The decision means that the platform’s article on Zionism will continue to suggest that the ideology inherently supports the expulsion of Palestinians
September 5, 2025 10:06
Wikipedia has frozen editing of its article on Zionism for a year, meaning it will continue to suggest that the ideology inherently supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
The first paragraph in the influential platform’s article reads: “Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe to establish and support a Jewish homeland through the colonisation of Palestine, a region corresponding to the Land of Israel in Judaism and central to Jewish history.
"Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.”
As reported by The Tablet, this passage (particularly the second sentence) has been the subject of intense internal debate at Wikipedia, driven by the so-called “Gang of 40”, which the report dubbed “a network of more than three dozen editors who systematically pushed the most extreme anti-Zionist narratives”.
In January 2024, the group reportedly imposed a “moratorium” on editing the sentence, which was written by a volunteer editor known as Levivich – a member of the “gang” who, along with six others, was later banned from making changes to articles related to the conflict due to allegations of bias.
One of the main concerns from critics was that the passage was written in “wikivoice”, asserting it as the impartial reporting of Wikipedia itself rather than as a contested claim.
The organisation’s own Neutral Point of View policy specifically states that editors must “avoid stating seriously contested assertions as facts”.
Another editor filed a Request for Comment (RfC), the first stage in the Wikipedia dispute process, about the passage in November but the thread was reportedly dominated by Gang of 40 members before being closed by a volunteer administrator, who later commented: “I’m not an expert on this topic, nor even all that interested in it.”
An appeal to this decision was filed in March of this year, around a month after a year-long moratorium was imposed on editing the passage to prevent the dispute from flaring up again.
The freeze, reportedly approved by the same administrator who closed the RfC, ensures the changes will remain in place until at least February 2026, by which time the dismissed editors may have appealed their own bans.
And, while the decision is under review, the row has gained national attention after the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform launched an investigation into the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organisation that hosts Wikipedia, last week.
The committee is set to examine the potential influence of foreign actors over US public opinion through article editing, including “potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles.”
This, reports the Tablet, could put the Gang of 40 in its sights, especially as one of the group’s members has allegedly demonstrated a pattern of editing to favour the Iranian regime, including the erasure of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Islamic Republic from Wikipedia entries.
That individual alone is reported to have made over 400 article edits alone, allegedly amounting to the “systematic removal of instances documenting human-rights crimes by Iranian officials”.
To get more Israel news, click here to sign up for our free Israel Briefing newsletter.