People attend the annual al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day) rally in London, Britain, March 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jaimi Joy

A dangerous shift happens when people stop feeling responsible for verifying what they believe. The accusation itself becomes enough. Once institutions repeat something with enough confidence, many decent people hand over their judgment completely. They assume somebody else has already checked the facts.

That is where real danger begins.

A case is being built against Israel in international courts, and much of the public discussion around it already feels emotionally settled long before most people have examined a single document, testimony, or legal standard for themselves.

The International Court of Justice has no meaningful conflict-of-interest mechanism comparable to what people would expect in many domestic legal systems. UN reports and secondary claims enter public discourse carrying the weight of institutional authority, even when the underlying sources were never cross-examined or independently verified in a courtroom setting.

At a certain point, the accusation itself becomes proof.

That pattern extends far beyond a courtroom. Perception gets taken over before a person realizes his or her thinking has been outsourced. Repetition creates familiarity. Familiarity creates emotional certainty. Eventually people stop asking where the information came from in the first place.

Jewish history carries enough experience with this pattern to recognize it early. A claim repeated often enough starts feeling like an established truth even before evidence exists to support it.

Once institutions absorb the accusation, the public no longer experiences skepticism as responsibility. Skepticism starts feeling like disobedience.

Artificial intelligence is about to accelerate this problem even further. AI systems absorb dominant narratives faster than human beings can examine them critically. Once a version of events becomes widely indexed, cited, repeated, and emotionally reinforced, it enters the system as background truth. The next generation encounters conclusions first and context later.

That matters because most people do not independently investigate history, legal claims, or war. They inherit understanding socially. Search engines shape it. Institutions shape it. Algorithms shape it. Repetition shapes it.

The responsibility for your own safety begins before the threat fully arrives. Physical self-defense taught me that years ago. Cognitive self-defense follows the same principle. A society that loses the ability to question emotionally satisfying accusations becomes vulnerable to manipulation at a scale far larger than any courtroom.

People once understood that serious accusations required serious proof. Today, institutional confidence often replaces evidence in the public mind. That shift should concern anyone who still believes good intentions alone are enough to protect people from participating in injustice.

Tsahi Shemesh is an Israeli-American IDF veteran and the founder of Krav Maga Experts in NYC. A father and educator, he writes about Jewish identity, resilience, moral courage, and the ethics of strength in a time of rising antisemitism.