseless case of genocide at the International Court of Justice, the propaganda war against Israel is as intense as it is multi-faceted. There is one arena in the information war, though, where the influence of anti-Israel propaganda is both vastly under-reported and especially damaging. It’s one of the most visited websites in existence. It usually comes up as the top result in most web searches and is also the basis for the short synopsis that accompanies those results. And in our AI-obsessed times, is also one of the primary sources that most Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini draw on for information. I’m talking, very sadly, about Wikipedia. And though my focus is on one particular subject, about which I actually know a fair amount, it represents a much broader problem with not just Wikipedia but information, in general. Dangerous Definitions This is the opening paragraph of Wikipedia’s entry on Zionism: “Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe to establish and support a Jewish homeland through colonisation in the region of Palestine, which roughly corresponds to the Land of Israel in Judaism—itself central to Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” This is, it’s true, the definition of Zionism that anti-Zionists use and no doubt most Palestinians view it this way too. It is not, however, a definition of Zionism that the overwhelming majority of Jews and Zionists come remotely close to recognising. To the vast, vast, vast majority of Zionists across the political spectrum, Zionism refers, very simply to the belief that Jews have the right to self-determination in their historic homeland. That’s it. It most certainly define itself according to having “as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible”. The first point, especially, isn’t borne out by history when Zionist and Israeli leaders have consistently agreed to territorial compromises for the sake of their own sovereignty. It was Zionists, after all, who accepted partition in 1947 and the Arab League who outright rejected it. It was successive Israeli governments that surrendered substantial pieces of land for peace with Egypt and Jordan, not the Palestinians. And it was a right-wing Israeli Prime Minister who unilaterally withdrew all Jews from Gaza, only to be repaid with nearly two decades of constant attacks from Hamas, culminating with its invasion of southern Israel on 7 October 2023. It’s true, like every other nation on Earth with a cultural identity, in order for Jews to have self-determination, they do need to make up the majority population of their own state. It’s an unspoken truth on which all countries exist – especially ethnostates, which comprise the vast majority of countries in the world, but even in an ethnic melting pot like the USA – and yet only Israel is singled out for, in effect, being a nation with borders and a particular cultural identity. Certainly none of the many ethnostates with far greater restrictions on citizenship than Israel are defined in such incendiary terms. Nor are any other national movements, including, obviously, that of the Palestinians. The most galling part of this twisted definition of Zionism, though, is the insistence that it’s a colonial movement. These Zionist so-called “settlers” didn’t come to the land as leaders of a vast conquering empire, but as refugees – first from pogroms and the Holocaust in Europe, and then from the many Middle Eastern countries that Jews called home for millennia, but were expelled or driven out from in the wake of the establishment of Israel. What kind of twisted take on colonialism do you need to reframe refugees with indigenous ties to a land as colonisers? And though there is a tad more nuance to be found elsewhere in the lengthy entry on Zionism, it is this opening paragraph that is most frequently quoted in search results and often forms the entire basis of a more casual reader’s understanding of a the topic. The ideological manipulation hardly stops there, though. The entry on Zionism, for example, never mentions that the name “Palestine” comes from the term Syria Palaestina, which the Romans applied to the region in order to separate the land (Judea) from its people (Judeans, later Jews). “Palaestina”, incidentally, didn’t refer to the non-Jewish natives of the land either, but to the Philistines, a Greek sect that attempted to colonise the area years before. Most egregious, though, are the attempts - as in the section on “national self-determination” - to rewrite the Jewish people as simple co-religionists and not a nation (despite the ancient Hebrew term most used to describe Jews, am yisrael, being a designation of peoplehood, not religion), while also minimising the centrality of the land of Israel to Jewish belief and culture. Goodbye Objectivity And yet, my primary objection here is not, in fact, that the Wikipedia page on Zionism includes things with which I even very strongly disagree, but that it de-emphasises, omits, or misrepresents vital information and viewpoints that don’t fit into a specific, highly subjective ideological narrative. Though, yes, it is especially galling that it’s the “lived experience” of actual Zionists, actual Jews, actual Israelis that is being most pointedly denied. Even worse is the Wikipedia page on “the Gaza genocide”, which presents this so-called “genocide” as absolute, irrefutable fact, and all but entirely negates the many, many arguments against such a claim – one that has, as it so happens, never been proven in any international court of law. But it doesn’t stop there. Investigative journalist, Ashley Rindsberg – who has really been at the forefront of exposing these deep-rooted institutional biases within Wikipedia – notes this ideological capture across multiple pages that deal with Jews, Israel and Zionism, and also on pages dealing with the likes of Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The results are stark: a softening or erasure of the many evils of radical Islamism and Jihadism and a wholesale vilification of Jews and Israel. How It Works That Wikipedia is not a perfect source of information isn’t exactly news, of course. Its “democratic” nature, where anyone can edit it as long as they provide some sort of “reliable source” for their claims, means that it has always had a certain level of unreliability. It’s why it’s generally not considered a valid primary source in schools and universities. And yet, because most entries reference numerous sources and because it uses a consensus approach to information, it has become increasingly seen as pretty unimpeachable. A few mistakes here and there, sure, but on the whole, very reliable. Without getting into the complicated system that Wikipedia uses to edit, maintain and monitor its millions of pages – again, Rindsberg lays it out far better than I could, though it would require a whole article in itself anyway – these two assumptions of reliability are actually exactly why the platform is so vulnerable to exploitation. First, there’s the matter of “reliable” sources. When news sources, humanitarian organisations, NGOs, and governments are as captured by ideology as almost all are today, even the most “trusted” of sources, be it the UN, the New York Times, Harvard, or the Wall Street Journal, can’t be relied upon for anything remotely resembling objective truth. And this is to say nothing of the countless less trustworthy sources out there. This becomes all the more true when dealing with subjects that are already politically charged, and when it comes to something as fiercely debated as the Israel-Palestinian conflict, it’s all too easy to build entirely conflicting realities, each fully backed up by hundreds of “reliable sources”. As for what we can call objectivity through consensus, it only works if the subject in question is fairly straightforward, already understood by large swathes of people, and isn’t vulnerable to ideological manipulation. It’s not hard to think of examples where thousands of people are wrong and only one or two are right. We have experts for a reason, after all. Much more problematic, though, than ignorance or mistaken error is wilful manipulation. And the Wikipedia entries relating to Jews, Judaism, Zionism and Israel are just the most acute examples of this. Rindsberg, in his investigations, uncovered some forty editors who are dedicated purely to pushing a specific anti-Israel, frequently pro-Islamist agendas on Wikipedia. These editors have a lethal combination of resources, time, and know-how to exploit the very mechanics of Wikipedia and have proven so effective at this manipulation that they managed not only to prevent others from editing the content, but managed to get Larry Sanger, one of the platform’s founders, banned for trying to provide greater ideological balance to pages related to Zionism and Israel. How It Affects You As is so often the case, though, prejudice against Jews is not really about Jews. At least, it never stops with the Jews. I don’t care whether you’re left-wing, right-wing or centrist. Liberal or conservative. Pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, or anything in between. Anyone who cares at all about historical accuracy, truth, balance, and objectivity, should care that the largest and most accessible repository of information in the world has been so thoroughly ideologically captured. The ideological bias on Wikipedia is, according to Rindsberg, overwhelmingly leftist, but the issue here is less about the specific bias than the fact that there’s such a heavy bias at all. It would be no less alarming if Wikipedia was ideologically captured by the right. But, of course, we’re not even allowed to divorce the matter from partisanship even just in talking about it. Because this particular bias is left-leaning, there is an unwritten but unbreakable rule that it can only be discussed on primarily right-wing (and/ or Jewish) platforms. Readers of the New York Post are presumably familiar with this story; readers of the New York Times presumably aren’t. But then, what else can be expected in an age where blind adherence to ideology trumps reality at every turn? The genuine pursuit of truth simply never stood a chance.

Ilan Preskovsky: Wikipedia's Israel and Zionism pages are ideologically captured

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