I've put together a quiz that compares your views with political parties and groups in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. I'd be interested to see what people here get, and whether the results make sense to you.

Quiz: https://israelpalestinepartiesquiz.blogspot.com/

It's 42 questions, with your top 10 matches shown as percentages. There are 22 groups, including Likud, Yesh Atid, The Democrats, Otzma Yehudit, Ra'am, Hadash, Balad, Fatah, Hamas, and the PFLP.

My main reason for making it was to get a better sense of the differences between these groups beyond the usual "pro-Israel" and "pro-Palestine" labels. Those labels tell you very little about what someone thinks a government should actually do, or what they'd want everyday life under that government to look like.

The questions cover things like Israel's Jewish national identity, Palestinian statehood, settlements, refugee return, religion in government, women's rights, gay rights, political freedom, and the economy. For example, supporting Israel's continued existence and supporting its Jewish-majority character are separate questions. So are supporting a Palestinian state and supporting an unlimited right for Palestinian refugees and their descendants to move to Israel.

Some issues count more than others. I don't think someone should get a high match with a group they fundamentally disagree with about democracy or national identity just because they happen to agree on healthcare and taxes. The results show where those major disagreements are, and you can open each group's profile to see how its positions were assigned.

There's also a political compass showing economics on one axis and freedom versus coercive control on the other. That takes account of things like political repression and attacks on civilians, along with personal freedoms. A group's stated ideals aren't always a good description of how it behaves. The compass only covers part of what the quiz asks, so your closest dot won't necessarily be your highest overall match.

I'm aiming for something people will actually enjoy taking. Think political infotainment with sources you can check. Some positions are estimates, and some groups have much less information available than others. I've tried to make those gaps visible. I don't think every percentage deserves to be taken literally, but the differences should be broadly recognizable.

There's no sign-up, and the quiz doesn't send your answers to me.

If you try it, post your top few matches. Were they what you expected? If a result seems wrong, I'd especially appreciate knowing which question or assigned party position you think is causing it. A source for a correction would be helpful too.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is a prominent, New York-based nonprofit organization founded in 1981 to defend global press freedom and the rights of journalists to report safely. It is widely cited by international media, human rights groups, and governments for its comprehensive databases tracking journalists who are imprisoned, injured, or killed in conflict zones.

CPJ's lists are heavily relied upon. In the case of Israel and Gaza, for example, South Africa cited CPJ's work in both their January 2024 oral ICJ submission of their genocide allegation against Israel and their May 2024 ICJ submission. Amnesty International used CPJ's work in their December 2024 report accusing Israel of genocide as did B'Tselem in a July 2025 report and the UN Commission of Inquiry in a September 2025 report.

However, the integrity of their casualty data in the Gaza conflict has come under serious scrutiny. Evidence suggests that they haven't been reliably verifying the individuals included. Recently, CPJ removed 20 names from its database — including eight who were later confirmed to be active combatants, plus others who were non-journalists or even still alive. By their own admission, CPJ verified each person’s death and journalistic credentials but presumed that the death was connected to journalistic work unless definitively proven otherwise. That is a presumption, not case-by-case verification of the work connection.

Pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting found significant ongoing issues. They identified 25 individuals still on CPJ’s list for whom militant organizations or related bodies had published martyr posters or videos, often naming units or military roles. For example, CPJ currently has a page on their website devoted to killed journalist Ahmed Abu Eisha. They cite his colleague Safaa al-Hasanat as saying that he was “polite, calm, and kind; someone who avoided conflict." Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) identified him as an operative and unit commander nearly a year after his death.

A major structural flaw is CPJ’s two-source verification rule. Relying on local sources — which can include relatives, colleagues, or local press groups — does not guarantee accuracy in a highly partisan conflict zone. Two connected sources can easily repeat the same claim, conceal a person's military role, or simply lie.

Even after addressing the errors – and while acknowledging that the dataset remains under review – CPJ continues to describe its methodology as “longstanding and rigorous” and to call the war “the deadliest on record for journalists" (article updated June 2026) while confidently claiming that 75 journalists and media workers were “directly targeted and killed by Israeli forces in direct reprisal for their work.” It also still asserts (as of this writing) that Israel is conducting “the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented."

However, because Hamas and PIJ are still retroactively identifying fighters killed as far back as 2023, it is impossible for CPJ to know how many concealed military roles remain on their list. Acknowledging these issues, CPJ promised a full internal audit of its Gaza database by July 2026, but that deadline has passed and the audit remains unpublished. Ultimately, what CPJ is presenting is a provisional, demonstrably error-ridden list — not settled evidence.

Across the 232 names ever included in CPJ’s relevant database, we can see 36 cases with factional or related military-role evidence. Thirty-two had a dated public mujahid (holy warrior) notice. The median interval between death and the cited publication was ~697 days:

Time between death and recognition by militant groups and number of recognitions:

<6 months: 3
6 months to 1 year: 2
1 to 1.5 years: 8
1.5 to 2 years: 4
2 to 2.5 years: 10
&gt;2.5 years: 5

This isn't the first time a list of killed journalists or media workers has been examined. In December 2025, the Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center published a report which found that 60% of individuals classified or reported as journalists and were killed during the war in Gaza were members of or affiliated with terrorist organizations, primarily Hamas and PIJ. Their findings were covered by The Jerusalem Post and by Times Now of India.

Jewish-Israelis are often compared to French settlers in Algeria. The chief problem with the analogy is that Jewish-Israelis are not a foreign imperial population serving a distant metropole. Treating Zionism as simply France-in-Algeria obscures far more than it explains.

Why the Algeria Analogy is Not Merely Academic

When the French-Algerian conflict is invoked not just as a comparison, but as a blueprint for decolonization, the analogy carries dangerous implications. During the Algerian War, the FLN deliberately targeted European civilians to make coexistence impossible and force a French withdrawal.

Applied to Israel, this framework performs a lethal conceptual trick. By classifying Israeli Jews collectively as foreign colonizers equivalent to French pieds-noirs, terrorism is rebranded as legitimate "decolonial resistance," and the mass expulsion of Israelis is imagined as a natural return to a parent state. This ignores a fundamental reality: most Israeli Jews were born in Israel, possess no foreign metropole, and descend from refugees who have nowhere else to go.

Crucially, this analogy attempts to bypass International Humanitarian Law by stripping Israelis of their civilian protections even though, under IHL, the political category of "settler" does not replace the legal category of "civilian." Living in a disputed or even unlawful settlement does not transform an individual into a lawful military target.

The French-Algerian analogy distorts a complex dispute between two peoples with competing national claims into a binary narrative where one population must be violently removed. Correcting this framework does not excuse Israeli misconduct; it simply removes a pseudo-historical alibi for attacking civilians today.

To understand why the analogy fails structurally, it is helpful to look at the historical realities of both contexts. Here is a point-by-point comparison:

1. Colonial structure and metropole

French Algeria: France conquered Algeria and governed it from Paris. Settlers were French citizens whose sovereignty, military protection and ultimate political authority came from a powerful parent state.

Zionism and Israel: Zionism had no Jewish parent state directing settlement or benefiting from an overseas colony. Its intended national center was the land itself. Britain sometimes supported Zionist aims, but it was not a Jewish metropole; it later restricted Jewish immigration and fought Zionist groups.

2. Historical connection

French Algeria: The pied-noir community arose mainly after the French conquest. It had no precolonial national origin in Algeria.

Jews in Palestine: Jews originated as a people in the land in antiquity. Jewish communities remained there continuously for millennia, while diaspora communities retained religious, cultural and historical ties to it.

3. Purpose

French Algeria: French settlement extended imperial control and privileged settlers within a French colony. Individual settlers had varied motives.

Zionism: Its central goals were refuge and Jewish self-determination through land purchases and the creation of Jewish-majority settlement blocs. Many were built in sparsely populated or malaria-stricken areas. The proposed Jewish state nevertheless contained a large Arab minority.

4. Demographic position

French Algeria: Pieds-noirs remained approximately 10% of Algeria’s population and ruled over a large Muslim majority through colonial institutions.

Mandatory Palestine: By 1946, Jews constituted about one-third of the population and had developed extensive political, economic and defense institutions. This was increasingly a conflict between two emerging national movements.

5. Population origins

French Algeria: Settlers were predominantly Europeans—especially French, Spanish, Italian and Maltese—whose citizenship and political identity connected them to Europe.

Israel: Israeli Jews descend from communities in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere. Many families have mixed backgrounds, and most Israeli Jews today were born in Israel.

6. Land before independence

French Algeria: French conquest enabled extensive state confiscation, expropriation and redistribution of Algerian land.

Mandatory Palestine: Most land held by Jewish institutions before 1948 was legally purchased. Jewish-owned land amounted to approximately one-quarter of the non-Negev portion of the territory proposed for the Jewish-majority state.

7. International standing

French Algeria: France’s seizure of Algeria was a unilateral imperial conquest.

Jewish national home: The League of Nations Mandate endorsed the establishment of a Jewish national home, and the United Nations recommended separate Jewish and Arab states in 1947.

8a. Status within the state

French Algeria: For most of French rule, Muslim Algerians were governed as colonial subjects without equal citizenship. From 1881 to 1944, the discriminatory Code de l’indigénat imposed a separate coercive regime. Later reforms expanded formal citizenship but initially preserved grossly unequal political representation.

Israel: Arab citizens of Israel have citizenship, voting rights and access to public office. Most Arab communities were under military administration until 1966. Arab citizens have served as cabinet ministers, Supreme Court justices, legislators, diplomats and leaders in medicine, academia and business, while documented discrimination and socioeconomic disparities persist.

8b.i. Status in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria

French Algeria: Algeria was incorporated into and governed by France, but the Muslim Algerian majority lacked political equality with European settlers.

West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem: Palestinians are not Israeli citizens and cannot vote in Israeli national elections. The Palestinian Authority administers many civil matters in Areas A and B, while Israel retains overriding security authority and civil and security control in Area C.

Israeli residents are generally governed under Israeli civilian law. Palestinians are governed by Palestinian Authority law in many civil matters but remain subject to Israeli military law.

8b.ii. Historical relationship to the West Bank/Judea and Samaria

French Algeria: By Algerian independence, most pieds-noirs had been born in Algeria, sometimes into families established there for generations. Their local birth therefore cannot simply be dismissed. Nevertheless, their community originated in modern European colonial migration sponsored by France. Algeria was not the ancestral homeland or national center of the French people.

West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem: Judea was the center of the ancient Kingdom of Judah, from which the English word “Jew” ultimately derives.

Jewish communities in territory captured by Jordan—including East Jerusalem, Gush Etzion, Atarot and Neve Yaakov—were eliminated during the 1948 war through expulsion, killing, captivity or evacuation. Jews could not return during Jordanian rule.

Most Jewish residents today have likely lived there since birth or early childhood, including substantial second- and third-generation populations. Jewish communal presence was re-established after 1967 with Israeli state support.

9. What “decolonization” would mean

French Algeria: France could withdraw from Algeria, and pieds-noirs could relocate to the existing country whose citizens they already were—even though most had never lived there.

Israel: Israel has no external Jewish parent country to which its population could “return.” Expelling Israeli Jews—most of whom are native-born and many of whom have no other citizenship—would create refugees, not remove an overseas empire.

West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem: Withdrawal from West Bank settlements is a separate question: residents could potentially relocate within Israel, but that would be a territorial withdrawal by a neighboring state, not France abandoning a colony on another continent.

Objections/Responses

Objection: Jews returning to Israel would be like a person from the U.S. with English ancestry returning to England due to that being their ethnic/national motherland.

Response: If you moved to England, legally purchased a home and joined English society, that would not make you an American colonial settler. More importantly, England remained the sovereign homeland of the English throughout your family’s absence. Jews remained a stateless people with no other national homeland. Historical connection does not settle every question of sovereignty, but it makes the French-Algerian analogy fundamentally misleading.

Objection: Palestinian Arabs were simply pursuing national independence, like Algerians resisting French colonial rule.

Response: Palestinian Arab representatives did seek independence, but they proposed a unitary state with a permanent Arab majority and treated preventing Jewish sovereignty anywhere in Palestine as non-negotiable. In February 1947, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin summarized the impasse: “For the Jews the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.” Arab opposition can be understood as resistance to partition and large-scale immigration, but its program was not two peoples achieving parallel self-determination; it was Arab-majority sovereignty throughout Palestine and no Jewish state in any part of it.

Objection: Britain sponsored Zionism, making it the equivalent of France in Algeria.

Response: British endorsement and administration were extremely important, and Britain pursued the Mandate without obtaining the consent of the Palestinian Arab majority. That is a genuine colonial dimension. Britain, however, was not a Jewish parent state, did not regard the settlers as Britons and was not building an overseas homeland for the British people. British policy also changed: it restricted Jewish land purchases and immigration, including during the Holocaust, and eventually fought Zionist organizations. Imperial sponsorship existed, but the relationship was not that of France, French citizens and French Algeria.

Objection: Early Zionist leaders and institutions openly used terms such as “colonization” and “colonies.” Doesn’t that show that they understood Zionism as colonialism?

Response: That terminology is real and should not be concealed. But its historical meaning—and who was using it—matters. In that period, “colonization” could also mean organized migration and agricultural resettlement. The Jewish Colonization Association, for example, used the same term for settling persecuted Jews in Argentina, where no Jewish state or empire was claiming sovereignty.

The institutional vocabulary therefore does not establish that most Jewish immigrants understood themselves as foreign imperial colonizers. Their motives varied, but many saw themselves as refugees, immigrants, pioneers or national returnees. Early waves included Jews fleeing pogroms and legal persecution; during and after the Nazi era, many were escaping or had survived an attempt at extermination. For many Zionists, sovereignty consequently came to seem not merely desirable but essential to collective survival—a safeguard against continued dependence on states that had repeatedly failed to protect Jews.

The terminology remains relevant: Zionism involved organized settlement, institution-building and a struggle for sovereignty that profoundly affected Palestinian Arabs. But the word “colonization” alone does not make it structurally equivalent to France’s imperial conquest and government of Algeria.

Objection: The Nakba demonstrates that Zionism was a settler-colonial movement based on removing the indigenous population.

Response: The mass displacement of Palestinians during the 1947–49 war—through expulsions, flight from fighting and fear, and the destruction or depopulation of communities—was a profound injustice and is central to Palestinian history. Israeli forces committed massacres and deliberate expulsions, and Israel subsequently prevented most refugees from returning.

But this did not occur as a one-sided campaign against a passive population. The mainstream Zionist leadership accepted partition as the basis for establishing a state, while the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected partition and chose armed resistance. The post-partition civil war opened with Arab attacks on Jewish traffic, neighborhoods and communities; after Israel declared independence, five neighboring Arab states invaded.

Both sides killed civilians and prisoners. Arab forces or mobs massacred Jewish workers at the Haifa oil refinery, dozens of civilians in the Ben Yehuda Street bombing, Jewish doctors, nurses, patients and others in the Hadassah convoy, and Jewish defenders—including some after surrender—at Kfar Etzion. Jewish communities captured by Arab forces—including the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City and the communities of Gush Etzion—were also killed, expelled, imprisoned or destroyed. Approximately 1% of Palestine’s Jewish population died during the war, with a similar or lower percent usually cited as dying on the Arab side.

Approximately 55% of Palestinian Arabs and about 10% of Palestine’s Jews were displaced during the war. These percentages partly reflect the war’s outcome and available escape routes: Palestinians could flee into contiguous Arab-held territory and neighboring Arab countries, often expecting to return, whereas Jews had virtually no friendly country to flee to and were generally evacuated internally. Most Palestinian Arabs were also displaced internally within territory originally governed under the Palestine Mandate framework.

None of this excuses the expulsion of Palestinian civilians or makes them collectively responsible for their leaders’ decisions. Nor must the atrocities be numerically equal for Jewish victimization to matter. It does, however, mean that the Nakba emerged from a mutually violent war in which Palestinian Arab leaders bore primary responsibility for rejecting partition and initiating hostilities—not from a French-style metropole conquering territory to enrich itself and then removing a passive indigenous population.

Objection: Palestine was not an empty land, so references to sparsely populated or malaria-stricken areas reproduce the “land without a people” myth.

Response: Palestine was not empty, and sparsely populated did not mean ownerless or unused. Palestinian Arab towns, villages, farmers and pastoral communities existed throughout the country. The narrower point is that settlement patterns varied: some major Jewish communities were developed on legally purchased, sparsely populated or marshy land, while other purchases and later territorial changes displaced existing inhabitants. Neither “an empty land” nor “every Jewish community replaced an Arab community” accurately describes the full history.

Objection: Palestinians were made to pay for European antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Response: Palestinians did not cause European antisemitism and had no moral obligation to lose their homes, property or political rights as compensation for Europe’s crimes. The Palestinian dispossession accompanying Israel’s creation is therefore a powerful moral objection that should not be minimized.

But the argument becomes misleading when it portrays Palestine as an existing sovereign Palestinian state that Europe simply transferred to foreigners—or assumes that preventing Jewish sovereignty would necessarily have produced Palestinian self-determination. Zionism and substantial Jewish migration predated the Holocaust, Jewish attachment to the land long predated European nationalism, and the Jewish community was not an extension of a European parent state.

Palestinian Arabs genuinely sought self-government. Their leadership demanded a unitary Arab-majority Palestine and rejected partition, including the proposed Arab state, because partition also recognized Jewish sovereignty. Yet “Arab rule” was not necessarily Palestinian rule. Neighboring Arab governments had their own territorial and dynastic ambitions. After the 1948 war, Jordan annexed the West Bank, Egypt administered Gaza, and the nominal All-Palestine Government was largely powerless. No independent Palestinian state emerged in either territory.

The conflict was therefore not simply “Europe compensating Jews with someone else’s country.” It was a collision between two national movements in a territory whose imperial ruler was withdrawing, intensified by the desperate plight of Jewish refugees whom much of the world would not admit. Palestinians were entitled to self-determination and suffered grave injustice. Jews were also entitled to self-determination, and preventing Jewish sovereignty did not guarantee Palestinian sovereignty. None of this turns the Jewish national movement into the equivalent of French imperial rule in Algeria.

Objection: Israel’s Middle Eastern and North African Jewish population is irrelevant because the Zionist movement’s founders were predominantly European.

Response: Early political Zionism was predominantly founded and led by European Jews, and the large-scale arrival of Middle Eastern and North African Jews after 1948 cannot retroactively justify earlier actions or erase Zionism’s European influences. Their relevance is narrower but still important: Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewish communities existed in Palestine before modern political Zionism, and Israel’s Jewish population today cannot accurately be characterized simply as a transplanted European community.

More fundamentally, there was no external Jewish metropole comparable to France—no European parent state whose colonial nationals the Jews collectively remained or to which they could collectively be “repatriated.” Even Jews of European ancestry had lived in Europe as dispersed minorities, frequently subjected to exclusion, expulsion, pogroms and ultimately genocide. The fact that some European countries are safer for Jews today does not transform them into the Jewish people’s national homeland or colonial parent state.

Objection: West Bank settlers can relocate to Israel just as the pieds-noirs relocated to France.

Response: This is a narrow practical similarity: nearly all Jewish residents of the West Bank possess Israeli citizenship and could physically relocate inside Israel. But the ability to live somewhere else does not establish that one’s present home is a foreign colony—or that collective removal would constitute “repatriation.”

France was an overseas metropole that conquered Algeria, governed it for French interests and settled its citizens there. Israel is the neighboring national state of the Jewish people, not a distant parent empire. Judea and Samaria contain the historical center of ancient Jewish national life; Jewish communities there were eliminated under Jordanian control in 1948, and a Jewish presence was re-established after 1967. Many present residents were born or raised there. France’s relationship to Algeria had no corresponding historical or national dimension.

Nor did demands for Israeli withdrawal arise after consistent Palestinian acceptance of territorial compromise. Arab and Palestinian leaders rejected partition in 1937 and 1947. Palestinian leaders later entered negotiations and accepted some frameworks, but repeatedly rejected or failed to conclude far-reaching two-state proposals in which Israeli governments participated. Palestinian terrorist campaigns—particularly the Second Intifada—and the attacks that followed Israel’s evacuation of every settlement from Gaza convinced many Israelis that territorial withdrawal could bring terrorism closer rather than produce peace. This history does not justify every settlement or Israeli policy, but it makes the pieds-noirs narrative radically incomplete.

The legal question is also more contested than is commonly acknowledged. The dominant international position, reaffirmed by the International Court of Justice, regards the West Bank as occupied and Israeli settlement policy as unlawful. Israel and a minority of legal scholars dispute this. Among their arguments, uti possidetis juris would presumptively have given the new state of Israel the external boundaries of Mandatory Palestine because Israel was the only state to emerge when the Mandate ended. This position was advanced by Abraham Bell and Eugene Kontorovich and adopted by ICJ Vice-President Julia Sebutinde in her 2024 dissent.

International law is not a traditional statute written by a single legislature; it is built heavily on "customary international law." This means that the rules are defined by the general practice of nations and their shared belief that such practices are legally required (known as opinio juris).

Here is where the problem arises: The UN General Assembly is treated as a primary factory for determining what the international community believes the law is.

If a voting bloc of nations—such as the Non-Aligned Movement or the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation—consistently votes to condemn Israel, those resolutions don't just act as political statements. Over time, legal scholars and international courts use those stacked, repetitive votes as evidence of opinio juris. They argue, "Look at all these resolutions; clearly, the international community agrees this is the law."

When structural, political anti-Israel bias drives the voting patterns at the UN, those politically motivated votes are later cited as objective "evidence" of customary international law. Therefore, when international courts or bodies evaluate Israel, they are often applying a version of international law that was quite literally authored by Israel's political adversaries.

That said, even if one accepts that Israeli settlement policy violates international law, that conclusion concerns state conduct; it does not erase the individual rights, historical connections or local roots of Jewish civilians. A negotiated settlement could evacuate some communities, incorporate others through land swaps, or place some Jewish residents under Palestinian sovereignty. It need not assume that an independent Palestinian state must first be emptied of Jews.

The possibility of relocation may therefore matter to a future peace agreement. It does not make West Bank Jews the equivalent of French colonists in Algeria.

Objection: Settler colonialism does not require a parent state or metropole.

Response: Correct. The absence of a metropole does not by itself disprove a settler-colonial analysis. Liberia, for example, has been described as a settler colony without a metropole. Certain Zionist practices—and especially Israel’s state-supported settlement policies after 1967—can reasonably be examined through this framework.

But the absence of a metropole remains highly relevant to the specific French-Algerian analogy. France conquered Algeria, governed it as an imperial possession, transferred settlers there and retained France as their political and national center. Zionism instead began as a movement of a stateless and widely persecuted people seeking sovereignty in the land where Jewish national identity originated. Jews maintained a continuous presence there, much Jewish immigration was driven by persecution or immediate danger, and there was no sovereign Jewish parent country directing migration for its own strategic or economic benefit—or to which Jews could ultimately be repatriated.

No one of these distinctions automatically resolves every question about displacement, sovereignty or settlement. Their combination nevertheless makes Zionism structurally different from French rule in Algeria.

Global comparisons clarify the distinction. Indonesian settlement in West Papua, Han settlement in Xinjiang, Bengali settlement in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and Turkish settlement in Northern Cyprus have involved existing states moving members of a dominant national population into peripheral or occupied territories to consolidate state control. Liberia demonstrates that a metropole is not essential, but Americo-Liberians were not a displaced Liberian people returning to the particular land in which their national identity had originated, nor did they join a continuously existing community of that people there.