If the Palestinian cause is just, why is every argument in favour of it a lie?
Lie 1. Israel is an apartheid regime. This charge is especially misplaced because apartheid involves race. Israel is the only state in the Middle East where there is no distinction in law for people of any race or religion. Israel is a democracy where its Arab citizens are fully equal under the law. It is the only place in the Middle East where Hindus, Bahais, Jews, Christians, Muslims and others can and do live together in peace. There are distinctions made between Israeli citizens and the Palestinian Arabs who are not citizens, just as every other nation makes a distinction between its citizens and others. Even more than usually justified in this case because of legitimate security needs.
Lie 2. Israel is committing, or attempting to commit, genocide. Genocide is an internationally recognized crime where one party acts with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. There is absolutely no evidence that Israel intends to destroy the Palestinians, in whole or in part. This is why the South Africans are having a problem making this claim, even with a biased anti-Israel international court. Palestinian Arab population numbers continue to grow, and grossly exaggerated Hamas claimed casualties are dwarfed by those from many other recent conflicts (see the Sudan, the Congo, Syria, etc.) On the other hand, Jews have been expelled or exterminated in almost every other Middle eastern state, and Hamas routinely call for a genocide of the Jews.
Lie 3. Israel is targeting civilians/or Israel is indiscriminate about its attacks, leading to excessive civilian deaths. No, it isn’t. The civilians who die do so largely because Hamas routinely uses civilians as human shields. Further, the IDF has made great efforts to minimize civilian casualties, by warning Gazans to leave areas or buildings about to be targeted. They have done this through more than nine million leaflets dropped, fifteen million messages sent, and sixteen million robocalls made. As a result, the ratio of civilians to terrorist in this conflict is probably approaching one to one, an unprecedented modern ratio, and Israel has been praised for its success in protecting the lives of civilians by noted experts in modern warfare such as Richard Kemp (UK, Ret.) and Major John Spencer (US, Ret.).
Lie 4. Casualties reported by the Gaza department of Health are credible and should be accepted. No. The Gaza department of Health is an arm of Hamas which regularly produces poorly fabricated figures. Meanwhile, Israel bases its own casualty figures on careful counts and multiple checks, and on the basis of those checks reduced the number of its reported casualties from the October 7th massacre by Hamas terrorists.
Lie 5. Israel is the aggressor in this conflict. Not so. Israel has never started a war against it neighbours. The Jewish state has made real peace offers to the Palestinian Arabs in 1993, in 2000, in 2001, in 2005, and in 2008, all immediately answered by vicious and bloody Palestinian terrorism. Former President Bill Clinton took Palestinian Arabs to task for their failure to accept the generous offers made to them and embrace peace during his term. And of course, Hamas started the current hostilities in a particularly bloodthirsty way on October 7, 2023.
Lie 6. Favouring the Palestinian Arab Cause is in our national interest. No, it isn’t. Favouring terrorism and dishonesty is never in anyone’s long term interest.
Lie 7. The Palestinian Arabs are a stateless people. False. Jordan was intended to be a homeland for the region’s Arabs. It has a majority of Palestinian Arabs, and its Queen is a Palestinian Arab. The Palestinian Arab majority does not rule in Jordan for two reasons. Native Jordanians do not trust them – they have invoked and encouraged acts of violence against the king and other Jordanian citizens, and of course, none of the 21 Arab states are democratic.
Lie 8. The conflict needs to be solved soon because the Palestinian Arabs are having more children than the Israelis. They need living space. False. This is outdated demographic data. Today, Israeli citizens including Jews, Arabs and others have higher demographic growth than the Palestinian Arabs. And do we really want to base arguments on lebensraum?
Lie 9. The Palestinian Arabs have a population in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza that is too large to be controlled by Israel. So agree to peace or else. Threats are not proof of a righteous cause. In addition, and as in everything else, the Palestinian Arabs are simply lying about their numbers. Based on Palestinian reports, the UN numbers the Palestinian Arabs in those areas at roughly 6 million. In reality, there may be less than 4 million.
Lie 10. Creating a Palestinian state will lead to peace and the protection of human rights of Palestinian Arabs. As stated above, none of the 23 Arab states are democracies, and none of them are protective of human rights. A Palestinian Arab state will most certainly be a what Gaza has been since 2005; a brutal dictatorship with discriminating policies against women, homosexuals, Christians and other religious minorities including atheists.
Lie 11. The Palestinian Arabs are the indigenous people in Israel and the Jews are the settlers. No – absolutely not. The Palestinian Arabs are mostly descended from Arabs and others who immigrated to the area from other Muslim areas in response to the economic job opportunities created by the return of many Jews to the area in the early 1900s. Only a very small percentage of the Palestinian Arabs are native to Israel, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and those are descended from the original Jewish, Christian, or Samaritan inhabitants who were forcibly converted to Islam. Meanwhile, a majority of the Jews in Israel are descended from Middle Eastern Jews, who were exiled from Israel but stayed in the Middle East, and who are physically indistinguishable from Arabs. The minority Ashkenazi Jews, who are often portrayed as European settlers, are descended from Jews from ancient Israel, but with some European influence, from living in Europe for so long. Their original Middle Eastern origin can easily be seen in the physical appearance of most Ashkenazi Jews, for example Adam Sandler and Gal Gadot.
Lie 12. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is responsible for the lack of a ceasefire deal. As Eli Lake at Commentary has written, “There was no deal for Netanyahu to reject. Hamas is not participating in the actual negotiations. The diplomacy has been between America, Israel, Egypt, and Qatar. The Qataris are stand-ins for Hamas, but they are not proxies. Several times since April, Hamas has rejected offers for a cease-fire, or in some cases, has insisted on last-minute deal-killing demands—such as a stipulation that the first round of hostages need not be alive.”
Lie 13. Israel is violating international law. How? Doing what? Every country has not just a right but a responsibility to take steps to protect its citizens from attack. If your country had been subject to the hundreds of rocket, missile and terrorist attacks Israel has endured, there was no end to these attacks in sight, and the perpetrators repeatedly agreed to cease fires and then broke them as soon as it thought it had an advantage, how would you expect your country to respond?
Lie 14. Gaza was occupied by the Israelis prior to the October 7th. False. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, trading land for promises of peace. It forcibly uprooted thousands of its own citizens, some of whose families had lived in that part of Israel for generations. It left major infrastructure intact, including water and sewage networks, schools, hospitals, ports roads, and glasshouses. Gaza has not been “occupied” by Israel since 2005. Instead, it has been administered by Hamas, a terrorist organisation committed to the destruction of Israel and murder of Jews around the world. Hamas was (at least at first) freely elected by the people of Gaza.
Lie 15. Gaza was an “open-air prison” before the October 7th. Make up your minds! Was it a peaceful and prosperous society made up of peace-loving Arabs trying hard to build an independent society, now reduced to rubble to by Israeli attacks? Or a concentration camp Arabs were forcibly moved to and deprived of basic necessities? Which story you hear depends on what argument the terror proponents are trying today. Neither is accurate. No Arabs were forcibly relocated to Gaza. Gaza was left with industry and infrastructure to enable it to be a prosperous independent state like Monaco or Singapore. Instead, it still relies on Israel for electricity and water, much of its food, and much basic medical care. Providing these should be a top priority for any responsible government. Instead, Hamas has spent billions in aid buying weapons and constructing terrorist tunnels, while basic necessities continue to be provided by Israel, even while Israel is under attack.
Lie 16. The Gazans were suffering from an Israeli caused famine. The U.N.’s own Famine Review Committee admitted in a report that the claims about not enough food being sent into Gaza were untrue. And why on Earth is it Israel’s responsibility to provide food and other basic necessities to Hamas? If someone broke into your house, murdered some of your family, and tortured and kidnapped others, would it be your responsibility to provide them with dinner?
Lie 17. Hamas is a legitimate nationalistic organisation seeking a Palestinian state. Really? Israel and the wider world community accepted Hamas at first because it was the elected government of Gaza. But Hamas is a part of the international Muslim Brotherhood terror organization, which also briefly ruled over neighbouring Egypt. Hamas is also a terror proxy of Iran, a nation which is the leading state sponsor of terrorism, and which has provided Hamas with billions in funding for weapons, training and equipment. Hamas has made no effort to implement the basic requirements of statehood. Instead, it has continued to attempt to do exactly what its charter says is its purpose – to destroy Israel and murder Jews.
Lie 18. The Palestinians should have been recognised as a separate nation state. Despite there never having been an independent state called Palestine, and despite the land of Israel never in the last 3,000 years having been home to any independent state except Israel, Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly been offered their own independent state, for example in 1936, 1948, 2000, and 2008. In every instance they have refused and responded with violence. Despite having administered the West Bank (actually the Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria) since 1993, and Gaza since 2005, no Palestinian Arab group has focussed on building a stable state or society.
Lie19. The Palestinian Authority is the “moderate” force among Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinian Authority uses their various cultural, educational, and media sources to undermine the peace process with Israel, uses their children’s shows and elementary schools to incite Palestinian children to kill Israelis, including women and children, produces government officials, from the President down to their diplomatic envoys, who spread anti-Semitism throughout the world, names streets, buildings, and squares after terrorists who have killed Israelis and Jews; sells and teaches Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; smuggles arms, rockets and explosives into Judea and Samaria to be used to attack Israeli cities and farms; praises, pays and otherwise honours Palestinian terrorists, and their families, who kill Israelis, Jews, and even Americans, denies Jewish history in the Middle East, and denies the Holocaust, while calling for another one. The PA is not in any way “moderate.”
20. After October 7th, now is the time to recognise the Palestinian Arab Cause and work with them. Israel, the US, and other Middle Eastern states have been consistent in their willingness to work with Palestinian leaders towards a Palestinian state, and towards lasting peace. There was a ceasefire in place on October 7th. Calling a ceasefire now, when Hezbollah and Hamas have continually broken previous ceasefire agreements and continue to fire missiles at random into Israeli schools, homes, hospitals and shopping centres, and responding to October 7th with renewed effort to negotiate the offers of peace and statehood which have been violently rejected at every previous attempt, would encourage international terrorism by rewarding Hamas for kidnapping, rape, torture and mass murder. That is not a responsible or fair way to expect any state to respond to ongoing attacks and acts of terror.
Adapted from an article at Frontpage Magazine.
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