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In the beginning was the word — and the word was whisky
The Whiskey Bible: A Complete Guide to the World’s Greatest Spirit
By Noah Rothbaum
Workman, 640pp, $40
Ask an American to picture the origin of whisky and they will probably conjure up a bearded man in overalls emerging from the Appalachian woods, clutching a jug of moonshine with three Xs on the side.
Noah Rothbaum, the author of The Whiskey Bible, has a name for that cliché: the “Uncle Jesse theory” of whisky history, after the chaotic moonshiner on The Dukes of Hazzard. It’s also, he argues, almost completely wrong.
“For one thing, moonshine only exists because of tax law,” he told me when we spoke about the book. “You don’t get bootleg without a government to evade.”
Real American whisky — the kind that fills warehouses and balance sheets and, until 1933, doctors’ prescription pads — was an immigrant industry, built in cities and river towns and railroad hubs. It grew when America stopped being a rum-drinking colony and became a rye-drinking republic.
Before 1776, the young colonies distilled molasses from Caribbean sugar into rum. After independence, that molasses was politically tainted — too bound up with the British Empire and its trade routes. American farmers had land and grain, not sugar cane. So they turned to whisky.
Then a tiny insect changed everything. When phylloxera destroyed vineyards across Europe in the 19th century, wine and brandy became scarce. Doctors who’d been happily prescribing cognac as a cure-all suddenly needed alternatives. Medical journals in Britain began recommending whisky as a respectable substitute. Demand soared. As Rothbaum writes in his Bible, phylloxera “transformed whiskey from a farm product to an international best seller.”
“Right at the moment when whisky is taking off, you also have this massive wave of Jewish immigration to America,” Rothbaum told me. “And they bring with them exactly the skill set the new industry needs.”
A Jewish story
What’s a nice Jewish boy doing writing a Bible? Or writing about booze at all? There’s nothing actually sacrilegious about the title of The Whiskey Bible in a series whose expert guides include The Wine Bible and The Beer Bible. More transgressive, perhaps, is how close it hews to a kind of competition — Jim Murray’s best-selling, canonical, annual tasting guide, the Whisky Bible. But having a Jewish critic in the top tier of American whisky coverage is actually deeply appropriate.
Indeed when I asked Rothbaum, the spirits editor at Men’s Journal, about it, he was enthusiastic about a personal historical connection to the industry: “Looking back, part of my family ran a restaurant in Warsaw and others in the Ukraine ran a boardinghouse so my conjecture is, maybe it had a distillery or at least, you know, in my looking back romanticizing the past, perhaps they were making some kind of booze there, too.”
But even if his conjecture has no basis in family reality, his story is no outlier. Rothbaum’s Whiskey Bible is a readable introduction and encyclopedic guide to the “world’s greatest spirit” that has its own tag at the Forward. The “Bible” is also a highly engaging guide to a surprisingly broad swath of history and science from George Washington (“America’s first celebrity distiller”) to bovine digestion – bourbon has to be made in a certain way to ensure that its leftovers can be used in feed lots for cows. As Rothbaum recently told a crowd at the 92Y, “everything through the lens of whisky is more fascinating.”
It’s a coffee table book, definitely released to be part of the holiday gift market. But, unlike much of that tranche, it’s a reference book that you — or your giftee — will actually enjoy referring to for years to come. It doesn’t taste test each distillery’s expressions (for that you need Murray) but it has all the background you could need. Want to know about Japanese whisky, there’s a section on that. Want to know whether whisky should be spelled with an “e” or not, there’s a very sensible section on that (spoiler: it doesn’t matter, but you should stick to one). Want to know about how Metallica’s Blackened whisky uses sonic waves in its maturation process — there’s a section on that too.
Part of the broader story — which Rothbaum stressed during his visit to the 92Y — is that Jews have been central in the American whisky story. Looking at POLIN: Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Poland you can see how Jews were disproportionately represented in the hospitality trade. That’s because in the Pale of Settlement, Jews were often barred from owning land, so they gravitated to the things they were allowed to touch: money, grain and booze.
“You see it over and over,” Rothbaum told the 92Y audience. ”Because of antisemitism in Europe, Jews were pushed into roles like collecting taxes, running inns, and overseeing alcohol production for the local noble. When they get to America, suddenly that work is not only useful — it’s welcome.”
In America, Jews were often merchants who later set up a distillery to supply their distribution network. Alternatively, existing distillers needed a liquor expert to scale up their business and Jews were cheap and ready to bring over European know-how. That first pattern repeats: A young man arrives, peddles wares from a pack, graduates to a general store, then to wholesaling and, eventually, to owning or running a distillery. Whichever way they were pushed, the Jews comprised such a major part of American whisky production that by the early 20th century, many of the biggest liquor companies in the country were owned or run by Jews.
Rothbaum rattles off the names the way other people recite old team lineups or film casts:
- The Bernheim brothers, who built one of the largest distilleries in America in the 1800s and launched the I.W. Harper brand — which is still on shelves today.
- The Shapira family in Kentucky, peddlers turned five-and-dime proprietors turned co-founders of Heaven Hill after Prohibition, makers of Evan Williams, Elijah Craig, and Rittenhouse Rye among others.
- The Rosens and Rosenstiels, running Schenley (long absorbed by Diageo the corporate drinks giant) by a few different names.
- The Bronfmans who ran the Seagram’s empire until they didn’t.
- The Goldring family, still at the helm of Sazerac, owners of Buffalo Trace.
“In all these little towns in Kentucky and the Midwest, Jews are a tiny percentage of the population,” Rothbaum says. “But a huge percentage of the booze business.”
Jews become so identified with alcohol that some of the most antisemitic, anti-immigrant figures of the early 20th century seized on Prohibition as a way to drive them out. Henry Ford and his allies, Rothbaum notes, didn’t just hate liquor; they hated the people who made it.
“That’s how famous Jews were for making alcohol,” he told me. “The people who didn’t like Jews tried to shut down alcohol to drive them away.”
And yet, when people lift their glasses today, almost no one thinks of whisky as a Jewish story.
The rule, not the exception
If Jews were so central to the industry, how did they vanish from its mythology? Part of the answer lies right on the label (another topic that Rothbaum wrote about in The Art of American Whiskey: A Visual History of the Nation’s Most Storied Spirit, Through 100 Iconic Labels).
“Somebody like Bernheim, in the late 1800s, can’t put ‘Bernheim’ on a bottle and expect it to sell,” Rothbaum explains. “So you get I.W. Harper instead — something that sounds safely Anglo.” Almost no one knew then or even knows now that I.W. comes from the initials of the founder Isaac Wolfe Bernheim.
For reasons of marketing and survival, Jewish distillers and owners hid behind WASPy brand identities. Despite its name, Old Fitzgerald is not the legacy of a charming Irishman but of Jewish distiller Solomon S.C. Herbst. The name “Old Fitzgerald,” Rothbaum argues, is practically a caricature of Irish respectability — a Gentile mask on a Jewish business.
After Prohibition, when all booze acquired a gangster sheen, there were even more incentives for upwardly mobile Jews to downplay the connection. Any Jewish involvement in illicit liquor trading was attributed to the useful religious exemption for kiddush wine.
So the Jewish role was sanded off both ends: Jews soft-pedaled their attachment to liquor; the whisky world packaged itself with mythologies of Scottish workmen, Irish storytellers, and, in America, the Uncle Jesse myth — that shirtless guy in the Appalachian holler. “When I first started writing about whisky, I knew about a couple of big Jewish names — the Shapiros, Louis Rosenstiel,” Rothbaum says. ”What I didn’t realize was that they weren’t the exceptions. They were the rule.”
I myself had bumped into the deep connection between Jews and whisky in North America when I noticed in 2010 that Glenmorangie was getting an Orthodox Union hecksher to prove it was kosher and set out to investigate. I went all the way to the Highlands the following spring to write about kosher scotch. Rothbaum told me that the key to that whole story was Glenmorangies ambassador David Blackmore and a whisky tasting a scant few miles from the Forward offices:
He’s Scottish, his wife is Jewish and from New Jersey. And Blackmore was doing a whisky tasting in Borough Park. It was a Friday afternoon, and all these Orthodox Jews were buying a ton of whisky. He was like, “does this go on every Friday?”
When the answer was a resounding “Yes!” Blackmore asked himself what would help his brand stand out and the result was kosher certification on flagship single malts that — because they are made of barley, water and yeast only — do not even need one.
There are now scores of whiskies across the continents that have heckshers on them, whether from OU, Star-K, or local boards. One rabbi in Kentucky even branched out from his day job heckshering bourbon to bottle his own.
Part of Rothbaum’s mission in The Whiskey Bible is to separate real history from romantic marketing slop. Even the famous spelling debate — “whisky” versus “whiskey” — turns out to be newer and messier than most enthusiasts think.
“If you look back at government documents from the early 1900s, you see all kinds of spellings,” he told me. “Brands in Scotland and America both use ‘whisky’ and ‘whiskey’ more or less interchangeably. A lot of what we treat as sacred rules were invented in the last 25 years.”
Even our contemporary practice of reverently sipping neat brown liquor is historically unusual. Scotch conquered America as a highball: Scotch and soda.
“It’s funny,” Rothbaum says. “The entire Scotch industry in the U.S. is built on whisky and seltzer. And 120 years later, people will tell you it’s somehow sacrilegious to add soda.”
Although the marketers and the hipster artisans want to sell you the ritual or the expensive specialty products, the most important ingredient to set your whisky glass straight is information. Beyond that it is just a case of trying different expressions — and there are some great $30 bottles — working out what you like, and how you like to drink it.
From language, to history, to science, to the way we approach the many varieties of the drink itself, Rothbaum’s Bible is no-nonsense, helpful, and engaging — the perfect accompaniment to a nice glass of Scotch.
The post In the beginning was the word — and the word was whisky appeared first on The Forward.
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Is Netanyahu dead? Has Tel Aviv been flattened? AI videos are dominating the Iran war.
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted an unusual video this week: of himself buying coffee at a Jerusalem-area cafe.
It was hardly typical fare for wartime, when Netanyahu can more often be seen giving recorded addresses or touring missile damage within Israel. But the prime minister had come with an important mission: to debunk viral claims of his death.
The claims, which originated on Iranian state media last week, were picked up by social media users on Thursday after Netanyahu gave his first press conference during the war.
Zooming in on details in the seemingly innocuous address, some claimed that Netanyahu had an extra finger on his right hand and missing teeth, signs they said were key tells of AI-generated content.
“Imagine Netanyahu was actually dead this entire past week,” the pro-Palestinian TikTok influencer Guy Christensen wrote in a post on X. “It’s too good to be true but Israel has been using AI generated videos of Netanyahu ever since. One can only hope.”
From the cafe Sataf, Netanyahu issued his response to the conspiracy, posting a video on Sunday of him ordering a coffee, chatting with baristas and telling Israelis that the wars against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon were going well.
“They say I’m what?” the caption read. Mocking the idea that he had been killed, he joked, “I’m dying for coffee!” Then, alluding to the speculation about the earlier video, he asks, “Do you want to count the number of fingers?” before holding up each hand with his fingers outstretched.
JUST IN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shares proof that he is alive after online users started speculating that he was dead.
Netanyahu also showed off how many fingers he has.
“We’re doing things I can’t share right now, but we’re striking hard in Iran today and… pic.twitter.com/5tyD5HImCG
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 15, 2026
But rather than quelling the claims of his death, the Israeli leader’s response instead spurred more speculation, with users on social media calling into question details in the video including the physics of his coffee cup. In another video posted by Netanyahu on Monday, some social media users pointed to a clip where a ring seemingly disappears from his hand in one of the frames.
“ISRAEL: ‘Benjamin Netanyahu is still alive. Here’s another AI video of him as proof. Just trust me, goy,’ the antisemitic podcaster Stew Peters wrote in a post on X.
The churn of conspiratorial claims about the Israeli leader’s death, which also included an AI-generated image of him being pulled from rubble, highlights the growing challenge of combating misinformation in an era of artificial intelligence and viral deepfakes, especially during times of conflict.
The war with Iran has produced an absolute flood of fabricated imagery, from AI-generated clips circulated by pro-Iran accounts purporting to show missile strikes flattening Tel Aviv or the capture of American troops by Iranian forces. The Israeli disinformation detection company Cyabra said it identified networks containing tens of thousands of accounts that generated material garnering 145 million views in the first two weeks of the war — almost all pro-Iranian, and mostly on TikTok. (The company said during the last Israel-Iran war, in June 2025, that Iran’s internet outage had quelled disinformation bot farms located there.)
“The campaign did not spread organically. Clear coordination patterns were identified, including repeated narratives, identical videos and captions, fixed hashtag clusters, and synchronized burst posting,” Cyabra said in its report published Friday. “These tactics allowed the network to rapidly flood the information environment and dominate online discussions during key moments of the conflict.”
The videos have left some of Israel’s critics confident that the country has been battered far beyond what has been officially reported.
But even Israeli television has not been immune, airing its own misinformation too — albeit unwittingly.
Channel 12 News last week aired a night-vision clip that it said showed American B-2 stealth bombers over Iran flying in formation with F-18 fighter jets.
ניר דבורי הציג סרטון של “מפציצי B2 בשמי איראן”
העובדות: מדובר בסרטון שלקוח מתוך משחק מחשב.
בשרשור: הסרטון המקורי שפורסם במרץ 2023 ביוטיוב.קרדיט: @ItayBlumental @manniefabian pic.twitter.com/zJCugreDZM
— בודקים (@bodkim2022) March 8, 2026
Within hours, the clip was identified not as a Pentagon release, as Channel 12 military correspondent Nir Dvori had suggested on air, but as footage from the combat flight simulator Digital Combat Simulator World. Itay Blumental, Dvori’s counterpart at rival public broadcaster Kan, wrote on X that the footage was “indeed incredible, but also lifted from a video game,” sharing the same YouTube clip from March 2023.
During Monday evening’s broadcast, Dvori apologized and said the mistake was “entirely mine,” but did not specify which footage he was referring to, leaving viewers who had missed the earlier segment with little indication of what had gone wrong. The news network also issued an apology, saying it would “examine its procedures.”
The right-wing Channel 14 also aired the clip — more than once.
i24 News made a similar mistake, the Haaretz newspaper reported, airing a video it treated as apparent footage of an American strike on Iran, though the clip was also from Digital Combat Simulator World.
The segments quickly became internet fodder, with social media users lampooning the news networks and posting their own tongue-in-cheek “exclusive war footage.”
Omer Babai, who runs Kan’s social media, posted a GIF on X of shoot ’em up video game Chicken Invaders, saying it showed “American bombers in Iranian skies.”
Another X user quipped: “Nir Dvori: Iran scattered mines across the Strait of Hormuz,” alongside a screenshot of vintage PC game Minesweeper.
A third posted an image of fellow 1990s gaming staple “Digger,” with the caption: “Exclusive footage of Sinwar in the tunnels of Gaza,” referencing the Hamas chief killed by the IDF. Street Fighter and Pac-Man made cameo appearances too.
Channel 14, widely seen as sympathetic towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is no stranger to broadcasting dubious footage. Earlier in the war, the channel aired a video it said showed crowds in Tehran appearing to express support for the Israeli premier with chants of “Bibi joon” — a Persian term of affection translated roughly as “dear Bibi.” But the online Israeli fact-checker FakeReporter later said the chant had been generated with artificial intelligence.
But the B2 gaffes are one side of a much wider phenomenon.
One viral clip, shared across X, TikTok and other platforms, appeared to show missiles pounding Tel Aviv and apartment blocks collapsing under a barrage. AFP and several other outlets found it had been generated using AI, citing telltale distortions in cars, rooftops, smoke trails and even the placement of an Israeli flag sans pole. The Grok AI chatbot on X, however, helped amplify the video, with repeated assurances that “the video is real,” AFP reported.
After the video was exposed as AI-generated, an X account under the name Abdulruhman Ismail, one of the first to share the footage in a post that drew 4 million views, said he would leave it up “because the scene reflects, painfully, what Gaza has endured under Israeli bombardment.” He added, “I am keeping this post for transparency. The video may not be real, but the devastation it evokes is real, and it mirrors what Palestinians have lived through.”
During the June 2025 war, pro-Iran accounts similarly circulated fake videos and images claiming to show strikes devastating Tel Aviv as well as Iranian forces downing Israeli F-35s.
Australian wire AAP debunked several fakes from this round of conflict, including a video claiming that an Iranian strike set a CIA facility in Dubai ablaze, as well as a fabricated image purporting to show late Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dead under a pile of rubble.
A separate fabricated clip that racked up tens of millions of views purported to show the Burj Khalifa engulfed in flames as crowds rushed in its direction.
The Tehran Times also shared false images and false reports of extensive damage to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.
Iran’s embassy in Austria posted an AI image of a child’s backpack, claiming it was taken at the Minab school in Iran that was hit on the first day of the war.
Tasnim, the Iranian state-affiliated news agency, shared an AI-generated image on X purporting to show an American radar installation in Qatar destroyed in an Iranian strike, The New York Times reported. The paper said Iran’s propaganda “appears focused more on swaying international audiences,” portraying the “success of Tehran’s counteroffensive in effusive terms.”
But X’s head of product told the BBC that 99% of the accounts spreading AI-generated war videos were trying to “game monetization,” posting sensational content to rack up engagement and qualify for payments through the platform’s creator revenue program. The social media giant announced that it will temporarily suspend creators from the program if they post AI-generated videos of armed conflict without disclosing that they were fake.
British politician George Galloway posted a video last week containing AI imagery in which he narrates that the “apocalypse is burning Tel Aviv,” that the city “now looks like Gaza,” and that air defenses over Tel Aviv are “no longer operational.” He says his information came from friends on “Sheinkin Street, Tel Aviv, near Dizengoff Square.”
Former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy seized on the canard, posting reaction videos of sun-soaked beach scenes and one of himself at Dizengoff Square, casually sipping an iced coffee with the very much intact plaza behind him.
Some people responded to the video by cheering Levy on, saying that they, too, were enjoying a beautiful day in a mostly intact Tel Aviv. But others resisted the evidence in front of them. “Cheap Jew propaganda,” one commenter wrote. “It’s basically flattened out.”
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Jews decry UK newspaper for appearing to justify attack on bakery founded by Israelis
(JTA) — A Guardian column that seemed to rationalize the targeting of a popular Israeli-founded bakery has ignited controversy in the British Jewish community.
The March 14 piece in the British daily, by sports and culture writer Jonathan Liew, came days after the newly opened north London branch of Gail’s was repeatedly vandalized, with its windows smashed and red paint and pro‑Palestinian slogans daubed on its doors.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews denounced the vandalism, saying that “targeting a business on the basis of alleged or perceived Israeli and or Jewish connections reflects a very worrying trend.”
Liew, meanwhile, described the bakery chain’s expansion into diverse neighborhoods as a form of “aggression,” implying that its presence near a Palestinian-owned cafe was inherently provocative.
Critics, including British Jewish media, communal leaders and online commentators, accused Liew of rationalizing an attack on a business they say is being targeted solely because of its founders’ Israeli heritage. Gail’s was founded in the 1990s as a wholesale bakery by Israeli baker Gail Mejia, who with an Israeli partner opened a storefront bakery in 2005. In 2021, the company, today with close to 200 stores, was acquired by the American investment firm Bain Capital.
“We are a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK,” a spokesperson for Gail’s told the Jewish News. “Our focus right now is on working with the authorities and making sure our people feel safe and supported.”
Although the Guardian piece acknowledges Bain’s ownership, it also notes allegations that the investment firm “invests heavily in military technology, including Israeli security companies.” As a result, wrote Liew, “its very presence 20 metres [65 feet] away from a small independent Palestinian cafe feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression.” High Street is the British equivalent of “Main Street.”
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators had protested the opening of the branch in the days before the vandalism.
A spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in the U.K. told The Daily Mail that Liew’s article was “an astonishing exercise in bigotry disguised as moral commentary.”
“Beneath its surface lies a familiar and ugly trope: the repackaging of anitsemitic prejudice in fashionable political language,” said Alex Grandler.
The debate, playing out in fiery messages on social media, has highlighted broader concerns about Jewish-owned businesses in Britain being cast as proxies in disputes over the Middle East. In 2025, the Community Security Trust, Britain’s main antisemitism watchdog, recorded 20 incidents involving vandalism at Jewish businesses and organizations.
“In the Guardian’s hall-of-mirrors morality, smashing up a shop because it was founded by Jews is just a touching little political tantrum,” Jewish News editor Richard Ferrer wrote in a column.
In the Guardian piece, Liew seemed to sympathize with the Palestinian-owned cafe in the neighborhood, Cafe Metro, for having been the frequent victim of “pro-Israel activists” who “regularly descend on it to slap stickers on its windows reading ‘Stop killing people’ and ‘One of these days you’ll thank us.’” At the same time, he referred to the window-smashing at Gail’s among the “small acts of petty symbolism” that grow out of Palestinian frustration with their failure to exert influence on the Israel-Palestine debate.
Hadley Freeman, a former columnist for the Jewish Chronicle who now writes a column for The Times, called out Liew for applying an apparent double standard.
“So let me get this straight,” she wrote on X. “1. Petty activism against a Palestinian-owned cafe is bad (agreed!) 2. But *violent* activism against a cafe that people associate (wrongly!) with Israel is justified and understandable.
“Update your rule book accordingly!” she added.
CAMERA UK, a media watchdog group that monitors coverage of Israel, said it had contacted the Guardian, asking if Liew’s column met its “editorial standards.”
“We know the answer, but are nonetheless hoping to see how they justify Liew’s latest defense of antisemitism,” CAMERA said in a statement.
A Guardian spokesperson did share a terse reply with The Daily Mail. “Complaints about Guardian journalism are considered by the internally independent readers’ editor under the Guardian’s editorial code and guidance,” the spokesperson said.
The controversy even reached across the Atlantic. “Good grief — Gail’s is just a bakery!” Patricia Heaton, the actress and conservative political activist, wrote on X. Heaton said she ”had no idea it had any connection to Israel or the Jewish people. But now I want to support it even more.”
Public defenses of the article have been limited, though some pro-Palestinian activists online argued that Liew was only describing the motivations of the protesters rather than endorsing vandalism.
Liew hasn’t responded to the criticism of his column, although he pinned the article to the top of his Bluesky social media account, with the message “the war at home.”
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Report: Israeli group quietly organized charter flights evacuating Palestinians from Gaza
(JTA) — An Israeli organization headed by a right-wing activist quietly arranged a series of charter flights that evacuated Palestinians from Gaza last year, according to an Associated Press investigation.
The organization, Ad Kan, a right-wing Israeli organization founded by Gilad Ach, an Israeli combat reservist and West Bank settler activist, coordinated the flights via another company called Al-Majd, which describes itself on its website as a humanitarian organization “supporting Palestinian lives.”
Among the evacuations facilitated by Ad Kan was a flight in May that transported nearly 60 Palestinians to Indonesia and other locations, as well as two flights in October and November that transported over 300 Palestinians to South Africa.
It was not clear who had planned or paid for the flights. South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola decried the evacuations as representing “a broader agenda to remove Palestinians from Palestine,” and an investigation was launched into one of the flight’s origins.
At the time, President Donald Trump had walked back his proposal to relocate the population in Gaza to other countries amid criticism, despite getting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s endorsement.
The AP investigation found that Ach had stuck with Trump’s plan after the U.S. president dumped it, publishing a report detailing how he would implement the “voluntary exit.”
The newly revealed origins of the charter flights adds to a history of controversy surrounding small-scale efforts to evacuate Palestinians from Gaza. Last August, France suspended its effort to evacuate Palestinians after a woman who took part in the program was accused of making antisemitic comments online. The same month, the United States also suspended a program designed to give Palestinian medical care after the far-right Jewish influencer Laura Loomer called the effort a “national security threat.”
Several of the passengers on the South Africa flights told the Associated Press that they were unaware of who was behind the flights, but said they did not care and were more concerned with leaving the besieged territory. (Six Palestinians who spoke to the outlet said they paid up to $2,000 per person for the transportation.)
“There was famine, and we had no options. My children were almost killed,” said a 37-year-old Palestinian who arrived in South Africa in November. “Death and destruction was everywhere, all day, for two years, and nobody came to the rescue.”
In a statement to the Associated Press, Ach rejected South Africa’s allegations that the evacuations amounted to ethnic cleansing and decried the “profound hypocrisy” of countries unwilling to accept Palestinian refugees.
“Their continued presence in Gaza, under dire conditions, serves as a tool to pressure Israel internationally and allows Hamas to maintain its rule over this suffering population,” Ach said.
While it was unclear if Ach had coordinated with the Israeli government to facilitate the evacuations, Muayad Saidam, a Palestinian identified on the group’s website as its Gaza humanitarian project manager, told the outlet that travel arrangements for Palestinians must be made with Israeli authorities.
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