Taking Sides: Wikipedia Advances Anti-Israel Narratives

The controversy has emerged during a sharp rise in antisemitism around the world, including the recent murders of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., and the firebombing in Boulder of protesters demanding the release of hostages taken by Hamas. Critics argue that the online encyclopedia is fueling this hatred by publishing biased entries that are presented as objective statements of fact. 

Wikipedia is produced by volunteer editors who are instructed to follow a set of rules as they summarize the work of authoritative sources, which can include those that appear to be biased. Its consensus model encourages editors to work out their differences collegially and reach a compromise that balances the different viewpoints of sources to ensure neutrality. But critics say that so many academics and NGOs hold left-leaning views that cast Israel as the oppressor and Palestinians as the oppressed that it is hard for editors to avoid publishing biased statements as neutral ones. 

Consider Wiki’s entry for “Gaza genocide” – a title that, critics argue, takes sides. It begins with this statement: “According to a United Nations Special Committee, Amnesty International, and other experts and human rights organizations, Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people during its ongoing invasion and bombing of the Gaza Strip as part of the Gaza war.” The entry then lists several paragraphs of evidence, including large-scale deaths of Palestinians, the forced displacement of most of the population, and starvation. 

Where’s the other side of the story to establish neutrality? Not until the seventh paragraph do readers learn that Hamas’ attack in Israel, killing 1,139 people, sparked the invasion of Gaza. But rather than calling Hamas a terrorist group – a classification used by the U.S., EU, U.K., Canada, and other democratic nations – whose avowed goal is the destruction of Israel, the entry describes the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas as a response to Israel’s historic treatment of Palestinians. 

Leading With Bias 

Critics say that, as in the case of the “Gaza genocide,” bias is often revealed in the opening lines of entries. This can skew readers’ understanding because, as Wikipedia reports, about 60% of people don’t scroll past the lead. In the Hamas entry, readers would have missed the terrorist designation of the organization that controls Gaza. It appears in the very last line of the opening section. 

“Fundamentally the policy for reliability is based on the views of editors, and not more rigorous metrics,” explained a Wikipedia editor who says they have edited hundreds of articles. “There is also a conflict between reliability and the ideas of [the] ideological fringe.” “Pro-Hamas editors,” added this editor, who insisted on anonymity, selectively choose “their preferred academic sources.”

Wikipedia’s impact is amplified because its entries are usually high on the list of links offered by top search engines Google and Bing, which often reprint the first few lines in their query responses. A Wikipedia article is dedicated to the longstanding relationship between Google and Wikipedia, discussing how Google utilizes Wikipedia to combat misinformation on YouTube and how Google has made donations to the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that oversees Wikipedia. 

The Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the site, did not respond to RCI’s repeated requests for comment. In March,  a spokesperson said, “The Foundation takes seriously allegations of bias on Wikipedia.  “We categorically condemn antisemitism and all forms of hate.  

Katherine Maher, who led the Foundation from 2016-2021 and is now CEO of National Public Radio, recently walked back controversial statements, including that America was “addicted to white supremacy” and that “our reverence for the truth might become, might have become, a bit of a distraction.”

Questionable Sources

The plethora of anti-Israel academics makes it easy to present anti-Israel narratives under the guise of neutrality. The entry for the Nakba – Arabic for catastrophe – describes the 1948 war after the UN created the state of Israel as “the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Mandatory Palestine during the 1948 Palestine war.” This echoes the claim in the Zionism entry that “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” Neither article presented balancing perspectives in the all-important top parts of the lead sections. 

Two of the sources for these claims are Columbia University Professor Emeritus Rashid Khalidi and University of Exeter Professor Ilan Pappé. Both professors are seen by critics as anti-Israel activists. 

Several newspapers have reported that Khalidi was associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) when he was in Beirut in 1976-83; at the time, the PLO was widely considered to be a terrorist organization. In 1976,  the Los Angeles Times described Khalidi as “a PLO spokesman.” In 1978, the New York Times said he “works for the PLO” (the article misspells his name as “Khalidy”), and in 1979 the paper re-reported that he was “close to Al Fatah” (which controls the PLO). A 1981 Christian Science Monitor article refers to Khalidi as having “good access to PLO leadership.” None of the papers has corrected these statements. 

Wikipedia’s entry on Khalidi includes his reported links to the PLO and his denial of being a spokesman for the group, saying in 2004 that he “often spoke to journalists in Beirut, who usually cited me without attribution as a well-informed Palestinian source. If some misidentified me at the time, I am not aware of it.” He also said that he didn’t have much time for anything outside of his academic work, writing, and research while he was in Beirut in that timeframe.

Asaf Romirowsky, a historian who heads Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and North Africa, has tracked Khalidi and Pappé’s work. A defender of Israel, he reports that Khalidi has at various times described Israel as a “racist state” and an “apartheid system in creation.” Romirowsky told RCI that Khalidi supported Columbia’s anti-Israel encampment in the spring of 2024 and has become increasingly anti-American and anti-Western in his books.

Whatever the truth, critics say enough questions surround Khalidi’s past that it is hard to view him as a neutral source. Khalidi did not respond to RCI’s requests for comment.

Complicated History

Pappé belongs to a group of Israeli historians who challenged Israel’s version of the 1948 war. In June 2024, Pappé said that the “hope for me is the end of Israel and a creation of a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

According to Romirowsky, Pappé’s 2006 book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” – which Wikipedia cites in both the “as few Palestinian Arabs as possible” and “ethnic cleansing” lines – is premised on the belief that Israel had a “master plan” in 1948 to eradicate the Arab Palestinian community and that its policies are still motivated by an ethnic cleansing agenda. Romirowsky disputes that narrative, calling such claims “sensationalist.”  

“Don’t get me wrong: wars are difficult,” Romirowsky said. “The history is not black and white, there were a lot of mistakes made in ’48, but … [historians like Pappé] have selectively chosen quotes without giving context as to the position of the Jewish Agency – the Yishuv – at the time as it comes to the Arab Palestinian population.” 

Pappé did not respond to RCI’s requests for comment.

A second Wikipedia editor, self-described as being disillusioned after making thousands of edits, told RCI anonymously that “it’s at best naive to use sources everyone knows are biased” to make statements “in the encyclopedia's neutral voice,” and such sources should always be properly attributed. 

The first editor informed RCI that while sources like Khalidi and Pappé can be used, “it should be noted that not everyone agrees with them” and should be balanced with academics who hold opposing views.

Comparing Hamas and Likud

Wikipedia’s page on Hamas similarly draws upon what critics see as partisan sources. The article compares the Hamas charter to the platform of Likud, a right-wing Israeli political party, stating: “Many scholars have pointed out that both the 1988 Hamas charter and the Likud party platform sought full control of the land, thus denouncing the two-state solution.” These “many scholars,” according to the authorities cited, include the journalist Peter Beinart and politically active linguist Noam Chomsky, both of whom are well-known left-wing critics of Israel. 

It does not note that other scholars reject this equivalence. Romirowsky said that “there is nothing in the Likud party platform that talks about the eradication of the Arab Palestinian population,” while the Hamas charter calls for the eradication of Jews and Zionists, and the charter uses “Jews” and “Zionists” interchangeably.

The first editor told RCI anonymously that the wording of the Hamas-Likud comparison violates the site’s policy. “Unless you have an academic review article that says that academic consensus is x, y, and z, you can’t write, ‘many scholars think x, y, and z’ and then cite it to your own cherry-picked list of scholars,” the editor said. 

Double Standards

Pro-Israel academics are cited on Wikipedia, but they often face hurdles. The 2018 book “The Zionist Ideas” by McGill University professor Gil Troy - who identifies himself as “American Historian, Zionist Thinker” on his personal website – was rejected from inclusion on an editor-compiled list of “Best Sources” providing an overview of Zionism in Wikipedia. The stated reasoning: Troy is an American presidential historian whose book is better suited for discussing different types of Zionism. 

By contrast, Shahid Alam, an emeritus professor of economics at Northeastern University who serves as faculty advisor for the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, was included in the “Best Sources” list and is cited twice in the Zionism page, including in the opening section. Alam wrote a controversial column for CounterPunch in 2004, drawing parallels between the American revolutionaries and the 9/11 hijackers in that “both insurgencies seek to overthrow what they perceive to be foreign occupations,” though he acknowledged that the colonists did not target civilians and the 9/11 hijackers did. 

Wikipedia editors also rely on NGOs that appear to be biased in some reports as neutral observers. The lead of the “Use of human shields by Hamas” page states that Amnesty International found no evidence to support Israel’s claims that Hamas used human shields in the 2008-2009 and 2014 Gaza Wars, while Human Rights Watch found no evidence that Hamas used human shields in the 2008-2009 war.

Max Abrahms, a political science professor at Northeastern University and terrorism expert, found the groups’ claims that Hamas did not use human shields during those prior wars “laughable.” He said that there is photo evidence to the contrary, and even the Palestinian Authority has said that Hamas uses human shields. 

While Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are considered reliable sources, some organizations more sympathetic to Israel are not. The Heritage Foundation was recently blacklisted on Wikipedia (meaning its URL is blocked from the online encyclopedia) following a report from The Forward that Heritage had proposed unmasking antisemitic Wikipedia editors. 

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has also been downgraded to being generally unreliable on all topics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel, or Zionism (although the ADL’s hate symbol database is considered reliable). The downgrade occurred following a formal discussion among editors last year in which they stated their position on the reliability of ADL; three uninvolved Wikipedians in good standing then “closed” the discussion and rendered a verdict based on the numbers and strength of the arguments. In this discussion, editors cited critics of Israel like The Nation, The Guardian, and Jewish Currents as evidence that the ADL conflates criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism and thus its reliability should be downgraded. 

One source that is generally considered reliable on Wikipedia is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has been criticized for casting mainstream conservatives as extremists. On May 24, a formal discussion was launched reexamining the SPLC’s reliability on Wikipedia, which remains ongoing as of publication time.

Although Wikipedia credits its volunteer editing for making it a vast encyclopedia with tens of millions of pages, it lacks the policies and tools to achieve neutrality on hotly contested topics like the Israel-Palestine conflict, according to a third editor who requested anonymity. “The system is remedial at best: if it is from a plausibly reliable academic source, publication, institution, or individual, it is usually allowed without question, and is incredibly hard to contest,” a longtime editor said. “Just because a person is staffed at a university or is publishing work in a peer-reviewed journal does not mean that it should be considered by default a reliable or neutral point-of-view source.”