The main entry on Wikipedia—one of the most visited sites on the internet and one that reportedly feeds into the ways that artificial intelligence tools answer questions from users—essentially blames Israel for being attacked on Oct. 7, the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Jew-hatred watchdogs and pro-Israel groups have long accused the crowdsourced encyclopedia, in which almost anyone can post to the site, of antisemitic bias. But the fact that its main entry on the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks states in its first sentence that the terror attacks were “a series of coordinated armed incursions from the blockaded Gaza Strip” adds insult to injury, experts told JNS.
“It’s yet another example of the Wikipedia editors’ anti-Israel bias,” Alyza Lewin, president of U.S. affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement, told JNS. “They modify entries to support a distorted narrative that erases Jewish history and the Jewish experience. This time they added the word ‘blockaded’ to try and justify Hamas’s barbaric Oct. 7 massacre.”
The claim on the Wikipedia page recalls statements from anti-Israel protesters, “who claim that ‘resistance is justified’ or U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’s assertion that Oct. 7 ‘did not happen in a vacuum,’” Lewin said.
The edit to the main Oct. 7 page to include the word “blockaded” took place in February and only got minimal pushback from another editor at the time on the entry’s “talk” page.
Discussion was revived in August, as more editors pushed back, which prompted a formal discussion on Sept. 11 to determine if there was consensus among editors—which can be any active Wikipedia user who has edited for at least 30 days and made at least 500 edits—whether the word “blockaded” should remain in the opening sentence.
“The edit ignores Hamas’s history of diverting humanitarian aid intended for Gaza’s civilian population,” Lewin told JNS. “Indeed, Hamas used pre-Oct. 7 aid to build a massive terror tunnel network under homes, schools and mosques from which it launched its attacks, cynically exploiting civilians as a human shield and then crying ‘genocide’ when Israel defended itself.”
Shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks, Guterres said at the U.N. Security Council that the attacks “did not happen in a vacuum” and that “the Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” At the time, Gilad Erdan, the Israeli envoy to the global body, said that the secretary-general’s comment “expressed an understanding for terrorism and murder.”
The Wikipedia user who launched the formal discussion stated that “Israel’s blockade of the Gaza strip is a defining feature of this topic and necessary context for a nonspecialist reader” and that the highest quality sources support using the word “blockaded” in a neutral voice in the opening sentence.
The editor cited Rashid Khalidi, whom the editor called the “preeminent expert in modern Palestinian history” to support using the term. Jonathan Schanzer, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has noted that Khalidi was a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization when the PLO was a U.S.-designated terror group. Khalidi has denied that.
The Wikipedia user compared saying Hamas came from a “blockaded” place to noting that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising opposed an oppressive regime. “We must not create an exception to obfuscate through omission here,” the person wrote.
A different editor wrote on Tuesday that “blockaded” should not be used, because “the word suggests justification.”
“To the unedified reader, it may well connote the most extreme version of what ‘blockade’ might mean, like the complete stoppage of all food and supply into a territory,” the editor wrote.
The discussion remained ongoing as of press time.
Max Abrahms, an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University who studies terrorism and the Middle East, told JNS that “the removal of pro-Israel scholars and even Israel-neutral ones” from academia has impacted “Wikipedia and many other forms of discourse influencing the public.”
“Zionist-free higher education reduces balanced scholarship and contributes to Wikipedia’s bias,” he said. “The same is true of podcasts and social media, where almost no pro Israel scholars can be found.”
“Philanthropists who care about Israel and intellectual pluralism must make targeted investments to ensure there are faculty to teach the younger generation, which will also have all sorts of additional benefits like objectively correct entries on Wikipedia,” he told JNS.
