How Wikipedia Weaponizes Antisemitism—Against Jews

'Weaponization of Antisemitism' as created by the veteran anti-Israel operative 'Onceinawhile'

In this blog I've documented how antisemites weaponize Jew-hate in the pages of Wikipedia, turning "encyclopedia articles" into anti-Israel and often antisemitic screeds. But did you know that Wikipedia has an article devoted to how antisemitism is weaponized?

Of course, this being Wikipedia, the article does not detail how antisemitism is weaponized against Jews by the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, but rather by Jews against nice people who aren't antisemites. 

The article, titled "Weaponization of antisemitism," was created last Dec. 31 by the veteran anti-Israel propagandist "Onceinawhile." The article was initially illustrated with a cartoon by Carlos Latuff, notorious for employing "classic antisemitic tropes." 

That was, of course, the point of the article—to exonerate Jew-haters like Latuff, by pointing out that those antisemitic tropes he uses aren't antisemitic tropes at all, but rather "criticism of Israel."  

The article, which now looks like this, has since jettisoned its Latuff cartoon, but the polemical point remains. The lead paragraph of the article currently reads as follows:

The exploitation of accusations of antisemitism, especially to counter anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel,^[1] may be described as weaponization of antisemitism, instrumentalization of antisemitism, or playing the antisemitism card.^[2] Bad-faith accusations against Israel's critics have been called a form of smear tactics.^[3] Some writers have compared them to playing the race card.^[4][5]

The article goes on in that vein, with sourcing that relies heavily on anti-Zionist writers like Noam Chomsky and anti-Israel screeds with titles like "Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom," and "Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel."  

There are of course, no articles on Wikipedia with titles like "Weaponization of Islamophobia" or "Weaponization of racism."  

"Onceinawhile," the author of the article, has been around for 14 years and is one of the most prolific anti-Israel editors on Wikipedia. Long before pro-Hamas propagandist descended on Wikipedia en masse after Oct. 7, 2023, "Onceinawhile" was gaining recognition for his agenda, which is to minimize, justify and erase antisemitism. 

He was listed as the "No. 5 Anti-Israel Editor" by "Israel Group" researchers in 2019, when he was singled out for downplaying the severity of antisemitic pogroms: "Onceinawhile is one of the primary participants in systematically removing 'pogrom' from Wikipedia and replacing it with other terms, usually 'riots.'"

British investigative journalist David Collier described Onceinawhile's tactics back in December 2020, in the article  "Exclusive - Project Wiki - how Wikipedia is breeding an army of antisemites." 

Collier pointed out that Onceinawhile:

• Edited the Wiki page on the murderous 1945 anti-Jewish riots in Egypt by adding a single sentence – that the Prime Minister of Egypt blamed the Zionists for provoking the attacks.
• Tried and failed to have the page on the expulsion of Egyptian Jews deleted.
• Edited the page on ‘refugees’. This was an interesting edit. The section on Jewish refugees (which this user edited) is all about how politicised the argument is, how Israel wanted the refugees and the possibility of Zionist false flag attacks. The section immediately above it is all about Palestinian refugees – there is no mention of politicisation and the focus is almost exclusively (and errantly) on forced expulsion. The page was eventually cleaned up – but the insertion about politicisation stuck and is visible on other Wiki Jewish refugee pages (see here).
• Created the page about Ben Gurion’s letter to his son in 1937. The page was weighted to imply that Ben Gurion had stated his intention to expel the Arabs. Placing the original page alongside the current version highlights the problem of correcting bias – whilst individual attempts can be made over time to clean up the entry – the pillar of the page, the very bias with which it was created, remains intact. 

More recently, Onceinawhile was featured in Ashley Rindsberg's Pirate Wires investigation, which described how he was among the most productive anti-Israel editors, frequently acting in collaboration with a hard core of other anti-Israel operatives: 

 As of time of publication, Nableezy and Onceinawhile have co-edited 1,418 articles. Nableezy and Iskandar323 1,429 co-edited articles. Onceinawhile and Zero0000 have co-edited 2,119 articles. Zero000 and Nableezy have co-edited 1,754 articles. Onceinawhile and Iskandar323 have 1,594 co-edited. Huldra and Onceinawhile have co-edited articles 2,493 times. Nableezy and Huldra have co-edited 1,764 times.

At the time he probed Onceinawhile four years ago, Collier pointed out that he "has made over 32000 edits on Wikipedia. The mistake would be in thinking this is an exceptional case."

The edit count is now over 50,000, and Onceinawhile has not been impeded one bit by Wikipedia's vaunted processes, which claim to promote a "neutral point of view" that does not exist in articles relating to Jews and Israel.

Indeed, in August 2024, "Onceinawhile" created a Wikipedia article titled "Masada myth," describing how a well-documented historical event, the Siege of Masada, is a lot of hooey dreamed up by those horrible Israelis to justify their illegitimate state.

It goes without saying that "Onceinawhile" is not a party to the Arbitration Committee proceedings that were recently commenced to examine the "Palestine-Israel" subject area.

The Spartacus Factor: How Wikipedia's Pro-Hamas Editors Control Articles

Very few established Wikipedia editors want to be Spartacus.

Recently I received an email from a longtime former Wikipedia editor. I'm taking the liberty of replicating a passage from their email, redacted to ensure their anonymity:

I'm actually a former editor of Wikipedia. . .  After discovering the anti-Israel activity, I had multiple negative encounters with the propagandists you write about, most notably [redacted], and arguing with these people was driving me crazy, plus the fact that they seem to have unlimited time and energy, and the ability to get - and get away with - whatever they want. I realized I was up against an immovable evil, so I left the entire project, for my own sake. I definitely don't have the mental energy to do what you're doing!

Note the text that I've put in italic boldface, as I think it is crucial. 

I thought of that email when I read Ashley Rindsberg's well-researched, exhaustively documented article that just came out in an online journal called the Pirate Wires. Ashley, author of an excellent book on the New York Times, has written other articles about Wikipedia, and it is a superlative website, well worth a subscription. His work on Wikipedia is right up there with Aaron Bandler of the Jewish Journal, who has been all over the story of Wikipedia's gross anti-Israel bias for months.

What made Ashley's article especially valuable is how he delves into and quantifies the techniques used by what I call the Wikipedia Flood—the well-coordinated coterie of anti-Zionist and sometimes antisemitic editors who control every single article that has anything to do with Israel, even remotely. 

Opponents of the Flood are overwhelmed, exhausted, and ultimately worn out because the pro-Hamas editors effectively "game" Wikipedia's arbitrarily enforced, often unenforced policies. Ashley points out:

To evade detection, the group works in pairs or trios, an approach that veils them from detection. They also appear to rotate their groupings for the same reason. Likewise, one or more of the group’s editors can come to the aid of another in the case of pushback. In many instances, editing by the group is made to articles focused on historical issues, where a single editor might be patrolling for this kind of abuse, making it easy for two dedicated users to overwhelm or exhaust the lone editor.

Yes, "lone editors" like the one I quoted at the top of this post.

The Flood consists of many editors, but Ashley documents how it comes down to a hard core of 40 experienced editors.  Experienced editors are held in high regard by Wikipedia. When acting in concert, they invariably get their way when they are persistent, motivated, ideologically single-minded and well-organized.

Ashley describes how that works, with charts identifying the editors in questions, all familiar names to readers of this blog.

To skirt [Wikipedia polices], the pro-Palestine group leverages deep Wikipedia know-how to coordinate efforts without raising red flags. They work in small clusters, with only two or three active in the same article at any given time. On their own, many of these edits appear minor, even trivial. But together, their scope is staggering, with two million edits made to more than 10,000 articles, a majority of which are PIA or topically associated. In dozens of cases, the group’s edits account for upwards of 90% of the content on an article, giving them complete control of the topics.

The numbers are indeed staggering:

In August, an analysis of the intensity of editing in PIA between January 2022 and September 2024 found that the top contributor to PIA by number of edits, a user called Selfstudier, made over 15,000 edits in the space in that period. Iskandar323 contributed over 12,000 edits to PIA articles in the same period. Other members of the pro-Palestine group are equally prolific, with top contributors including CarmenEsparzaAmoux (8,353), Makeandtoss (8,074), Nableezy (6,414), Nishidani (5,879), Onceinawhile (4,760) and an admin called Zero0000 (2,561).

. . . . All together, the top 20 editors of this group made over 850,000 edits to more than 10,500 articles, the majority of them in the Palestine-Israel topic area, or topically connected historical articles.

These astonishing numbers quantify why when you see the "talk" pages of article there is either no dissent at all to their "POV-pushing," or when there is dissent it is isolated and ineffective, a case of one editor is up against many. 

That's no accident. As Ashley points out, and as I have documented, they "swarm" over articles due to offsite "canvassing." That is against Wikipedia rules, like everything else they do, but is unenforceable when it takes place offsite.

Sure you can fight them. But that can end your Wikipedia career or get you kicked out of the topic area. By coordinating their actions offsite, the Wikipedia Flood is able to gin up a "consensus" whenever they so desire. Fighting them means that you are against "consensus," which means that you are being "disruptive." Fight too hard, refuse to surrender to the Flood, and you get blocked or banned from the topic area entirely.

It's a numbers game, as I have said over and over again in this blog. 

It's a bit like Spartacus and his small band of slave rebels. Remember what happened to Spartacus? He and his band were overwhelmed by the Roman legions. It made for a great Kirk Douglas movie, but remember how it ends, with everyone crucified on the road to Rome? Every single one dead.

No experienced editor wants to be Spartacus. They like editing Wikipedia. They enjoy it. Maybe there is another area of interest that holds their interest. Maybe they are beekeepers or mainly focused on editing articles about their hobbies or their hometowns. I guarantee you that it is much more satisfying to edit in an area where other editors are pleasant and cooperative than editing in a topic where the other editors would happy if you burned to death in real life.

To avoid that fate, editors drop out of Wikipedia entirely or, more commonly, stop editing in what is known on Wikipedia as the "Palestine/Israel" topic area. 

The same desire to avoid unnecessary conflict, expenditure of energy and fatigue results in the vast majority of Wikipedia's volunteer "administrators" avoiding the subject area—except, in almost all cases, for administrators who back up the Wikipedia Flood. As I've described, one admin, "Vallereee," improperly uses her administrative tools on behalf of the Flood.

That same conflict-avoidance imperative has resulted in the Wikipedia "Arbitration Committee" showing extreme reluctance in tackling the issue. Same reason: they are volunteers, they have other things to do, and life is short.

One "arbcom" case involving the same pro-Hamas editors mentioned in Ashley's article has been dragging on since August without resolution. In fighting that case, the Flood has used the same "swarming" tactics they've used in getting their way throughout Wikipedia.

Read Ashley's article for more. And be sure to follow Aaron Bandler's great work in the Jewish Journal. They are the only journalists who are following this story closely. Hopefully there will be more.

Wikipedia's Anti-Israel Obsession: An Introduction

Wikipedia displays a pattern of obsessive hostility toward Israel. 

It is a systemic, institutional problem, caused by a large and unrestrained group of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas editors. I call them the "Wikipedia Flood," the online counterpart of the "al-Aqsa Flood," the name Hamas gave to its murderous onslaught on Oct. 7, 2023.

This is a longstanding problem, and it has been exacerbated by the Gaza war.  Anti-Israel bias is so extreme that it frequently veers into antisemitism. 

This is a major problem. Wikipedia is one of the most highly trafficked and influential websites around, with 9.5 billion visits in December 2023 alone. It is a major target of anti-Israel activists, and their work has been a resounding success.

The purpose of this blog is to shed light on Wikipedia's anti-Israel bias on a continuing basis.   

Key issues

▶ Every single article related to the Arab-Israel conflict is distorted to reflect an anti-Israel point of view.

▶ Anti-Israel sources such as Al Jazeera, The Guardian and The Intercept are considered "reliable" and are used to provide the raw material for articles, while pro-Israel sources are downgraded, and some are prohibited. 

▶ Wikipedia processes, its "administrators" and "arbitrators," are unwilling to curb the depredations of pro-Hamas activist "editors."

▶ Activist "editors" create articles whose sole purpose is to disseminate anti-Israel hate.

▶ Pro-Israel editors are banned from articles related to Israel on drummed-up pretexts, or kicked off the website, if they complain about anti-Israel editors.

▶ Article discussion ("talk") pages are cesspools of crude anti-Israel hate. Oct. 7 atrocity denial, especially rape denial, is rife. This creates a hostile atmosphere for Jewish editors.

For the anti-Israel activist "editors" of Wikipedia, the "encyclopedia everyone can edit" is just another form of warfare. Their job is to fill it with anti-Israel polemics and do their best to oust pro-Israel editors on trumped-up charges. 

Thus an article that began as effort to explore the phenomenon of "Holocaust inversion" was twisted over time by anti-Israel and antisemitic editors into a platform for comparing Israelis to Nazis. The editor who created the article was banned from Wikipedia as retribution for his efforts to counter anti-Israel and antisemitic editors, and for exposing a long-running hoax created by Polish nationalist editors. 

Investigative journalist David Collier described the problem as follows in December 2020:

Some pages – such as the sections on Palestinian history – are incoherent and ahistorical garbage. The pages on Jews and antisemitism only help to spread a hatred of Jews. Those who set up the rules for Wikipedia may have anticipated acts of correctable terrorism on their pages – but did not foresee the war of attrition. Nobody was going to come along and attempt to rewrite history in a day. The best strategy is taking the current mindset apart brick by brick. Patiently over a number of years. That is what is happening with Wikipedia. . . . 

Every edit by someone with a Zionist leaning is placed under a microscope, if it gets past the gatekeepers at all – and then immediately contrasted with the placement of an anti-Zionist counter-argument.  

 In 2017, blogger Dani Ishan Behan stated:

Israel-related articles almost uniformly emphasize the Palestinian and Arab narrative while marginalizing the Jewish one. Rudimentary facts about Israel’s history: including Palestinian massacres on Jewish civilians, Arab intransigence being a primary factor in the conflict’s intractability, and even the Jewish people’s origins and indigeneity to the land of Israel are either downplayed or outright erased. 

The reason this can happen is that Wikipedia is rigged. 

Wikipedia has rules that ostensibly prevent this kind of thing from happening, they require neutrality and fairness, and it has been reported that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is pro-Israel. But Wales does not run Wikipedia. That is in the hands of largely anonymous volunteers, who let Wikipedia be gamed by anti-Israel editors. 

Even the most well-intentioned volunteer, unpaid "administrators" and "arbitrators" (a kind of super-administrator) are manipulated by pro-Hamas activists who dominate the articles on Israel and the Gaza conflict.

Wikipedia rules protect anti-Israel activists

Here's an example of how the rules are rigged to protect anti-Israel activists whose sole purpose is to turn Wikipedia into a propaganda organ:

The "user pages" of anti-Israel editors, such as the one maintained by the pro-Hamas activist "Nableezy," frequently proclaim their support for terrorism. This contributes to the anti-Israel atmosphere that pervades Wikipedia. Here is a "user box" on Nableezy's "user page." 

? This user supports the right of all individuals and groups to violently resist military aggression and occupation by other parties, but due to an alleged consensus he is disallowed from naming particular individuals or groups which certain administrators find to be unacceptable.

This pro-terrorist 'user box' is explicitly permitted by Wikipedia. 

The rules governing user pages prohibit them from containing "very divisive or offensive material not related to encyclopedia editing."  They also ban advocacy or support of grossly improper behaviors with no project benefit. The latter are defined as "statements or pages that seem to advocate, encourage, or condone these behaviors: vandalism, copyright violation, edit warring, harassment, privacy breach, defamation, and acts of violence."

But "acts of violence" are specifically defined to exempt support for Jew-killers:

("Acts of violence" includes all forms of violence but does not include mere statements of support for controversial groups or regimes that some may interpret as an encouragement of violence.)

Since Wikipedia allows editors to openly proclaim their support for Jew-killing terrorist groups, Jewish editors find themselves rubbing elbows on article talk pages with people like Nableezy who proclaim that they would be happy to see Jews murdered, their children and parents kidnapped, their daughters raped. 

According to one article from 2019, "recent information suggests that Nableezy works for The Electronic Intifada," a virulently anti-Israel website. It goes on to point out that Nableezy is especially active in trying to thin the ranks of the opposition by gaming the Wikipedia enforcement mechanisms. Nableezy has continued in that activity since that article was published in 2019, gaining in power and influence. 

A numbers game

Anti-Israel editors realize that winning the propaganda jihad on Wikipedia is a numbers game, and they see to it that the number of pro-Israel editors remains small. They do that by intimidating and bullying "the opposition" and seeking tenaciously to get them banned from articles on Israel and from the site itself. "Topic bans" of varying length are commonly handed out by administrators, acting at the behest of anti-Israel editors who compile laundry lists of trumped-up grievances. The administrators who oversee such things have broad power to act as they like, making up the rules as they go along.

On Wikipedia, the "community" rules. What "community" means in practice is "whoever shows up for a discussion." Pro-Hamas and anti-Israel editors have the numbers, and they "flood" article discussion pages where required, gathered in requisite quantities by email canvassing campaigns. One of the grievances frequently used to get pro-Israel editors topic-banned is that they act contrary to the phony "consensuses" established by anti-Israel editors.

Gaming "consensus" rules is especially problematic in determining which sources can and cannot be used, and how they are used in articles. "Reliable source" discussion pages and an alphabetized list of "perennial sources" show how anti-Israel sources are invariably usable, while pro-Israel sources are downgraded, thanks to the efforts of anti-Israel and far-left editors.

Al Jazeera and Amnesty International are fine. Fox News is not OK for "politics," so its reports on Israel are not usable for sourcing. The Nation is fine. Jacobin is fine. Jewish Virtual Library is not NGO Monitor is not. 

There is nothing on Wikipedia to stop aggressive, pro-Hamas editors from gaming Wikipedia's processes. When whistleblowers attempt to call them on their tactics, the whistleblowers themselves are punished. This is known on Wikipedia as "boomerang." 

David Collier describes as a "war of attrition" in which the far more numerous anti-Israel editors invariably come out on top.

Not a new subject

Wikipedia's systemic anti-Israel bias is not new. Here is a rundown of the literature on the subject.

In November 2019, a website called "The Israel Group" profiled anti-Israel editors. It was written about in the Washington Free Beacon: "Wikipedia's Anti-Israel Editors Unmasked" The website subsequently went dark. Its most recent web page, archived by the Wayback Machine in December 2021, can be found here.

The editors profiled there were as follows, in the order that was provided as of the most recent archived page, with the worst at the top: 

The "five worst" as of 2019: Brendan McKay aka User:Zero0000, User:Nableezy, User:Huldra, Peter Nicholas Dale aka User:Nishidani, User:Onceinawhile

"Dishonorable Mentions": User:Sean.hoyland, User:Malik Shabazz/MShabazz (has since left Wikipedia), User:Snooganssnoogans  (now known as User:Thenightaway, and largely avoids editing on Israel),

Although the article is dated, it provides a good resource on the tactics employed by anti-Israel editors. Since that website appeared, the cast of characters has grown considerably larger.

In addition to the David Collier and Dani Ishai Behan articles cited above, in 2008, the media watchdog HonestReporting published an article titled "Exposed – Anti-Israeli Subversion on Wikipedia," which cited this article describing manipulation of Wikipedia by the antisemitic website Electronic Intifada.

Lastly, CAMERA– Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis– writes about Wikipedia periodically.

One place you won't find meaningful examination of Wikipedia's anti-Israel bias are Wikipedia criticism websites, "Wikipediocracy," "Wikipedia Sucks" and "Wikipedia Review," which are dominated by anti-Israel editors. 

What can be done?

Behan concludes his 2017 Times of Israel blog as follows:

So what can be done about this? The answer is simple: everybody who cares about the truth must create an account, learn the site’s rules, and push back vigorously against those who would defame or delegitimize the Jewish people on the world’s largest online encyclopedia. Do not be intimidated by the task at hand, for there is too much at stake.

He is absolutely correct. 

Our advice:

Register an account at Wikipedia and play by the rules. The pro-Hamas editors will not. But even so, you will have an impact. The more editors push back against anti-Israel bias, the more likely they can have impact. 

Don't let anti-Israel editors provoke you into breaking the rules. They will goad you, insult you, when they see you as a threat. Ignore them.

Be patient. Stay away from subjects that are subject to "Arbitration Committee" restrictions on the "Israel-Palestine area," which were crafted by anti-Israel editors to restrict editing in those areas to registered accounts more than thirty days old with 500 and more edits.

Be sure to edit a wide variety of subjects. Edit articles about your interests, whatever they may be. The less controversial and less political the better. Editors who edit only to counter anti-Israel bias are far more likely to be singled out for punishment by the easily manipulated administrators.

Even if you cannot directly edit because your account is not old enough, you can request edits even if you do not log in to an account. But it is better to register an account, start editing and wait a month.

About us

We have no affiliation with any persons or organizations cited above, or any of the persons we cite in the review of literature above. We are paid by no one, this is not how we make our living, so our contributions here may be sporadic, and may be discontinued or interrupted at any time. We are neither a volunteer with nor affiliated with any organization outside Wikipedia.

Comments are open and can be anonymous. Tips, critiques, and suggestions are welcome, and I am receptive to guest blogs as well. Theycan  be anonymous or otherwise. Just email me at WikipediaCritic at proton dot me