Occupation, oppression, apartheid: the trifecta of disinformation and deceit
A brief history of Israel and Gaza exposes the fallacies of moral equivalence
The outpouring of national and international support for Israel and condemnation of Hamas has reassured Jews around the world that we still have allies committed to truth and justice. However, those expressions of compassion and solidarity have been punctuated by other voices–from Harvard Yard to Hollywood, from the halls of Congress to the counters of Starbucks–voices celebrating or sympathizing with the perpetrators of terror.
Does this contrarian minority have a case? Is there any legitimacy to the claim that Israeli occupation and apartheid justify a Palestinian uprising?
Let’s see.
WHAT IS PALESTINE?
The name Palestine was coined by the ancient Greeks and revived by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago. Always mindful that conquered peoples might attempt to reclaim their sovereignty, the Romans changed the name of Israel as a tactic of psychological warfare, intending to weaken the connection between the Jewish homeland and the Jewish people, whom they sold into slavery and scattered throughout the empire.
After the Romans, the region came under rule by the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, and finally the Ottoman Turks, whose 400-year sovereignty ended when British forces captured Jerusalem in 1917 toward the end of World War I. The League of Nations subsequently established the British Mandate to equitably divide the region between its Arab and Jewish inhabitants.
At the time, Arabs in the region considered themselves part of Southern Syria and envisioned becoming part of a Pan-Syrian empire. But that dream evaporated in 1920, when the French deposed the King Faisal of Syria. Desperate to formulate some credible claim upon the land, those same Arabs contrived the fiction of a Palestinian people who had lived in their homeland since time immemorial.
TWO STATE SOLUTION?
Their campaign was largely successful. In 1923, the British divided the mandatory territory into two parts, giving Palestinian Arabs 76% in the form of Transjordan.
(Imagine if Winston Churchill had named the new protectorate Palestine instead of Jordan how differently political history might have unfolded. But he didn’t.)
Of the remaining 24%, a little more than half was eventually voted to Israel by the United Nations in 1947, constituting about 13% of the total area. The Jews reluctantly agreed. But the Arabs rejected the plan and attacked, determined to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean.
Miraculously, a tiny enclave of Jews beat back the combined forces of the surrounding Arab armies. They continued to fight for their security and their existence in the 1956 Suez war, the 1967 Six Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1983 and 2006 Lebanon Wars, two intifada uprisings, and multiple Gaza wars.
LAND FOR PEACE?
Were the Arabs in Gaza fighting for independence? Clearly not.
In August 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza (which it had captured from Egypt in the Six Day War), giving over full control of the region to the Arab population. In that seminal moment, Gazan Arabs had an opportunity to transform their country into another Singapore or Dubai. Instead, they celebrated their independence by destroying much of the infrastructure Israel left behind. They then elected the terrorist party Hamas to run their government.
From that moment forward, Gaza became a source of constant attacks against Israeli civilians. Billions of dollars in humanitarian aid from the US and Europe was diverted from building infrastructure and promoting trade to constructing hi-tech invasion tunnels and acquiring rockets.
What other country in the world would tolerate repeated acts of terror? What choice did Israel have but to defend itself and seal off its borders? But this played into the hands of Hamas leaders, who used their own people as human shields and exploited collateral damage from Israeli retaliation to manipulate world opinion, accusing Israel of war crimes.
RIGHT OF RETURN?
Palestinian propaganda has long bewailed the approximately 600,000 Arabs who fled Israel at the outbreak of the 1948 war as deserving repatriation into Israel. But why did they abandon their homes? Affluent Arabs fled early to protect their wealth. Others fled in response to Arab leaders urging them to make way for the advancing Arab armies. The majority, it seems, fled on account of the Israeli settlers' unexpected military victories over the Arab armies; whereas the Jews had nowhere else to go, many Arabs reasoned they would be safer in Arab lands. An undetermined number were expelled in the heat of battle.
The Palestinian narrative conveniently ignores the 860,000 Jewish refugees who fled for their survival from Arab lands, who settled in Israel but never received compensation for their homes or property. If that weren’t enough, the Palestinian government and surrounding Arab nations allowed their own displaced people to languish for decades in squalid refugee camps.
As far back as 1960, King Hussein of Jordan observed that “Arab leaders have approached the Palestine problem in an irresponsible manner… they have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes. This is ridiculous and, I could say, even criminal.”
JUSTICE FOR ALL?
So what is it that Palestinian leaders want? They state their aims very clearly:
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” In other words, their declared vision of peace and justice is not peaceful coexistence; it is nothing less than the obliteration of Israel based on a fabricated historical narrative.
And what about apartheid?
How can Israel possibly be called an apartheid nation when it has had two Arab deputy Prime Ministers and an Arab Supreme Court justice? Would an apartheid state allow an Arab party into its parliament, much less include that party in its ruling coalition as the last government did? Would an apartheid state have ever permitted an Arab national soccer team captain or an Arab Miss Israel?
What’s more, Israeli Arabs experience a higher standard of living, higher literacy, better healthcare, longer life expectancy, and lower child mortality rates than Arabs in any of the surrounding countries.
So, with no legitimate basis for their claims, what is it that motivates Hamas?
One thing and one thing alone: Pure hatred.
How else can you explain inflicting such intense and prolonged suffering on their own people to perpetuate an unwinnable war? How else can you explain the horrific acts of inhumanity inflicted on civilian men, women, and children? How else can you explain dancing in the streets to celebrate mass murder? And don’t forget: they did the same thing after 9/11.
In contrast, consider the words of Golda Meir:
“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
If that’s too much to hope for, the only other option is for the international community to impose such pressure on Hamas and their Iranian supporters that they can no longer persevere in their campaign of death and violence.
Paraphrasing a different comment from Golda Meir, Binyamin Netanyahu summed up the situation neatly:
“If the Palestinians would lay down their arms, there would be no more war. If the Jews would lay down their arms, there would be no more Israel.”
So when you hear that students at Harvard, at Tufts, at Stanford, or at any other Western University condemn Israel and endorse or excuse acts of terror, when you hear that the Starbucks workers’ union defends Hamas atrocities, when you hear twisted, hate-filled words from US congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush, raise your own voice to defend reason over ideology, to promote logic over hate, to advance the hope of peace over the delusional fantasies that perpetuate man’s inhumanity to man.
By raising our voices together, we may not be able to educate the ethically impaired. But we can stem the spread of toxic misinformation and moral confusion.
If you would like to support Israeli soldiers or victims of terror, here are several options:
https://www.charidy.com/agudahrelief
