The Anti-Zionism Sentence Wikipedia Won’t Let You Touch

Wikipedia editors have frozen in place a passage labeling Zionism as ethnic cleansing, blocking changes for at least a year.

On August 27, 2025, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform launched an investigation into the Wikimedia Foundation to examine potential foreign manipulation of Wikipedia, especially content related to Israel and antisemitism. The investigation followed reports of coordinated editorial activity by a network of approximately 40 Wikipedia editors, dubbed the “Gang of 40,” accused of systematically inserting anti-Zionist and anti-Israel narratives into thousands of Wikipedia articles.

Ashley Rindsberg, in an October 2024 report, revealed how pro-Hamas Wikipedia editors push propaganda, scrub damaging details about Hamas, and tilt narratives against Israel. As she notes in Tablet, these editors — many foreign nationals, some allegedly tied to Iranian interests — have racked up more than 850,000 edits across 10,000 articles, dramatically reshaping what the public reads about Zionism. A key controversy centers on a sentence added to the lead paragraph of Wikipedia’s “Zionism” article: “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” This equates Zionism with ethnic cleansing, which was framed as fact in Wikipedia’s neutral “wikivoice.”

After a flawed internal dispute process, efforts to challenge the sentence were rejected. Although Wikipedia’s policies require neutrality and rigorous content standards, the “Gang of 40” allegedly exploited Wikipedia’s procedures to push through their preferred version, according to Rindsberg. The resulting Request for Comment (RfC) was closed by an administrator who later admitted to lacking expertise and misapplying site governance policies. A 12-month moratorium was then imposed, freezing the disputed content until February 2026.

This moratorium locks the ideologically-driven narrative into the article. The move may have been designed to preserve the sentence until the banned editors could appeal their sanctions and return to editing.

Rindsberg notes that several key editors have histories of downplaying Iranian human rights abuses or pushing disinformation aligned with Iranian regime interests. Editor “Iskandar323” allegedly removed references to Iranian atrocities and promoted narratives hostile to dissident groups.

Wikipedia’s editorial integrity and its role in shaping public discourse are in question. With AI tools and search engines relying heavily on Wikipedia data, the impact of the manipulation could dominate the digital knowledge ecosystem.

“Profound, a company helping brands monitor and influence their presence in AI search engines, has analyzed 30 million citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity from August 2024 to June 2025,” CyberNews reported in June. “OpenAI’s ChatGPT shows a clear preference for Wikipedia, which accounts for nearly half (47.9%) of its top citations within its top 10 most-cited sources.”