Israel and the Palestinians
Most people who are critical of Israel are motivated by concerns for justice, for they believe that Israel has committed serious crimes against the Palestinians. To assess the truth of several such beliefs on the basis of historical and contemporary facts is the purpose of this essay. Since the Palestinian grievances are part of the wider Arab-Israeli conflict, it is this conflict that provides the proper context for this assessment.
The Jews Drove Out the Arabs to Settle the Land
The first belief of the critics of Israel is that the Jews drove the Arabs from their lands by force to make room for their settlements and establish their state. In truth, however, the land on which the Jews settled, when Palestine was under Ottoman and later British rule, was lawfully purchased with funds that had been collected for this purpose by the Jewish National Fund.
Moreover, only a small number of Arabs were displaced by these land purchases because most of the acquired land consisted of wastelands, sand dunes, and malarial swamps that the Jews irrigated, drained, and farmed. Also, Palestine at that time was thinly populated, and relatively few of its inhabitants lived in settled communities, affording plenty of room for Jewish farms, villages, and towns. Indeed, these Jewish settlements initially attracted Arab migrants from neighboring countries who sought to benefit from their growing prosperity.
From the 1920s onwards, however, as the Jews became more numerous, the Arabs began to attack them violently because they were unwilling to share the land with them, and because they were incited to a Nazi-style Jew hatred by the virulently anti-Semitic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. These attacks culminated in the war of 1948, when the regular armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, together with local Arab gangs, attacked the newly formed State of Israel with the openly declared goal of destroying it and killing the Jews.
It was during this war that between 470,000 and 520,000 Arabs were displaced from what was to become Israel. In the Arab telling, this displacement was an act of ethnic cleansing by means of force perpetrated by the Jews. In truth, however, most of the Arabs who left did so of their own volition because they wanted to wait out the war elsewhere, because they were unwilling to live in a Jewish state, because their leaders ordered them to make room for the advancing Arab armies, because they feared being seen as traitors deserving of death if they stayed, and because they dreaded—groundlessly—that the Jews would do to them what they would have done to the Jews had they been victorious, namely, to slaughter them.
It is true that the Haganah, the regular defense force of the Jewish community, expelled 30,000-45,000 Arabs from the towns of Lydda and Ramle, but only because they posed an intolerable security threat due to their active belligerence in a strategically important location. Further, the small and irregular Jewish forces of Irgun and Etzel engaged in a number of threatening actions, such as firing shells over villages, to encourage the flight of local Arabs. However, these actions have been blown out of all proportion by Arab propaganda, centered on the so-called “Deir Yassin Massacre,” which, in reality, was a single small battle during the 1948 war in which about 100 Arabs lost their lives under unclear circumstances.
On the whole, there clearly was no general policy of expulsion or ethnic cleansing by Israel. Rather, the Israeli leadership consistently expressed its hopes for peaceful coexistence and cooperation with the Arabs. In the city of Haifa, the Jews pleaded with the local Arabs to stay rather than leave, as they had been commanded by the Arab leadership. Moreover, Israel readily extended citizenship to the 160,000 Arabs who had chosen to remain.
Israel’s conduct towards the Arabs stands in stark contrast to the violent expropriation and expulsion of around 850,000 Jews from the Arab states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen in response to the establishment of Israel in 1948, which was motivated by a hostility toward Israel that overnight transformed loyal Jewish citizens into supposed enemies to be harassed, despoiled, raped, murdered, and driven out.
Most of these refugees became citizens of Israel, which successfully integrated them with the Jews of European descent. This integration poses another stark contrast to the concerted policy of the surrounding Arab states to deny citizenship to the Arab refugees from Palestine and to keep them in refugee camps, so that their plight would incite enmity against the Jewish state.
It is true that Israel—under its 1950 Absentee Property Law—did not allow the Arab refugees of 1948 to return and, in addition, turned their abandoned properties into state land. To a large extent, however, this policy can be justified on the grounds that allowing the refugees to return, especially after they had grown into millions indoctrinated to hate Israel, would have been a mortal threat to Israel’s security and its identity as a Jewish state.
On the whole, to accuse Israel of something that it did not do, but that the Arabs practiced in a coordinated way on a large scale, namely, systematically dispossessing and driving people from a land in which they had peacefully lived for millennia in a real act of ethnic cleansing is thus a grossly unjust inversion of reality.
The West Bank and Gaza Are Occupied Palestinian Territories
Many believe that Israel’s control over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip constitutes an illegal occupation of land that belongs to the Palestinians, whence these areas are spoken of as “occupied Palestinian territories.” In fact, however, these areas are “disputed territories” to which both Israel and the Palestinians have rights according to international law properly applied—as opposed to its obfuscation by the Palestinians and their many supporters, especially those at the contemporary United Nations, which has delegitimized itself on this issue by its flagrant bias against Israel.
There are five reasons why international law gives Israel territorial rights to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. First, the League of Nations explicitly recognized the right of the Jews to establish a state in Palestine without geographical restrictions in its Mandate for Palestine of 1922, which stated that “recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country,” with the terms “recognition” and “reconstituting” implying that the right of the Jews was pre-existing due to their having been the original inhabitants and having had a continued, albeit diminished presence after the Romans drove many of them into exile in 70 AD.
Second, Israel’s control over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip does not constitute an occupation in legal terms because no prior legitimate sovereign was ousted when Israel gained control in 1967; for the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 assumes that such an ousting is needed to justify the term “occupation,” and neither Jordan nor Egypt, which controlled the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from 1948 to 1967, were legitimate sovereigns because they had taken possession by illegal conquest.
Third, Israel gained control over these territories in 1967 as the result of a defensive and therefore just war that was forced on it by Egyptian, Jordanian, Iraqi, and Syrian aggression, which, according to an International Court of Justice opinion from 1970, gives Israel “better title” than the prior holders.
Fourth, UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in 1967 after Israel’s capture of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War, called on Israel to withdraw “from territories” to “secure and recognized boundaries,” but not from “the territories” or “all territories,” which was a deliberate choice of words to indicate that Israel was entitled to parts of these territories, so that its borders could be adjusted to make them more defensible.
Fifth, UN Security Council Resolution 338, passed in 1973 in the wake of the Yom Kippur War caused by Egyptian and Syrian aggression, reaffirmed Security Council Resolution 242 and called for negotiations for a just and durable peace. Hence, negotiations ought to determine which parts of the lands captured by Israel in 1967 would become sovereign Israeli territory and which would become sovereign Arab or Palestinian territory.
Hence, it is clear that Israel possesses territorial rights in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with their geographical extent to be determined by negotiations with the Palestinians; and since no negotiated agreement has been reached, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip remain “disputed territories” rather than “occupied Palestinian territories.”
Further, the fact that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are disputed territories implies that Israeli settlements there are not illegal because it renders the clause of the Fourth Geneva Convention that prohibits moving populations into occupied territories inapplicable.
At most, it can be claimed that the settlements prejudice the allotment of West Bank prior to final status negotiations, as called for by UN Security Council Resolution 338. Yet, there have been interim negotiations—the Oslo Accords—that gave the Palestinians their own civil administration in Areas A and B of the West Bank, wherein 95% of the Palestinians reside, which comprise 64% of the West Bank, and where no Jewish settlements have been built, and that gave Israel full control over Area C, wherein 5% of Palestinians reside, which comprises 36% of the West Bank, and in which all Jewish settlements are located. Further, Israel’s repeated efforts to reach a final status agreement with the Palestinians through negotiation have all failed due to Palestinian rejectionism.
Finally, it is true that Israel’s unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem in 1980 contravened the injunction of UN Security Council Resolution 338 that the final allocation of the disputed territories ought to be achieved by negotiations. However, there is much to excuse this move: the Arabs were and still are unwilling to enter into such negotiations in good faith; Israel gained control of East Jerusalem in a defensive and therefore just war; Israel subsequently and repeatedly offered to cede East Jerusalem to a Palestinian state in exchange for peace, but was rebuffed by the Palestinians; and Jerusalem is of far greater historical and religious significance to the Jewish people than to Arabs and Muslims.
Israel Has Prevented a Palestinian State
According to another critical belief, Israel has prevented peace by not allowing the formation of a Palestinian state. In truth, however, it has been the Arabs and later the Palestinians who have consistently rejected a state of their own because none of the offers they received satisfied their enduring wish to rule all of Palestine and eliminate the Jews therefrom.
In 1937, when Palestine was still a British mandate, the Arabs rejected the Peel Commission’s proposal for a partition of the area into a Jewish and an Arab state, whereas the Jews accepted it, while arguing for a greater share than merely 17% of the land. In 1947, the Arabs rejected the UN Partition Plan that similarly proposed two states, whereas the Jews accepted it and then declared the State of Israel in 1948, which was promptly attacked by Arab states seeking its destruction.
In 1967, Israel’s peace overtures in the wake of its victory in the Six-Day War were rejected by the Arab League, which exclaimed, “No peace! No recognition! No negotiations!” at its Khartoum conference of the same year. In 1979, Egypt, despite having made peace with Israel, did not accept an Israeli offer of Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza, which would in likelihood have led to statehood.
In 2000, the Palestinian Authority under Yassir Arafat not only rejected Israel’s offer of statehood on 95% of the West Bank, all of East Jerusalem, all of Gaza, and additional land to be ceded by Israel to make up the missing 5% but launched a major wave of terrorist attacks against Israel, called the Second Intifada, which dashed Israel’s hope for a peaceful coexistence that had arisen from the Oslo peace process from 1993 to 1995.
In 2002, with the Second Intifada still raging, the Arab League offered Israel recognition in exchange for a withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders, the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and the return to Israel of the five million descendants of the Arabs who became refugees in 1948, which Israel could not possibly accept because it would have destroyed the Jewish state from within.
In 2005, Israel withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip and removed all Jewish settlements, thereby giving its Palestinian inhabitants an opportunity to establish a state of their own. They responded by immediately wrecking the greenhouses that Israel had been left behind for their use and by electing as their government the Hamas terror organization, which is openly sworn to Israel’s destruction and which turned the Gaza Strip into a terror base from which to launch missiles, incendiary balloons, and murderous cross-border incursions against Israel.
In 2006-2008, despite all this terroristic violence, Israel made yet another major offer of statehood that would have given the Palestinians 94% of the West Bank, all of East Jerusalem, all of the Gaza Strip, and additional compensatory land ceded by Israel, which the Palestinian Authority, now under Mahmoud Abbas, rejected again.
As these facts so clearly show, it has been the Arabs and the Palestinians who have prevented a Palestinian state because of their persistent unwillingness to share the land with the Jews. Moreover, given the Palestinians’ ceaseless terroristic aggression against Israel, a majority of Israelis has recently and, indeed, correctly concluded that a Palestinian state would be such a menace that it could not be accepted in the foreseeable future.
The Israeli Military Indiscriminately Harms Palestinian Civilians
More and more people believe that Israel indiscriminately uses violence against Palestinian civilians in its military operations, either from callous disregard for their lives or even the intention to commit genocide against the Palestinian people, as claimed by South Africa’s accusation of Israel at the International Court of Justice in 2024. In truth, however, Israel’s armed forces have never purposely targeted civilians and have done far more than any other military to limit harm to them.
The reason is that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) is obliged by Israeli law to uphold the norm of “purity of arms,” which requires all soldiers to “maintain their humanity during combat . . . not use their weapon and power to harm uninvolved civilians and prisoners [and] do everything in their power to prevent harm to their lives, bodies, dignity, and property.“ And this norm is taken seriously by the IDF, which routinely punishes soldiers who disobey it, even for such minor refractions as taking a souvenir.
In obedience to this norm, the IDF—unlike other militaries—routinely warns civilians of impending combat operations in their area by air dropping millions of leaflets from the air, which include maps of where fighting will take place and where safe spaces can be found, by sending in speaker-equipped drones to broadcast warnings, and by contacting tens of thousands of Palestinian individuals with phone calls and text messages telling them to move away for their safety, notwithstanding the fact that these measures eliminate the tactical advantage of surprise and significantly increase the risk to Israeli soldiers. In addition, the IDF announces pauses in combat operations to give civilians a chance to escape or to procure food and other necessities of life, even though such pauses enable the terrorists to regroup and resupply as well.
Further, the IDF drops low-yield, harmless bombs on rooftops to signal impending strikes—only to see fleeing civilians being driven back into the building by the terrorists in order to cynically increase casualties among their own people for propaganda against Israel. And it carefully calibrates bomb yields and uses precision-guided munitions that can hit individual rooms instead of whole houses when neutralizing terrorists. It is true that these restrictions were relaxed during the recent war with Hamas from operational necessity, given the intensity of the fighting and extent to which Hamas had turned civilian dwellings in the Gaza Strip into terror bases.
As a result of all these measures aimed at protecting non-combatants, Israeli military operations cause far fewer civilian casualties than comparable operations of other Western militaries, let alone, non-Western ones, when fighting against guerilla forces in urban environments. Take, for instance, Israel’s operations in the Gaza Strip since October 2023, which are decried by many around the world as having caused high civilian casualties. As of mid-June 2024, Israel reported that it had killed about 15,000 Hamas combatants, while Hamas claimed that 35,000 people had been killed, however, without distinguishing between combatants and civilians and subtracting deaths that occurred due to their own misfired rockets. In addition, the Hamas number is demonstrably fabricated because of the strict linearity of its increase over time, which is realistically impossible. Thus, a United Nations study of hospital records in Gaza in May 2024 found only about identifiable 24,000 deaths.
Now, if the 15,000 dead combatants reported by Israel are subtracted from the 24,000 dead Palestinians, the number of civilians killed is 9,000, yielding a civilian-to-combatant death ratio of 0.6, which is very low for warfare in dense urban environments, especially considering Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields to drive up the death toll for propaganda purposes. And even assuming that the overall Palestinian death toll was 35,000, the civilian death toll would have been 20,000, yielding a civilian-to-combatant death ratio of 1.3. By comparison, the United Nations and the European Union have estimated that civilians account for 80%-90% of casualties in all modern war, yielding ratios between 4.0 and 9.0. Most relevantly, the Battle of Mosul in 2016-2017, conducted by the United States and its allies against ISIS, whose fighting tactics were similar to those of Hamas, killed around 10,000 civilians and 4,000 ISIS fighters, yielding a civilian-to-combatant death ratio of 2.5. It follows that that the IDF’s many measures to protect civilians have been extraordinarily successful.
Hence, the claim that Israel used force indiscriminately and thus caused excessive civilian deaths in Gaza is plainly wrong. And the further accusation that Israel is conducting genocide in Gaza, endeavoring to kill all or most Gazans, is shown to be a lie of the most vicious sort.
Whereas Israel goes to extraordinary lengths to protect civilians, Arab mobs, armies, and terrorists have intentionally committed atrocities against Jewish civilians for a long time, beginning with the precedent set by the founder of their religion, the prophet and conqueror Muhammad, who massacred the Jews of Khaybar in the Arabian Peninsula and distributed their women to his followers in 628. In Palestine, Arabs repeatedly murdered, raped, plundered, and mutilated Jews, most notably in the Jerusalem and Safed pogroms of 1834, the May 1921 pogroms in Jaffa, Hadera, Rehovot, and Petah Tikva, and the Hebron massacre of 1929.
In the war of 1948, battlefield victories by the Arabs were usually followed by murdering, raping, and mutilating every Jew in sight, in accordance with the genocidal declarations of their leaders, such as Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and ally of Hitler, who cried out on the radio, “I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews. Murder them all!” and Azzam Pasha, the Secretary of the Arab League, who declared openly that “this will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.”
In 1967, on the eve of the Six-Day War, Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt, likewise declared that “our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.” And when asked what would happen to the Jews, one of his underlings drew a finger across his throat in a gesture that left no doubt that the Jews would be massacred. Since 1988, the Hamas terror organization has asserted in its Covenant that “our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious . . . until the enemy is vanquished,” for the Prophet had said, “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews).”
An important but often overlooked context of this genocidal fanaticism is an abiding Nazi-style Jew hatred in the Arab world that was directly imported from Nazi Germany in the early 1940s, when Haj Amin al-Husseini’s agitation against the Jews of Palestine was financed by the SS, and when daily Arabic language radio broadcasts from Berlin urged their Arab listeners to exterminate the Jews. And to this day, Arab media are replete with antisemitic imagery, such as hook-nosed Jews with sidelocks, and antisemitic tropes, such as the claim that the world is ruled by the Jews, brought home by a popular Arabic TV enactment of the infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a 19th-century antisemitic forgery.
Overall, to accuse Israel of something that it has never done but that the Arabs have practiced with zest, namely, murdering civilians and attempting genocide, inverts the truth in an absurd and glaringly unjust way.
Israel Oppresses the Palestinians
It is often thought that Israel oppresses the Palestinians in the West Bank by erecting roadblocks, checkpoints, and walls to hinder their free movement and violate their dignity, by conducting military raids into Palestinian towns and villages to terrorize their inhabitants, by building settlements to prevent the formation of a Palestinian state, and by allowing Israeli settlers to harass and attack Palestinians with impunity. In fact, given that oppression equates to intentional and systematic domination, Israeli measures that aim solely at preventing terror attacks are justified and not oppressive; however, settlement activity that aims at achieving supremacy over the Palestinians and harassment of Palestinians by some of their inhabitants can be considered oppressive.
Israel maintains roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank to prevent terrorists from infiltrating Israel and from attacking Israelis on West Bank roads and in West Bank settlements. The walls, or more accurately, security barriers that protect Israel from the West Bank were built from 2002 to 2007 in response to the massive wave of terror attacks known as the Second Intifada. Israeli security forces enter Palestinian towns and villages to arrest terrorists hiding among the civilian population and do not molest Palestinians unconnected to terrorist activities. And if terrorism were to end and true peace were achieved, the roadblocks and checkpoints would be lifted and the arrest raids would cease.
It also bears mention that the security barriers protecting Israel are crossed daily by some 150,000 Palestinians who have permits to work in Israel (which was also the case for some 17,000 Gazans prior to the Hamas attack in October 2023); and Palestinians from both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip can get treatment in Israeli hospitals in case of ailments that Palestinian hospitals are not equipped to handle.
Israel’s security measures surely impose hardships on the Palestinians by diminishing their ability to move about freely. But it is the terrorists who bear primary responsibility for these hardships. And since opinion polls keep showing that around two thirds of Palestinians support continued terror attacks against Israel, they bear a secondary responsibility for this hardship as well.
Regarding Israeli settlements, there have been two building phases. In the first phase, which began after Israel attained of control over the West Bank in 1967, the intention of the Israeli government to allow and, indeed, encourage Jewish settlement was to improve Israel’s security. The settlements would act as a first line of defense against Arab attacks and move Israel’s difficult to defend border outward. Such settlement occurred in the Jordan Valley and near the Green Line that separates Israel from the West Bank. Settlement in the more heavily populated Arab areas was forbidden. This first phase of settlement was clearly aimed at security and was not oppressive.
In the second phase of settlement, which began in 1977 and lasts to this day, settlements have continued to be built close to the Green Line, in the Jordan Valley, and on the hills overlooking Israel’s densely settled coastal plain to enhance Israel’s security and, in addition, to provide affordable housing to Israelis. However, a different kind of settlement enterprise emerged as well: purposely placing Jewish communities deep in areas with large Palestinian populations, such as on the central ridge of the West Bank and its slopes. These settlements have been motivated by nationalist and religious desires to reclaim all of the historically Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria, which equate to the West Bank. The intention of the settlers has been to secure Jewish dominance over the West Bank, to prevent a Palestinian state, and to prepare the area for eventual annexation by Israel. Importantly, many of these nationalist-religious settlements have been built with the legal permission of and encouragement by the Israeli government. Further, a significant number of settlements that had been erected without government approval were retroactively legalized. Hence, the religious-nationalist settlement enterprise of the second phase does represent a fairly systematic and intentional effort to achieve Israeli domination over the Palestinians in the West Bank and thus constitutes a form of oppression.
Further, religious-nationalist settlers have harassed and attacked Palestinians living nearby. They march through Palestinian villages, paint graffiti on walls, throw stones, vandalize olive trees, drive off cattle, damage cars, set things afire, and even fire shots. This behavior is also oppressive because it is intended to demonstrate Jewish supremacy to the Palestinians and because the Israeli government has not taken sufficient measures to prevent and prosecute it.
Israel Is a Colonizer Practicing Apartheid
Another, more recent criticism portrays Israel as a colonial enterprise by white people who imposed themselves on indigenous people of color and, to make matters worse, are engaged in apartheid, the racist system of the former government of South Africa.
In truth, however, the return of the Jews to Palestine was not an act of colonization because they are also indigenous to the land from which they had been expelled, and in which small but not insignificant numbers of Jews maintained an unbroken presence through the millennia. For instance, throughout the Middle Ages and into Modernity, Jews lived continuously in Safed, Jerusalem, Tiberias, Hebron, and several other towns. In the 16th century, about 15,000 Jews lived in the Safed region alone. Moreover, about half of the Jews now living in Israel came not from Europe but from other Middle Eastern lands, where they were as indigenous as (or even more so than) the Arabs.
Further, the Jews who came to Palestine from Europe and founded Israel did not come as conquerors, as colonizers typically do, but were themselves fleeing persecution, immigrated peacefully, and settled on land they had lawfully purchased.
The apartheid charge, which assumes racial domination of white people over people of color, fails to consider in the first place that both Jews and Arabs belong to the same race, namely the semitic branch of the white race, which is also shown by the close relatedness of the Hebrew and Arabic languages. European Jews are lighter skinned than Arabs due to intermarriage during their stay in Europe, but this fact does not turn Arabs into people of color. Moreover, the Jews who came from Middle Eastern lands, who make up half of the Jewish population of Israel, are indistinguishable in skin color from the Arabs and other Middle Eastern peoples with whom they had lived for millennia.
The apartheid canard should end here, but its proponents keep it alive by claiming in addition that Arabs are systematically discriminated against by Israel, both in Israel proper and in the West Bank and Gaza. In truth, however, the Arab citizens of Israel have full and equal rights under the law, full and equal access to state resources, and can participate fully in the democratic political process—which constitutes the very opposite of apartheid.
Indeed, as a result of their legal equality, significant numbers of Israeli Arabs have risen to important positions in the economy, academia, and government, such as the High Court of Justice. Moreover, their average attainment in such socio-economic measures as income, employment, infant mortality, and education has improved considerably over time, and the lags that still exist are due to historical and cultural factors rather than discrimination.
The fact that Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza cannot participate in Israel’s political process and cannot access state resources—with the important exception of petitioning Israel’s High Court of Justice—justifiably rests on the simple reason that they are not citizens of Israel, and that the lands on which they live are not sovereign Israeli territory. Rather, Israel’s legal obligation to the Palestinians is defined by the stipulations of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which protects civilians in areas of armed conflict, for Israel gained control over the West Bank as a result of the war of 1967. This Convention is reliably applied by Israel’s High Court of Justice in its rulings on disputes between Palestinians and the Israeli government in the West Bank. This court further applies Ottoman and British laws that had previously governed the territory. Hence, it is patently untrue that the Palestinians are denied the legal rights they possess as non-citizens.
Moreover, since 1994, ninety-five percent of the Palestinians in the West Bank have lived under their own civil administration, the Palestinian Authority, which has its own legislature, judiciary, police, education system, taxation system, and health and welfare departments.
On the whole, Israel is clearly neither a colonizer nor an apartheid state, and those who call it such commit an odious defamation based on highly biased and factually false accounts.
Why Are So Many People Critical of Israel?
The facts show only one of the beliefs of Israel’s critics to be partially true: the religious-nationalist settlements in the West Bank and the harassment of Palestinians by some of their members aim at Jewish dominance and therefore qualify as oppressive. Otherwise, Israel’s conduct toward Arabs and Palestinians has been legal and just, treating them as decently as possible in the face of their unceasing aggression. Hence, it is the Arabs and Palestinians who have been guilty of the most serious crimes: murder, rape, mutilation, pillage, and wars of genocidal aggression.
But why then do so many people around the world believe the opposite? The reason is the great success of Palestinian propaganda, euphemistically known as the “Palestinian narrative,” which over time has spun a web of lies so thick that almost all Palestinians, almost all other Arabs, most Muslims, and increasing numbers of Westerners are thoroughly convinced of their factualness.
Among Arabs, this Palestinian web of lies is insulated from enlightenment by a culturally engrained rejection of heterodox ideas, especially those coming from the West, a fear of conspiracies, especially those by “world Jewry,” and a deep-seated hatred of Jews. Further, this web keeps being spun by the widespread belief and practice among Palestinians that distorting the facts and telling further lies in favor of their cause is justified.
Palestinian propaganda is readily accepted by many Muslims around the world because their religion is profoundly anti-Semitic, calls for violence to drive infidels, such as the Israelis, from the umma, the parts of the world conquered by and henceforth claimed for Islam, and is hostile to rational inquiry. In addition, many Muslims resent the West with Israel as its outpost for its scientific and technological superiority and blame it for their corresponding weaknesses.
The Palestinian narrative has spread to many non-Muslim parts of the world, where the tendency of the ill-informed to believe often enough repeated lies has been exacerbated by a number of local factors. In Africa, the Palestinian aggression against Israel has been confused with anti-colonial struggle, as seen, for instance, in the anti-Israel stance of South Africa, which goes back to the otherwise enlightened Nelson Mandela. In the West, old-fashioned anti-Semites have seized on the tales of Israeli misdeeds to utter now acceptable denunciations of the Jewish state. People on the left have subsumed the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to the Marxist idea of seeing every conflict as a struggle between oppressors and oppressed and have given this struggle an anti-colonial and anti-racist veneer by identifying the Jews as white colonizers and the Palestinians as colored natives. The ignorant and increasingly woke young of Western lands have found it counterculturally chic to root for the Palestinians as the supposed underdogs. And China and Russia amplify Palestinian propaganda as part of their campaign against the West.
As a result, the reality of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been turned on its head in far too many minds: rather than Israel being seen as the true sufferer of Arab and Palestinian aggression, the Palestinians have become the world’s most fashionable victims and Israel its chosen scapegoat.