On Israel and Palestine- Complete (Parts 1-8)

Introduction:

This is a compilation of Parts 1-8 of my essay series on Israel and Palestine. (because of its length, your e-mail previewer is likely to cut this post off, and I recommend reading it on the website)

The creation of the state of Israel almost 80 years ago and the conflict between its citizens and the displaced Palestinians and surrounding countries has become one of the most polarizing geopolitical topics in popular discourse. Those with any “skin in the game,” so to speak, (eg. Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Jews) probably have very strong beliefs about which “side” is in the right, and the actual facts and events occurring on the ground are unlikely to significantly change those beliefs, myself included. Discourse about this conflict across all forms of media is rampant in an attempt to sway public opinion, with wild claims being made to justify the actions of one side or another. It’s obviously a very complex topic and I encourage anyone interested in an in-depth look at Palestine to do their own research and reading, while being very critical of what biases sources may have.

The purpose of this series of essays is to give some basic background information for those with relatively little knowledge of the conflict and its history, to help clarify some of the conflicting and opposing claims you will often hear online or in the news, and help explain why I believe the actions of the state of Israel definitively put them on the wrong side of history and merit harsh criticism.

In this essay series, we will first give some historical background on the region. One of the fundamental arguments made by both sides in the conflict is that the land belongs to them on a historical basis. It is helpful then, to have a basic overview of the broad strokes of history and what populations lived there at various points throughout history. This will be an extremely basic summary, as you could read books on each of these periods in history and still have a lot to learn.

After that, the remainder of the series will be formatted essentially as responses to frequent claims made in defense of Israel and will cover a variety of topics, including Israeli behavior in relation to the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors, the relationship between the US and Israel, and what the future may hold. 

I will include sources at the end, but, as this is not an academic treatise, the formatting will be informal and will not be embedded into the text itself.

Because the compiled document is about 33000 words, this may be a little bit long to read in a single sitting. If you would prefer, you can find the original 8 short essays here:

1. Part 1 (a history of Israel and Palestine from antiquity to 1948)- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-1/
2. Part 2 (a history of Israel and Palestine from 1948 to 1993)- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-2/
3. Part 3 (a history of Israel and Palestine from 1993 to 2026)- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-3/
4. Part 4 (addressing claims made by defenders of Israel to justify their actions against Palestinians and Arabs in general)- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-4/
5. Part 5 (continuing to address claims made by defenders of Israel to justify their actions against Palestinians and Arabs in general)- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-5/
6. Part 6 (addressing Israel's "special" status as the sole home for Judaism)- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-6/
7. Part 7 (discussing the relationship between the US and Israel)- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-7/
8. Part 8 (discussing what the future may hold)- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-8/

A (Very) Brief History of the Region

From the earliest histories until the Byzantine period:

The earliest known settled people in what is now Israel/Palestine are the people of Canaan, with evidence of their settlements going back as far as the third millennium BC. For much of this early history of the region, they were surrounded by more powerful civilizations/empires including the Ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, Hittites, and Assyrians. The limited records of this region in particular make it difficult to be certain about exact dates, but it is likely that the city-states of Canaan existed as vassals to Egypt. While it is unclear when and how this process occurred, the first Jews (Israelites as they are more commonly referred to when discussing this time period) would have emerged as a monotheistic subgroup of these Canaanites. Internal chaos in Egypt would result in the independence of these various city-states in Canaan. Biblical texts would have us believe that these aforementioned events took the form of a Jewish escape from slavery under the Egyptians, and an exodus out of Egypt, though there are no Egyptian sources to corroborate this, and it seems likely that the loss of such a large workforce would merit some mention in the Egyptian historical record. It’s more likely instead at these Canaanites were vassals of Egypt and gained political independence at some point. At any rate, by the start of the first millennium BC it is likely that there were independent political entities of Jews living in this region, the two most well-known of which are the Kingdom of Israel and Kingdom of Judah. It is likely that around this time, the Phoenician city-states were rising to prominence in what is now Lebanon, and would have had significant interactions with these Canaanites/early Jews.

Around 700 BC, these kingdoms would become vassals of the Neo-Assyrians, and then the Neo-Babylonians, and famously, Nebuchadnezzar II of the Neo-Babylonians would destroy Jerusalem and dissolve the kingdom following a Jewish revolt in 587 BC. Only a few decades later, the first Persian Empire, the Achaemenids, would conquer the Neo-Babylonians and allow the Jews to return to the region, under Achaemenid control. Alexander the Great of Macedon defeated and conquered the Achaemenids in 332 BC, but his reign lasted only 10 years and his empire fractured after his death. The region would alternately be controlled by two of the Greek successor kingdoms to Alexander: the Seleucids and Ptolemaic kingdoms. The Jews would eventually revolt and in 142 BC managed to achieve autonomy for themselves for about a century, until a Roman army, led by Pompey Magnus, conquered the region in 63 BC.

The conflicts that would follow between the Jews and Romans would become famous in Jewish history, and over the course of three Jewish-Roman Wars from 66 AD to 136 AD, the Romans would ultimately destroy Jerusalem, and massacre much of the population of Judea and the majority of surviving Jews would be scattered, leaving only a small Jewish presence in the region. Under the Roman Emperor Hadrian, the province would be renamed from Judea to Syria Palaestina, and would thereafter continue to be ruled by the Romans and their successor state the Byzantine Empire.

Christianity was steadily gaining in popularity throughout Europe and the Middle East, and by 380 AD Theodosius would make it the official religion of the Roman Empire. By the end of the 5^th century the majority of the population in the region of Palestine was Christian, with a small Jewish minority. During the 5^th and 6^th centuries, there would be multiple revolts against Roman rule by the Jews (and other local populations, such as the people of Samaria), resulting again in significant depopulation by the Romans, and significant persecution against the Jews remaining in the area.

The Muslim Conquests:

By the time of the Muslim conquests in the 7^th century, the region was still controlled by the Romans, the majority of the population was Christian, and a small minority were Jews. In 610 AD, Muhammad ibn Abdullah (PBUH) would have the first revelations of what would become Islam revealed to him. He would unite the Arab tribes of the Arabian Peninsula together, and though the Ummah would begin to fracture to varying degrees following his death, the creation of Islam and unification of the Arabs would change the course of history. Under the Prophet’s (PBUH) next three successors, these Arab tribesman who were formerly organized around small clans, roaming the desert, eking out an existence through animal husbandry, as merchants, or as raiders, would sweep across the Levant, Mesopotamia, and North Africa, topple the Persian Sassanid Empire, and conquer much of the Byzantine Empire’s holdings in West Asia and North Africa, including Palestine.

The region would remain in Muslim hands for most of history until now, though would change governorship as the Islamic governments themselves changed (eg. first the Rashidun caliphate, then the Umayyads, then the Abbasids, then the Fatimids). It was during the initial Muslim conquest that many of the laws/persecutions specifically targeting the Jews that had been put in place by the Christian Romans were lifted. During the following centuries under Islamic control, the region would gradually become majority Muslim with Arabic as the dominant language.

In the late 11^th century, Christians would be organized into a crusade to try to reclaim the “Holy lands” of Jerusalem, and would be successful. The Crusaders would then control the region (known as the kingdom of Jerusalem) for about 200 years (from approximately 1099 AD to 1291 AD). The Ayyubid Arabs, Seljuk Turks, and Mamluks of Egypt would defeat the Crusaders, and re-establish Islamic control. In 1516 AD, the Ottoman Turks would defeat the Mamluks, and gain control of the region until the end of World War 1 in 1918, when the Ottoman Empire would be carved up by the French and British, and the British would gain control of what was known as the “British Mandate of Palestine”.

The Ottoman Empire:

Because the administration of the region under the Ottoman Empire would last for 400 years and last until the modern age, I think it’s worth briefly discussing the makeup of the region and relations between the major Abrahamic faiths at the time. The Ottoman Empire was Islamic, and applied Islamic law to the region. While the majority of the population in Ottoman territories in the Middle East were Muslims (this is less true for European territories they controlled, but these areas still contained large numbers of Muslims), there were sizeable populations of Christians and, to a lesser extent, Jews living throughout the Middle East. Christians and Jews, in Islamic faith, are considered “people of the book”, and were afforded a relatively protected status in comparison to those who were not either Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. Non-Muslims had to pay a special tax (the jizya) to the government. Non-Muslims were also, to varying extents throughout the duration of the Empire, not permitted to hold governmental positions or participate as soldiers in the Army. Particularly towards the later part of Ottoman rule (ie. the 19^th century), the fact that Ottoman military engagements usually resulted in their defeat actually meant that the relative proportion of non-Muslims in the Empire was increasing (due to Muslim deaths in combat), and the non-Muslim population had a greater proportion of individuals occupying more lucrative roles as tradesmen compared to the Muslim population, resulting in an average level of wealth that was greater amongst non-Muslims during this late Ottoman period.

The Ottomans would face, at varying times, revolts from different groups living within their borders, including Christian revolts in the Balkans, Jewish revolts in Palestine, and Arab revolts throughout Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula, and the response to these revolts was usually harsh and would involve some amount of what we today consider ethnic cleansing, which is to say, displacement of these populations to weaken their ability to revolt in the future. However, on the whole, if you were not a part of the faith espoused by the government, it was better to be a subject of the Ottoman Empire than anywhere in Europe at the time, particularly if you were Jewish. For example, many Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition in the 16^th century would be given permission to move to Palestine by the Ottomans.

There is also, in modern times, perhaps, a temptation to picture the Middle East during the time of the Ottoman Empire as similar to what it is now in terms of demographic makeup, but this is definitively untrue. The Ottoman Empire was very much a multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious Empire, and there were far greater proportions of Christians and Jews living throughout the Middle East compared to the current demographic makeup of the majority of the region, including within most Arab nations and within Anatolia itself as well; many of these demographic changes occurred during the 20^th century with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire when there was mass movement of populations (think for example, of the expulsion of many Muslims living in the Balkans, and the expulsion of many Christians living in Anatolia (eg. the Armenian genocide)).

Takeaways through the Ottoman Period:

There are some key takeaways from summarizing the history of Israel/Palestine up until now. Of all the groups that currently believe the region has significance to them, the Jews were the first to occupy the region. The last time there was an independent Jewish national entity in that region was about 2000 years ago, before the Romans definitively conquered and depopulated much of the area. All of the major Abrahamic religions at one time or another controlled the region. Aside from a brief time period when the Crusaders controlled it, the region had been in Muslim hands for about 1300 years. Finally, the Ottoman Empire was a more hospitable place for Jews than any of the other European kingdoms of Christendom for much of its duration, and as we will soon see, it was this “hospitability” of the Ottomans that would allow for mass Jewish migration to the region in the late 19^th century.

For individuals who “wave away” the Arab-Jewish conflict as being impossible to solve because these groups have been fighting each other for thousands of years, I hope this summary can help reveal how lazy, baseless, and reductive this line of reasoning is.

The British Mandate and Zionism:

Before diving into the major political events of the region when it was the “British Mandate of Palestine”, it will perhaps be helpful to talk about the demographic makeup of the region during this time, as well as the concept of Zionism.

The idea that the land of Israel is special to the Jewish people is an ancient one, however it was not really used as the basis for a political movement (ie. modern Zionism) until the 19^th century. Political Zionism then, is the idea that through immigration of the global Jewish population to colonize Palestine (or, in fairness, the historical “Land of Israel”), a Jewish nation that can function as a Jewish homeland can be created. This idea arose in Europe due to significant persecution against Jews that was occurring at the time, and Jewish organizations actively promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine starting in approximately the 1880’s. It was this political idea of Zionism and the mass Jewish migration to Palestine with the explicit plan to create a Jewish homeland (that would necessarily be at the expense of the existing Arab populations within) that would form the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Prior to that point, (~1880’s), the Jews made up about 2% of the population of Palestine. Over the following decades, waves of immigration from Jews fleeing persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe would go to Palestine. Many of these immigrants moved to Palestine with Zionism as their motivation, and the early 20^th century would see the formation of multiple Jewish political groups (paramilitary/guerilla organizations is perhaps a more accurate descriptor, of which perhaps the most famous is Irgun) that explicitly aimed for the displacement of Arabs from Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state. By the time of the creation of the British Mandate, the proportion of the Jewish population had increased to be about 10%, with Arab Christians making up another 10%, and the remainder were Arab Muslims.

British Promises/Lies:

It’s worth noting that from the outset, British plans for the region were poorly thought out and contradictory. The British had promised independence to the Arabs in exchange for their support in fighting the Ottomans during World War 1. The nature of this independence is murky, but would purportedly have entailed a single Arab nation that would have included Palestine (in addition to North Africa, Iraq, the Levant, and the Arabian peninsula). In 1917, the war was looking fairly dire for the British (the Russians were on the verge of dropping out of the war, there were mutinies in the French Army, the Americans were not yet directly involved on the ground), and in exchange for Jewish support (and to be more specific, on 2 fronts: as a reward for prominent Jewish scientists helping the war effort, and to motivate the Jewish population of Palestine to fight the Ottomans) the British made the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which stated their aim to fulfill the Zionist dream of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The British would betray the Arabs of course, as rather than an independent Arab state, the region was carved up into multiple territories with arbitrary borders under British and French control.

These two competing promises would define the next 30 years. During the 1920’s and 1930’s, there would be increasing immigration of Jews to Palestine, particularly as the Nazis ramped up their persecution as they marched across Europe. The region would experience the formation and strengthening of Jewish political movements and paramilitary groups, as well as their Arab counterparts, and would see fighting occur between Jews and Arabs, as well as between each of these groups and the British.

The British during the interwar period and during World War 2, knew that they were making contradictory promises that might be impossible to fulfill. The British Prime Minister at the time, Lloyd George, and later Winston Churchill, are both quoted discussing these challenges, and I will reproduce a particularly prescient Churchill quote from 1937 here:

“the wealthy, crowded, progressive Jewish state lies in the plains, and on the sea coasts of Palestine. Around it, in the hills and the uplands, stretching far and wide into the illimitable deserts, the warlike Arabs of Syria, of Transjordania, of Arabia, backed by the armed forces of Iraq, offer the ceaseless menace of war. To maintain itself, the Jewish state must be armed to the teeth, and must bring in every able-bodied man to strengthen its army. But how long would this process be allowed to continue by the great Arab populations in Iraq and Palestine? Can it be expected that the Arabs would stand by impassively and watch the building up with Jewish world capital and resources of a Jewish army equipped with the most deadly weapons of war, until it was strong enough not to be afraid of them? And if ever the Jewish army reached that point, who can be sure that, cramped within their narrow limits, they would not plunge out into the new undeveloped lands that lie around them?”

The Creation of the State of Israel:

By the end of World War 2, Jews would make up about 30% of the population of Palestine. In the years following the end of the war, there would be essentially open conflict between the Arabs and Jews against each other and against the British. Arab and Jewish delegations were unable to reach agreement, as the Jews insisted on a state of their own that involved partitioning Palestine, and the Arabs insisted on a non-partitioned Palestine under Arab rule. The British would defer the question to the UN, and the UN would pass a resolution that would create a Jewish nation comprising about 55% of the land (though they were 30% of the population) upon the expiration of the British Mandate. When the mandate expired in 1948, it resulted in a civil war in Palestine between Arabs and Jews, as well as the invasion of Palestine by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Fighting would last about a year, during which many atrocities were committed on both sides (and though it may be ignored now, there were massacres aplenty committed by the Jews), but ultimately the Jews would come out on top. This was the Nakba, the expulsion of about 750,000 Palestinians, who would flee into neighboring countries. Many of the remaining Arabs (about 150,000) within this Israeli territory (Muslim and Christian) would be rounded up into ghettos under heavy guard before they were gradually reintegrated in the following years (these are the Arab-Israelis that Israel so likes to tout as evidence of their tolerance). Jordan would control the West Bank, and Egypt would control Gaza.

Notwithstanding the military disaster, it was a humanitarian disaster for the Arabs as well, with the displacement of ¾ of a million people. Unfortunately for them, in the wake of a Holocaust that led to 6 million Jewish deaths, and the displacement of millions of refugees throughout Europe following the end of the most vicious war in humanity’s history, there was little international sympathy or attention paid to the plight of the Palestinians at this time.

And so, due to claims of an ancestral homeland from a people two millennia dispossessed, and the crimes of Jewish persecution and massacres committed by European powers, it would fall to the Arabs of Palestine to pay the price, and the Middle East has been defined by this conflict to this day. 

The early years of the Israeli state, the early Palestinian resistance, and the Suez Crisis:

The Palestinians were now scattered, with many living in Gaza (controlled by Egypt), the West Bank (controlled by Jordan), or in other Arab countries such as Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. Following 1948, all of Israel’s Arab neighbors were hostile to them in the sense that they would not have diplomatic relations with Israel, though large-scale conflict would not occur for several years.

The next few years saw additional mass migration of Jews from around the world to Israel, due to a variety of factors: many of the Holocaust survivors did not want to continue living in the countries where they had been rounded up and persecuted, there was rising antisemitism in Arab countries (though recall that this occurred as a direct response to Zionism, as the Middle East was where Jews would previously go to flee European persecution), and there were other Jews in Europe and America that believed in Zionism and wanted to move to Israel. Within a few years of Israeli independence, immigration would double the number of Jews from 700,000 to 1,400,000.

Resistance to Israel among the Palestinians was initially fairly disorganized, with sporadic guerilla attacks occurring usually launched from Gaza or the West Bank in the years following the Nakba. Many of these attacks would target Israeli civilians, and the Israelis would launch reprisal attacks in turn. These reprisal attacks also often explicitly targeted Arab civilians, though overall these operations were fairly small-scale, with several dozen Israelis killed and several hundred Arabs killed in turn over the period of a few years. Interestingly, Arab countries (Syria, Jordan, and Egypt) trying to avoid being dragged into a large-scale conflict with Israel would use their own militaries and intelligence services to curb the activities of the Palestinian guerillas.

In 1956, large-scale conflict would break out in the form of the Suez Canal Crisis. Egypt, under the government of Nasser, had nationalized the Suez Canal. The UK and France put intense political pressure on Egypt to reverse this move, and threatened military intervention. Israel, happy to use the opportunity to weaken one of its enemies, coordinated with the UK and France and invaded Egypt. Israel was able to capture the Sinai Peninsula and the tripartite forces were able to capture important ports along Egypt and had significant military success initially. Due to both immense political pressure from the US and the Soviet Union, the UK and France were forced into a ceasefire, Israel was forced to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula, and Egypt was left in control of the canal. The final death toll was as many as 3,000 Egyptians and about 170 Israelis killed. This event was viewed as an Egyptian geopolitical victory overall, and rapidly hastened the end of Britain and France as imperial powers in the new post-WW2 order.

The Six-Day War, Yom Kippur War, and Camp David Accords:

A lack of diplomatic relations between the Arab countries and Israel continued, eventually leading to the Six-Day War of 1967. Egypt massed forces near its border with Israel, and before they invaded Israel launched a pre-emptive attack. In response, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq attacked Israel, but unsuccessfully. The conflict lasted only 6 days, and Israel was able to capture both Gaza and the Sinai from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria, and occupied these territories. This was obviously, once again a catastrophe on the part of the Arabs, and a decisive military victory for the Israelis. The final death toll was almost 1000 Israelis, about 10,000 Egyptians, 1-2,000 Syrians, and about 700 Jordanians killed. The Israelis now controlled the entirety of the British Mandate of Palestine, with the addition of the Sinai and the Golan Heights. While they did not outright annex these territories, their military occupied it and forcibly expelled another 300,000-400,000 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.

We will discuss this more later in this series, but this victory allowed for the initiation of Israel’s settlement program in both Gaza and the West Bank. Where, even though Israel had not explicitly annexed the territory, they displaced Palestinians, bulldozed their homes, drastically reduced the approval of Arab building permits, and allowed Jews to create “settlements” and move into these areas under military protection. This process would begin after 1967, but would really ramp up in the 1980’s and continues until this day (in the West Bank).

In the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Egypt and Syria led surprise attacks into Israel (technically the Sinai and the Golan Heights), and after some initial military successes, they were ultimately defeated, and there were no changes in control of territory. Some 10,000 Egyptians, 3,000 Syrians, and about 2,800 Israelis would be killed. In the following years however, Anwar Sadat would begin peace negotiations with Israel and the Camp David Accords of 1978 would result in “land for peace”, where Egypt promised peaceful relations with Israel and Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt was arguably the most powerful Arab state at the time, and these negotiations were done without input from other Arab countries and undermined the Arab unity against Israel, and for his trouble Sadat was assassinated in 1981. The Yom Kippur War was the last large-scale military conflict between the land army of an Arab state and the Israeli army, aside from some smaller-scale encounters between the Syrian army and the Israeli army in Lebanon.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization:

We must now turn our attention back to the Palestinians proper, who remained scattered throughout the Middle East, but had become significantly more organized since the early days of the Fedayeen in the 1950’s. In 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or PLO, were created in Egypt. This would be the largest umbrella organization for Palestinian guerillas in the following decades, but had multiple smaller subgroups within it (the most famous of which now is Fatah). As is the nature of such a guerilla group, many of the attacks carried out over the years would be done by smaller cells operating individually, but ultimately, the PLO as a whole would be the most important organizing force for armed Palestinian resistance throughout the Middle East for several decades, and they operated throughout the Middle East but primarily in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and eventually Tunisia. The PLO would famously, especially in their earlier years, target Israelis outside of the region (such as in Europe), and in turn, the Israelis would target them abroad as well, and these attacks, assassinations, bombings, and hijackings would prove to be a big headache for the international community and ensure there was always international attention on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was in 1969 that the PLO’s most famous member, Yasser Arafat, would become chairman of the PLO, and the great boogeyman in American and Israeli imagination for the next 25 years.

Following the Six-Day War of 1967, the PLO were primarily operating out of Jordan and launching attacks against Israeli forces within the West Bank. There were also certain factions of the PLO that were chafing under the concept of monarchical rule and calling for the overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy. Jordan, in an attempt to avoid a large-scale conflict with Israel and in response to these factions of the PLO calling for the overthrow of the government, would launch small scale skirmishes to control the PLO that escalated into a much larger conflict in September of 1970 (in what would later be known as Black September) when a PLO army from Syria invaded to support their brethren in Jordan. The Palestinians would ultimately be defeated, and the PLO would be ejected from the country and would go to Lebanon, which would then be the main PLO base of operations. In 1974, the Arab League officially designated the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people.

The Lebanese Civil War and the invasion(s) and occupation of Lebanon:

The PLO in Lebanon would continue their attacks on Israel across the southern Lebanese border. Recall that during all this time, the PLO would also carry out attacks against Israelis worldwide. These continued attacks into Israel, as well as their continued involvement in Lebanese politics would play a large role in the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. This was a very complicated war involving many factions over the next ~15 years, and would involve different Lebanese Christian factions, Lebanese Druze factions, Lebanese Sunni factions, Lebanese Shia factions, Palestinians, the Syrian military, the Israeli military, the Lebanese military, and the American military. These different factions would at various times fight each other, ally with each other, and be supported by various external powers to turn it into a proxy war. We will not focus on a detailed discussion of this conflict, and instead focus just on Israeli and PLO involvement.

The Coastal Road massacre in 1978, where the PLO hijacked a bus in Israel and killed 38 of its passengers, prompted an invasion of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River that caused the PLO to withdraw from southern Lebanon (and the Israelis killed over 1000 Lebanese civilians in the process), but the Israelis would also withdraw from Lebanon in the coming months. Though the Israelis did not stick around in southern Lebanon, they supported Christian militias in the south to prevent the Palestinians from re-establishing a presence there.

It’s worth mentioning that in the years preceding both the 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon, the Israeli Airforce was launching regular air strikes into Lebanon. While the PLO would rebuild their presence in southern Lebanon, following the 1978 invasion of Lebanon, the UNIFIL was established to monitor the border. They reported that Palestinian attacks into Israel were a very rare occurrence while IDF attacks into Lebanon were becoming increasingly frequent (involving violations of Lebanese airspace, Lebanese waters, and establishing military outposts and minefields in southern Lebanon), clearly setting the stage for another military intervention. Israel would claim that though the PLO attacks into Israel were generally minimal and did not necessarily violate the ceasefire put in place after 1978, that Palestinian attacks against Israelis abroad and launched from elsewhere besides Lebanon would constitute a ceasefire violation. The goals of an eventual invasion of Lebanon were laid out by the Israeli Minister of Defense, Ariel Sharon (clearly, a re-invasion was being planned, and only a casus belli was needed); these goals included: the destruction of PLO infrastructure in Lebanon, driving Syrian forces out of Lebanon, installing a Christian-dominated government in Lebanon, and signing a peace agreement with this new Lebanese government. Sharon had also made comments to the effect that by undermining the PLO as a political organization, it would allow Israel to annex the West Bank outright. A Palestinian splinter group would attempt to assassinate an Israeli diplomat, and Israel would use it as an excuse to reinvade Lebanon in June of 1982.

Israeli forces, backed by their Lebanese Christian militias would rapidly advance through southern Lebanon, and would besiege West Beirut, fighting predominantly against the PLO and Syrian army. This siege would last for about 2 months, and there would be about 5,000 Lebanese civilians killed by the Israelis during this battle. An agreement would be reached that would allow thousands of PLO fighters to withdraw. Many of them would be evacuated outside the country, while some would go to Northern Lebanon in Tripoli. The Syrian Army would besiege Tripoli, eventually forcing the PLO out of Lebanon. They would go to Tunisia and thereafter have their headquarters in Tunis.

As for the Israelis, they withdrew from Beirut following the siege, but still occupied all the south of Lebanon. Though the Palestinians were no longer a significant threat in the country, it would be the Lebanese themselves that would resist the occupation. In particular, the Shia of southern Lebanon, who were the poorest demographic in the country, who had felt abandoned by the government and were now at the mercy of the Israeli occupiers and Christian militias, would create Hezbollah (really a gradual unification of multiple different militias). Shia resistance was very effective. The US would briefly send a “peacekeeping force” to assist the Israeli occupation, but suicide bombs detonated by Shia fighters would kill hundreds of American soldiers and lead to the withdrawal of US forces from Lebanon. The Israelis and Shia would continue fighting, but gradually the Israelis were withdrawing from the country. By 1985, in the face of mounting losses, the Israelis had withdrawn from the Bekaa Valley, Sidon, and Tyre, and continued to occupy only a small stretch of land in southern Lebanon along the Israeli border, before completely withdrawing in 2000.

The Lebanese Civil War as a whole was a destructive conflict, and Israeli involvement added to the destruction. The Israelis were involved in killing thousands of Lebanese civilians in their invasions, with estimates of about 15,000 Lebanese deaths in the first few weeks of the 1982 invasion, and over 5,000 additional Lebanese killed in the siege of Beirut. Later that year, Israel’s Christian militia proxies would massacre at least 1,300 Palestinians and Lebanese Shia in the Sabra and Shatila camps near Beirut (with some estimates as high as 3,500). In 1993, in an attempt to destroy Hezbollah, Israel launched an intensive bombing campaign severely damaging 55 villages in southern Lebanon and killing over a hundred Lebanese. And in 1996, they launched another intensive campaign resulting in several hundred additional Lebanese deaths, including an incident where a United Nations compound where hundreds of civilians were sheltering was targeted and over a hundred of them were killed (including 55 children). The Israeli occupation was a bloody affair that caused a tremendous amount of death and destruction across Lebanon, and it was armed resistance resulting in Israeli losses that ultimately forced their withdrawal out of the country.

The First Intifada, the rise of Hamas, and the Oslo Accords:

In 1987, the First Intifada (or Uprising) began where there were widespread demonstrations by Palestinians throughout the West Bank and Gaza. These demonstrations took various forms and evolved over the following years, but included nonviolent protests, labor strikes, boycotts, and general acts of civil disobedience, but also targeted destruction of Israeli buildings (when they could be accessed) and attacks on the Israeli army and civilians (again, when they could be accessed).

Recall that since 1967, the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza were under Israeli military occupation. Life in these areas was generally difficult. Israel was promoting the spread of settlements, where Israeli colonists were provided with Israeli military protection and building permits to move into these occupied territories. In order to promote settlements, Israel demolished many Palestinian homes and agricultural land and made it very difficult for Palestinians to obtain building permits. Other factors included the fact that the Palestinians were used as a source of menial labor such that by the time of the Intifada, about 40% of Palestinians were going into Israel for work, but jobs requiring an advanced education were limited for them, such that scarcely 12% of Palestinians with college degrees were able to get work. Curfews were in place in many areas, and all of these factors contributed to a general feeling of humiliation on the part of the Palestinians.

The Israeli military response was disproportionate, as protesters were frequently met with live fire, and by the end of the 6-year conflict about 2,000 Palestinians had been killed, compared with about 200 Israelis. The simple number of casualties can’t tell the entire story however, as the Israeli tactic of collective punishment was on flagrant display here. For example, when Palestinians medics when on strike, the head of the Gaza medical association was arrested and held without trial for 6 months. This was the case for the heads of many professional societies in the occupied territories. There were also widespread arrests, teargassing, and beatings of gatherings of Palestinians whether at protests or not (for example, gatherings at mosques).

The First Intifada is also when Hamas was organized and rose to prominence as an overtly Islamist and more hardline alternative to the PLO for resistance against Israel. Its origins lie within the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, and there are individuals who have claimed, both within Palestine and within Israeli intelligence, that the formation of Hamas was encouraged by Israel as a way to undermine the PLO, though this claim is contested. Another notable Islamist group rising to prominence during this time period was Islamic Jihad.

Although the various Arab countries did not get militarily involved against Israel, they did give monetary support to the Palestinians. The leadership of the PLO, in exile in Tunisia, also did not have significant involvement in the day-to-day demonstrations. Of note, in 1988, Jordan would relinquish its claims to the West Bank (and in so doing, stripped the Palestinians of Jordanian citizenship).

 In 1992, a conference was convened with several Arab countries, the PLO, and Israel to try to reach a peace agreement to resolve the Intifada. There was very little progress made for many months, as many sticking points included not only the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but also the occupation of Lebanon and the Golan Heights. There was also significant paranoia on the part of the Arab statesmen that one of the Arab delegations would go through back channels and sign a peace with Israel without consulting the other Arab delegations and maintaining a united front (such as what Egypt did in 1978). In fact, this is precisely what happened.

Arafat would open up back channels with Israel. The woefully unprepared Palestinians without a single lawyer among them would come to an agreement with Israel’s best-educated and shrewdest negotiators. It seems as though there were several motivating factors for these negotiations: Arafat’s desperation to be able to rule over a Palestinian state after spending decades in exile fighting for a Palestinian homeland, the increasing brutality of the Israeli occupation, and the increasing power of emerging religious Palestinian groups such as Hamas that were gaining influence in Palestine at the expense of the less religious PLO. The 1993 Oslo Accords would be signed, and Arafat would get to rule his little piece of the land. In doing this however, Arafat had undermined the other Arab delegations, had not built in any recognition of the many UN resolutions in the preceding decades that demanded Israeli withdrawal from territories they had conquered in war, had officially recognized Israel as the proper owner of about 80% of Mandate Palestine, did not secure any guarantees for joint control of Jerusalem, and would not secure any rights for the displaced Palestinians to return. A sad turn of events for the “superterrorist” he had been portrayed as in the preceding decades by the Western media, who had spent those decades uncompromisingly demanding a unified Palestinian homeland with Jerusalem as its capital and where all displaced Palestinians could return.

For his trouble, Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister that signed these accords would be assassinated by a right-wing Israeli in 1995. As it turns out, this agreement was equally distasteful to right-wing Israelis (who wanted to annex the West Bank and Gaza outright) and the majority of Palestinians, who felt betrayed for the reasons I outlined previously.

The end of the Cold War, the First Gulf War, and shifting focus to Iran:

We jumped ahead a little bit with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. Though we will return our focus to the Palestinians shortly, first we need to go back to cover a few more important details about the geopolitical situation in the Middle East as it pertains to Israel.

The start of the 1990’s would see two major events fundamentally change the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East: the end of the Cold War and the First Gulf War (ie. the multinational military response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait).

Thus far, we have not said much about American support of Israel, and we will cover that in a lot more detail later. For now, it suffices to say that America provided a tremendous amount of financial, military, diplomatic, and intelligence support to Israel. There were a few reasons for this which we will briefly touch on here: many Israelis were themselves immigrants from the US, there were important voting blocs in the US that were Zionist, there is a powerful Israeli lobby that advances their interests in the US, and Israel could act as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East on behalf of the Americans.

During the 1970’s and 1980’s Iraq had rapidly militarized, and was vocally strongly against Israel, though given that they did not share a border, their militaries did not have significant contact with one another (aside from intermittent air strikes carried out by the Israelis, and intermittent missile launches by the Iraqis, primarily during the First Gulf War). However, of the Arab nations that were openly opposed to Israel, Iraq was the most powerful. By the end of the First Gulf War, their military had been shattered by the American-led counter-invasion of Kuwait. In 1994, Jordan signed a separate peace deal with Israel, making them the second Arab nation (after Egypt) to end diplomatic hostilities with Israel. This meant that during the 1990’s, the only countries in Israel’s vicinity that were actively hostile to it were Syria and Iran (the Gulf Arab nations were nominally opposed to Israel, but had never done much militarily to oppose them other than manipulating global oil supply to apply diplomatic pressure on occasion).

The end of the Cold War meant that there was now less of a reason for the US to support Israel (or at least, many Israeli political figures were concerned about this), and the weakening of Iraq meant that now Iran was a convenient scapegoat to focus attention on to maintain their own relevance. It was in the mid 1990’s that Israel began lobbying hard in the US to expand American sanctions to not only include Iraq, but also Iran as well. This was also when the narrative of the Iranian nuclear program entered mainstream discussion, to help turn Iran in the global consciousness from not just a regional threat, but a global threat that only Israel could adequately curb.

It’s in the 1990’s that we see the pieces move in to place to create a situation that is much more familiar to a reader who is more aware of the events of recent years: the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon led to the creation of Hezbollah, mass arrests of Hamas members during the First Intifada and deportation of them to occupied southern Lebanon allowed Hamas and Hezbollah to create stronger ties, Iranian support of Hezbollah (and as a result, Hamas) would give the Iranians a way to meddle in Lebanese politics and give them an ally on the Israeli border, and Iranian support for the Alawite Syrian regime would create the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance that has reframed the Arab-Israeli conflict in recent decades.

The Palestinian Authority and the Second Intifada:

Once the Oslo Accords were signed and implementation began in 1994, Arafat finally went to Palestine to rule over the little land he had been given. But it is perhaps more accurate to say that he went not as a leader, but as Israel’s policeman. The PLO morphed into the Palestinian Authority, the new government of the West Bank and Gaza. The way the Oslo Accords were structured divided the land into Zones/Areas A, B, and C, where Zone A was under exclusive Palestinian control, and Zones B and C were under Israeli control but Israel was supposed to gradually withdraw from those areas. The trap Arafat had found himself in, was that in order to meet the demands of the Israelis, he had to quell any further Palestinian resistance. However, the Oslo Accords were deeply unpopular amongst the majority of Palestinians, and Hamas continued to push for armed resistance to the Israelis. Arafat therefore, with the help of Israeli military intelligence, set himself up in the typical style of an Arab autocrat, with a robust security apparatus used to surveil, oppress, and jail his political opponents.

It would not be enough. In Zone C, which comprised 60% of the land, Israel would continue an aggressive policy of expansion of settlements, despite ostensibly agreeing to plan for withdrawal once the Palestinian Authority had achieved adequate stability. In 2000, the number of settlers had almost doubled since the signing of the Oslo Accords, increasing from about 80,000 to 150,000. By 2003, that number had increased to 400,000 (and in 2026, is estimated to be about 750,000). Whatever intentions Rabin might have had when his government signed the accords, when Netanyahu became Prime Minister after him, there was clearly no interest in abiding by the agreements. Israel would renege on every promise for withdrawal from the land it had agreed to in the Oslo Accords.

This would lead to increased resistance on the part of the Palestinians, and in turn, harsh reprisals by the Israelis. In 1998, the Wye Agreement was reached between the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis, which primarily allowed for increased CIA activity in the West Bank and Gaza to help suppress Hamas, essentially encouraging the human rights abuses being carried out by the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis. In return, the Israelis would withdraw from an additional 13% of the land of the West Bank (though, absurdly, a quarter of that needed to be kept as a nature preserve and so Palestinians would not be allowed to build there). There was no word in Wye about preventing violence by the Israeli settlers. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli foreign minister at that time, told settlers to “seize every hilltop they can in the West Bank” in response to Wye. I will quote a 1998 Amnesty International Report here, as they summarize things nicely:

“Killings of Palestinians by Israeli security services or settlers have led to suicide bombings and the deaths of Israeli civilians. These have led to waves of arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detention, torture and unfair trials. The Palestinian population have been the main victims of such violations… the Occupied Territories have become a land of barriers, mostly erected by Israeli security services, between town and town and village and village…. There is general consensus by the international community, that Israel has legalized the use of torture.”

Due to the failure of the promises of the Oslo Accords to materialize, there were high-profile talks in 2000 known as the Camp David Summit. This “peace process”, these talks conducted between Israelis and Palestinians and brokered by the Americans, were farcical. The Americans were not impartial negotiators, their diplomatic envoys were themselves Jewish (and one was a former staff member of AIPAC), and the Americans were unwilling to apply any pressure on the Israelis, preferring instead, as Clinton put it, to “let the parties themselves make the hard decisions”. While this rhetoric may sound nice, when one of these parties (ie. Israel) is the infinitely more powerful of the two, this allows them to essentially do whatever they want. At these talks, the Israelis demanded a unified Jerusalem and in return the Palestinians could have about 64% of the 22% of Palestine that was left, Arafat refused to concede all of Jerusalem to the Israelis, and so the talks went nowhere and showed the world that the Oslo Accords would not work. Ironically, Arafat’s refusal to capitulate at the Camp David Summit was likely the most popular thing he had done amongst the Palestinians.

If we have gone into a little more detail here with regards to negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians compared to the rest of these essays thus far, it’s because I am trying to reiterate that as time has gone on, the material conditions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had continued to worsen: limited economic opportunity, increasing settlements, wanton violence carried out against them by the Israeli military and settlers, farcical negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority with the Americans “mediating”, absolutely no progress made towards statehood, and the only thing that had changed since the Oslo Accords was now Arafat’s government was able to participate in the political repression of his people. The Palestinians, trapped under military occupation, in land that was increasingly being characterized by security checkpoints and curfews that made life extremely challenging, had learned that they had little to lose by fighting the Israelis, and had learned politics was no longer a viable instrument of progress.

In September of 2000, Ariel Sharon and an escort of a thousand Israeli policeman marched to the Temple Mount (around which are multiple Islamic holy sites), the response was a massive Palestinian protest. Israeli snipers would fire into the crowd, and this would kick off the Second Intifada.

This was characterized by similar actions on the part of the Palestinians as the First Intifada: widespread protests, economic boycotts, stone throwing, and armed resistance where possible. Over time, the increased prominence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad made suicide attacks (frequently targeting Israeli civilians) a regular part of the conflict. As the conflict continued, it took on the more overt character of a war. The Israeli response was harsher this time, to the extent that shelling of Palestinian towns and strafing rocket attacks by helicopters scarcely made the news. Palestinian protesters and stone throwers would be met with bullets.

This conflict would last for almost 5 years, and would see about 1,000 Israelis killed and about 3,300 Palestinians killed (a significant proportion of whom, perhaps a third, were children). Again though, it’s worth remembering that the death toll doesn’t tell the whole story. Israeli repression was harsh, and involved widespread curfews, teargassing and use of rubber bullets (as well as frequent use of live ammunition) against peaceful crowds or stone-throwers (often met with live ammunition), prolonged detainment without trial, use of collective punishment (for example, the policy of bulldozing the home of family members of suicide bombers), widespread security checkpoints and roadblocks that disrupted Palestinian life, an economic blockade of the West Bank and Gaza, use of torture against detainees, and targeted extrajudicial killings.

The Second Intifada would finally end with 2 major events: the withdrawal of the Israeli military from Gaza in 2005 (and without the military there to protect them, the withdrawal of Jewish settlements in Gaza as well) and the creation of the West Bank Wall, which was a large wall built along the West Bank’s borders. However, the vast majority (up to 85% of the length of the wall) runs inside of the West Bank, effectively dividing up many communities and leaving them stranded from each other within the West Bank. While the creation of this barrier has been criticized (primarily because of the optics of building a large concrete wall around this occupied people, and because of the way it divides up and disrupts the border communities in the name of protecting the settlers in the West Bank), this was admittedly an effective method for impairing the Palestinians’ ability to attack within Israel, and the ratio of only 3 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli seen in the Second Intifada would only ever become more lopsided in the future.

The 2006 Invasion of Lebanon:

In 2005, Rafic Hariri, the former Prime Minister of Lebanon and perhaps the country’s most prominent Sunni politician was assassinated. Recall that at this time, though the Israelis had completely withdrawn from the country, Lebanon was still occupied by Syria. Syria was, at the time, ruled by Bashar Al-Assad, a dictator from the minority Alawite sect (considered to be a subsect of Shiism) and an ally to Iran and Hezbollah. It was believed that the assassination was carried out by Hezbollah at the behest of the Syrian government, and the massive protests that erupted came to be known as the Cedar Revolution and led to the withdrawal of Syria from the country. Hezbollah came under particular scrutiny due to their role as supporters of the Syrian government and as the last armed non-governmental force left in Lebanon following the end of the civil war. Though this has never been officially admitted, (and the official reason is to negotiate the release of Lebanese citizens held in Israeli jails), likely as a distraction from their domestic unpopularity, in July of 2006 Hezbollah ambushed an Israeli patrol at the border, killed three soldiers, captured two, and killed another five soldiers during a rescue attempt.

In response, Israel launched airstrikes targeting not only Hezbollah but also infrastructure around the country, in their tried-and-true tactic of collective punishment, the justification being that it was up to the Lebanese people to stop Hezbollah and if they didn’t, they were also targets. There was overwhelming evidence of intentional targeting of civilian targets, particularly civilians on roads trying to flee the south, looking for safety. In retaliation, Hezbollah launched missile attacks at Israel, claiming to have aimed them primarily at military sites. Israel would launch a ground invasion and a naval blockade of Lebanon, but would meet stiff resistance on the ground. After about a month with no significant progress made in the deterioration of Hezbollah’s combat capabilities, a ceasefire was reached. In the last few days of the war before the ceasefire was implemented, Israel would sew the south of Lebanon with cluster bombs, killing another 83 Lebanese in the month after the ceasefire took hold. In total about 165 Israelis would be killed, 44 of them civilians, while about 1200 Lebanese (~800-1000 civilians, of which about a third were children) would be killed.

The conflicts in Gaza;

Meanwhile in Palestine, a ceasefire ending the Second Intifada had been in place since 2005. Elections were held in 2006 and Hamas gained a majority of the seats in Parliament, defeating Fatah (a faction of the PLO, which was led by Mahmoud Abbas following Arafat’s death in 2004). Hamas, designated a terror organization by the “West”, did win the elections in 2006 fairly, though more due to the Palestinians’ disgust with the Palestinian Authority and Fatah. When Hamas won the elections, though they promised to work with the Israeli officials and create a joint government with Fatah, they were immediately boycotted by the Israelis and Americans, and Israel demanded Fatah make up for their failures at the polls with military action. This led to a small civil war between Hamas and Fatah, with the end result being that in 2007, Hamas gained control of Gaza while Fatah retained control of the West Bank. Henceforth, there would now be “two Palestines”, the Palestine led by Hamas in Gaza getting financial and military support from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar, and Iran; and the Palestine led by Fatah in the West Bank which would cooperate with Israel and get financial support from the West, and generally spend more time torturing and killing its Palestinian political opponents within its borders than protesting Israeli land grabs for their “settlements”. Democracy would be of little consequence for either one of these Palestines thereafter.

Israel (and Egypt) closed its borders with Gaza and imposed a complete blockade (by land, air, and sea) after which Israel said it would only allow “humanitarian supplies” through, with Israeli officials quoted as saying their policy was to “keep Gaza’s economy on the brink of collapse”. Hamas would try to circumvent this blockade through the use of tunnels, and would generally protest the current state-of-affairs through violence: periodically firing locally-made rockets into Israel while Israel would shell and launch air strikes into Gaza in turn.

A six-month ceasefire was agreed to in 2008, and was generally observed by Hamas and led to the lowest level of violence since before the start of the Second Intifada. Israel, in what they claimed was a pre-emptive attack, broke the ceasefire when they launched an attack on a tunnel and killed several Hamas fighters. In retaliation, the rocket attacks into Israel resumed, and Israel began to launch air strikes, and later a ground invasion. The conflict ended after Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire, and after 3 weeks of fighting, somewhere between 1200-1400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed. Looking beyond the loss of life, the Israelis had destroyed hundreds of factories and businesses, and thousands of homes in Gaza. Combined with tens of thousands of displaced civilians and a continuation of the blockade, it resulted in a humanitarian crisis where virtually the entire population became dependent on international assistance for food and medical supplies.

The cease-fire would somewhat hold for several years, where there would be intermittent rocket fire from Gaza (often from other militias besides Hamas) and the Israelis would launch raids into Gaza (between 2009 and 2012, killing almost 300 Palestinians, at least 113 of whom were civilians), while the blockade continued. This eventually boiled over into another intensive campaign in 2012, where the Israelis launch an air campaign and Hamas would launch rockets, and after 8 days a ceasefire would be reached, by which time ~160 Palestinians (105 civilians) would be killed, and 6 Israelis would be killed (4 civilians). Similar scenes would be repeated in 2014 and again in 2021, and a steady-state of misery was reached: Hamas would refuse to back down and would intermittently launch rockets into Israel and try to use tunnels to circumvent the blockade, Israel would intermittently launch military raids and air strikes and continue the blockade, and meanwhile the Palestinians in Gaza were trapped under a total blockade with no economy to speak of and reliant on international aid for survival.

During this time period, there were no major conflicts with the West Bank, but a similar pattern emerged there of continued expansion of settlements, bulldozing of Palestinian homes, use of security checkpoints to disrupt the daily life of Palestinians, and interruption of economic development therein. Protests that did intermittently erupt in the West Bank would be met with disproportionate force, but Fatah succeeded in preventing additional mass uprisings during this time.

The Abraham Accords:

 Meanwhile, outside of Palestine proper, Iraq had been crippled by the American invasion in 2003 and subsequent civil war that had erupted, Syria was wracked by its own civil war starting in 2011, Jordan and Egypt continued to have diplomatic ties with Israel (with Egypt dealing with its own unrest and 2 successive changes in government, and the destruction of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 took away a key source of support for Hamas), Lebanon continued with its unstable balance of power between the Christians and Sunnis and Shia and in 2019 would experience runaway hyperinflation, and Iran continued to overtly denounce and oppose Israel. While all this was happening, the governments of the Gulf Arabs developed friendlier ties with Israel. Bahrain and the UAE signed the Abraham Accords in 2020 to normalize relations with Israel. The governments of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait also seem to have an improving relationship with Israel, though with no overt deals made due to the unpopularity of Israel among their own populace.

Current Events: (as of writing this on May 22, 2026)

I have tried to set the stage for what the Middle East looked like in 2023, and the relationship between Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza in the preceding decades, and now we can discuss the current ongoing events.

Palestine:

On October 7, 2023 Hamas and affiliated militias launched a coordinated attack on Israel, using a combination of mass rocket attacks and a ground assault from Gaza using modified vehicles and killed about 1,200 Israelis (~828 civilians and 367 soldiers) and kidnapped another 251 in the surprise attack. This was the greatest single-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust (though frankly, the ratio of civilian:soldier deaths in these attacks is perhaps more skewed towards soldiers compared to the Palestinian deaths in most of the “wars” in Gaza since 2008), and Israel responded with expected fury. Their immediate counterattack incorporated the “Hannibal Directive”, where it was acceptable to kill their own captured civilians/soldiers to prevent their capture, and it is unclear how many of their own people the Israelis killed in this way. Israel prevented any further flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, cut off the electricity to the region, and began an intensive bombing campaign. A few weeks later, a ground invasion was launched. Using a combination of ground forces and air strikes, they have steadily leveled Gaza and turned it to rubble.

The conflict has been characterized by occasional periods of ceasefires, that are then broken by the Israelis once they have sufficiently reorganized and resupplied their forces. Since October of 2025, there is ostensibly a ceasefire in place, with Hamas having released all remaining hostages, but despite this “ceasefire”, Israel regularly launches airstrikes into Gaza and continues its blockade. The majority of Gaza is under direct Israeli occupation. The Israeli response: the combination of complete blockade and resulting famine and lack of medical supplies, extensive bombing campaign, and physical occupation have led to a catastrophic loss of life, with virtually no meaningful effort made to spare civilian lives. As many as 80,000 Palestinians have been directly killed by the Israeli military, with the overwhelming majority (~80%) being civilians (and about a third of them children), and likely many more have been killed by the complete collapse of infrastructure and the economy due to sickness and famine, to say nothing of the thousands of Palestinians arrested and detained without trial. Simultaneously, in the West Bank, protests that erupted were met with lethal force, and about 1200 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank. Hamas has been severely weakened, with the majority of their senior leadership killed, thousands of their fighters killed, their tunnel networks and other infrastructure destroyed, but still they persist and the immense amount of suffering the Israelis have subjected the Palestinians to will ensure they have no shortage of recruits.

Syria:

In 2024, the 13-year Syrian Civil War would come to a dramatic end, when Islamist militias would sweep through the country and depose Assad, who (along with his father) was one of Israel’s most stubborn opponents. Israel would take advantage of the chaos, not by trying to be diplomatic with the new government that had toppled its old enemy, but instead by launching the single largest number of airstrikes in a day to destroy any remaining Syrian military resources. It would then expand out from beyond the Golan Heights (remember, Syrian territory annexed by Israel after the 1967 war) and capture additional territory in Syria as a “buffer zone” for what was ostensibly already a buffer zone (though, in fact, instead of treating the Golan as a buffer zone, they had allowed settlers into the region in the decades following their occupation). This is territory they continue to occupy until this day.

Iran:

Iran, in the preceding decades, had been empowering its proxies around Israel and working on their own missile program as a way to make up for the difference in air capabilities between the two nations. The most notable of these included Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Iraqi militias, and to some extent Hamas. They also had a key ally in Syria before the Assad regime was toppled in late 2024.

Israel would frequently launch overt attacks against Iran for many years, with airstrikes (or other methods of assassination) targeting Iranian military figures in Iran itself, in Syria, in Lebanon, and in Iraq. Israel would assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists and launch airstrikes against Iranian nuclear infrastructure. Despite, this Iran would not retaliate directly, and instead use its proxies.

Following the October 7, 2023 attacks and the invasion of Gaza, Israel drastically ramped up its airstrikes targeting Iranian military commanders. In April 2024, after a wave of Israeli strikes targeting Hezbollah, Iran retaliated by having hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles launched from Iran, the Houthis, and Iraqi organizations, though this did limited damage (however it is notable as the first time, to my knowledge, that Iran had attacked Israel directly). Israel continued its assassination campaign, resulting in a massive missile barrage from Iran to Israel in October 2024. There was continued escalation and Israel launched an extensive air campaign in June 2025 targeting Iranian military and political officials as well as nuclear scientists and infrastructure. Iran retaliated by launching missiles, and this time the US, which had up until this point primarily contributed by shooting down Iranian missiles, directly attacked Iranian nuclear sites, after which a ceasefire was reached.

The ceasefire held, and negotiations were taking place in February 2026 when the US and Israel broke the ceasefire by launching a surprise attack that took the form of extensive airstrikes. These airstrikes were aimed at the destruction of Iranian military infrastructure (including ballistic missile launchers and drone/missile fabrication), assassination of political and military figures (including the assassination of Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei), destruction of their nuclear facilities and uranium stockpile, and regime change (likely thought to be feasible due to massive protests in Iran in January 2026).

The regime was not toppled. Iran has retaliated by attacking oil producing infrastructure in neighboring Gulf countries through the use of drones and missiles, launching drones and missiles at Israel, and attacking shipping in the Strait of Hormuz to close it. Up until now, the death toll is somewhere between 4-6,000 dead Iranians (unclear how many are civilians, but on the first day of the strikes a particularly heinous American attack on a school killed about 175 Iranian schoolgirls), 15 dead American soldiers, about 50 dead Israelis (about half of whom are civilians), and anywhere from 3-11 killed in Saudia Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE. Iranian retaliation, particularly the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has seemed to be effective. Israeli and American objectives for regime change seem to have failed, and while military infrastructure was affected, since the ceasefire was implemented in April 2026, there have been reports that Iranian drone and missile production has been reconstituted much faster than expected. Due to impact on the global economy, there is tremendous international pressure to resolve this conflict. It’s unclear what the results of subsequent negotiations will be, but as of now, it appears that despite initial successes, Israeli and US geopolitical objectives will not be achieved.

Lebanon:

Shortly after the Israeli invasion of Gaza in October 2023, Hezbollah would join the conflict by launching rockets into northern Israel, resulting in the Israeli evacuation of some northern villages. The stated goal of Hezbollah was to pressure Israel into a ceasefire in Gaza by promising to stop attacks into Israel if Israel stopped attacking Gaza. Israel would retaliate with airstrikes into Lebanon.

This escalated in September of 2024, when it turned out Israeli intelligence had sourced the pagers that Hezbollah was using to coordinate communications and detonated them, killing 42 people and injuring thousands. Israel immediately followed up with a massive air campaign and assassinating Hassan Nasrallah, the long-time leader of Hezbollah. This was followed up with a ground incursion a few miles into Lebanon in October 2024, and continued air strikes. There was some resistance on the ground to the Israeli invasion, but it was clear that after the assassination of key Hezbollah leaders and the pager attacks, they were disorganized and ineffectual. A ceasefire would be reached November 2024, where Israel would agree to withdraw from Lebanon, but Hezbollah could not be active south of the Litani River. Almost 3,000 Lebanese civilians were killed during this invasion, and somewhere between 3-5,000 Hezbollah fighters.

Over the next year, Israel would fail to meet its obligations to withdraw and remained in several Lebanese villages in the south, and regularly launched airstrikes during this time, killing another ~hundred Lebanese civilians. Hezbollah for their part, did not launch any attacks during this time, though it is unclear if they truly withdrew behind the Litani. In March 2026, in response to the Israeli and American surprise attack of Iran, Hezbollah launched a handful of rockets into Israel that did no damage. Israel considered this a violation of the ceasefire (despite dozens of their own airstrikes into Lebanon since November 2024) and would renew an extensive air and ground campaign into Lebanon. Since March 2026, over 3000 Lebanese civilians have been killed by the Israelis, and about 1.2 million people have been displaced (about 20% of the country’s population) and Israel has begun to systematically destroy Lebanese towns and villages in the south. Hezbollah seems to have reorganized in the interim into much more of a guerilla organization operating in small cells, and have used drones to attack the Israeli occupation forces. This has been surprisingly effective, and the Israelis have had to drastically reduce day-time operations. It seems that Israel’s goal with this occupation and these airstrikes is to pressure the Lebanese government into disarming Hezbollah. This is unlikely to happen, for a variety of reasons, and in the meantime Hezbollah will be able to continue using drones to attack the Israeli forces, while Israel continues its practice of collective punishment of the Lebanese people.

Concluding Remarks:

So that’s it, that’s my brief summary of Israel and Palestine, I tried to hit some of the more important events in the long history of the region, and tried to provide historical context before talking about current events. Israel’s current appalling behavior towards Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon is now frequently justified by Israeli politicians (and their supporters online) by pointing out the barbarity of the October 7 attacks, but I have tried to show that history did not start on October 7, 2023.

For the rest of this series, we’re going to address specific claims that are frequently made to defend Israeli actions in relation to their Arab neighbors and the Palestinians, we’ll discuss the relationship between the US and Israel, and we’ll talk about what the future may hold. Hopefully, having this historical background will help put everything into context going forward.

The Palestinians have been given Gaza and the West Bank to govern themselves. Why isn’t that enough?

Right now, when one thinks of the land set aside for Palestine, it specifically refers to the West Bank and Gaza. Recall that these were the two areas of the British Mandate of Palestine that the Jews were unable to conquer during the war of 1948, and then later conquered this territory following the war of 1967. Though under Israeli military occupation following 1967, these areas were not outright annexed, and the Oslo Accords of 1993 were based around the idea that the Palestinians would be given the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for relinquishing claim over territory in Israel itself: “land for peace”. Since then, popular discourse around Palestine essentially revolves around the idea that Gaza and the West Bank are for the Palestinians, and the rest of the former British Mandate is for the Israelis.

There are several reasons why this current arrangement is untenable and why Palestinians would not find it acceptable (which we will discuss from the point of view prior to October 2023, a necessary condition to set for this discussion given that in the last 2.5 years Israel has turned Gaza into a wasteland and occupies 70% of it).

Gaza:

Israel, the way it currently manages its relationship with either Gaza or the West Bank, has not allowed for conditions which will permit either Gaza or the West Bank to function as an independent country. First looking at Gaza, though Israel had not maintained a direct military presence and occupation since 2005 and withdrew its settlers at that time, following the rise of Hamas to political power in 2007 (in what were without a doubt, fair democratic elections at the time), Israel implemented a comprehensive blockade of Gaza (which Egypt participates in), encompassing land, air, and sea (really, an intensification of an already-existing blockade that had been in place since the days of the First Intifada and had been gradually increasing in intensity during the Second Intifada).

This blockade has made it impossible for the economy of Gaza to develop in a meaningful way, with a marked shortage of goods resulting in near-universal poverty, job insecurity, shortage of medical supplies, and food insecurity. Though Israel claims this is necessary for their own defense and basic items like construction materials or computer parts are heavily restricted due to concern they can be diverted for military use, there are also strict restrictions in place for essential items like food and medicine. Virtually all exports are banned. Basic infrastructure such as water and electricity are controlled by the Israelis. It has also impacted Palestinian freedom of movement, as border crossings are heavily restricted and Israel and Egypt control who is permitted to leave. It is a tiny strip of land with one of the highest population densities in the world, with 2 million people in a mere 146 square miles of land. The Israelis regularly would launch air strikes or lead raids into Gaza, even between the periods of intensified conflict (2008, 2012, 2014, 2021).

Ultimately, virtually the entirety of the population of Gaza is reliant on humanitarian assistance for survival. It was frequently (and accurately) called “the largest open-air prison in the world” and this was before huge swathes of the most heavily populated urban areas were completely demolished following the 2023 Israeli invasion and occupation.

For those who might ask, "why should the Palestinians in Gaza have cause to take up arms and attack Israel, the Israelis have withdrawn their military and settlers from the area", this is nonsense. Israel remains in control of Gaza’s airspace, its waters, and its borders. It can and does cut off water and electricity and bombard the population at will.

All of which is to say, this is hardly a state of affairs that is conducive to the development of an independent nation for the Palestinians to live in, rather the Israelis have created conditions where 2 million Palestinians live in poverty, are utterly reliant on the outside world for survival, and must spend much of their time wondering how to break out of the hold their prison wardens have on them.

The West Bank:

The larger of the two Palestinian territories, with about 3 million Palestinians living within its 2173 square miles, their lot in life is perhaps less miserable than the Palestinians in Gaza, but they face their own set of challenges.

The main challenge stems from the fact that the majority of the West Bank is still overtly under Israeli control. Under the Oslo Accords of 1993, the West Bank was divided up into Areas A, B, and C. Currently, Area A makes up about 11% of the West Bank, and this is the only part that the Palestinian Authority is directly in control of. Area B makes up 28% and is under joint control, and Area C makes up 61% and is exclusively under Israeli control. Since this system was first devised, there have been various agreements that the Israelis have made to withdraw from additional territory and transfer more control to the Palestinians (with the understanding that, when these Accords were signed, the entirety of the West Bank would eventually be under Palestinian control), but universally these withdrawal deadlines are either delayed or completely ignored.

Rather than giving any sign of good faith that the Israelis are eventually planning on giving Palestinians control of the West Bank, they have aggressively promoted settlements in Area C, such that in 1993, there were about 80,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank, and today that number is estimated to be almost 10-fold higher at 750,000. The presence of these settlements, protected by the Israeli military, has been extremely disruptive. Palestinian homes are bulldozed in their thousands, agricultural land near these settlements in use by the Palestinians gets flattened for “security reasons”, and the settlers themselves frequently harass (and often kill) Palestinians living nearby with impunity and destroy Palestinian infrastructure (particularly access to water). This problem has just been escalating over time, with 2025 and 2026 (so far) marking the greatest number of settler attacks on Palestinians. The occupying Israeli military, rather than intervening to protect the Palestinians, instead protects the settlers, and Israeli courts do not hold these settlers accountable for their attacks. It seems clear that the Israeli goal here is transfer of enough Israelis into the West Bank to eventually outright annex it. In the Jordan Valley for instance (a part of the West Bank in Area C), in 1967 about 300,000 Palestinians lived there, due to demolition of their homes and being prevented from building new homes, there are now only 56,000 Palestinians living there. Meanwhile, in this same area and during the same time frame, the numbers of Jews has increased from 1,200 to 310,000. The international legal consensus is that these settlements are not only immoral, but illegal.

The Israeli excuse is that these settlements are necessary for security, that they provide an additional buffer for Israel proper. Yet the creation of these settlements, full of Israeli civilians, pose new security concerns themselves, as now these settlements need to be protected, which give the Israeli military a further excuse for bulldozing nearby Palestinian land and property, and setting up further checkpoints to divide up the land. By the creation of these settlements, they lead only to further bitterness and anger on the part of the Palestinians, surely a situation which does not lead to “improved Israeli security”.

In addition to the problem with the settlers, the West Bank has been divided by so many “security checkpoints” that movement of Palestinians within the West Bank becomes very challenging. This has played a significant role in stifling economic development there and generally makes life difficult for the Palestinians. This is in addition to the usual heavy-handed Israeli tactics of responding to any protests with disproportionate force. Violence upon Israelis stemming from the West Bank has also been minimal since the Second Intifada (Hamas was expelled from the West Bank by Fatah in 2007), so that doesn’t even serve as an excuse for Israeli behavior.

I urge any readers to look up the most recent UNOCHA map on their most recent reports on the settlements in the West Bank, to get a sense for how profoundly the Israelis have fragmented the land.

In addition to the problems with settlers and other security checkpoints, other major demands by the Palestinians include the use of East Jerusalem as the capital of the West Bank, which has by this point gone disregarded by the Israelis who now have some 300,000 Israelis living in East Jerusalem. There is also the sticking point of the right of return for the Palestinians (and their descendants) who were displaced as a result of the Nakba.

On the topic of the right-of-return, and why this is still so important to the Palestinian diaspora outside of the West Bank and Gaza, I will share a poignant story from Robert Fisk’s The Night of Power.

Many of the displaced Palestinians have kept land deeds as proof that they own the land they were driven off of, and house keys to the front doors of the homes they left behind, many thinking it would only be for a few days. Often there is something of a museum that they will set up in their home-in-exile with photos, keys, land deeds, and other artifacts from their homes they were forced to leave behind. Fisk has at various times been given keys by these Palestinians who can’t go back, and he will go to a village in Israel and try the keys, and always, the locks have been changed.

Once, he went to visit a man in the Chatila camp in Lebanon, where he was born shortly after his parents fled in 1948. He has held on to the keys from his home in Al-Khalisa, now called Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel. The man bitterly complains about the British, and specifically their Balfour Declaration of 1917: promising a Jewish homeland in Palestine that would supposedly simultaneously respect the rights of the current inhabitants. Fisk asks him what his parents should have done differently, and the man replies that they should have stayed, even if it meant that they may have died, it was the act of leaving that made them permanent exiles. Of course, slaughter at the hands of the Jewish militias is precisely what happened to many of those who stayed. Fisk ends this story with, “I leave him, with the feeling that history stretches into the future as well as the past, and with the belief that he will never return and that his little museum is a symbol of regret rather than hope. I put the useless key back into its wooden box and close the lid. So much for Balfour.”

All of this is to say that though Gaza and the West Bank are Palestinian territories, they still live utterly under the Israeli thumb, and conditions within are not conducive to the development of an independent and prosperous nation that can meet the needs of the Palestinians, and one can only conclude that this is explicitly by Israeli design.

The IDF mainly targets enemy combatants and when Palestinian civilians are killed, it’s because the Palestinian combatants are using them as human shields, so aren’t they to blame when civilians are killed?

I think the extent to which Hamas intentionally hides behind civilian structures is overblown. This is certainly the narrative used by Israel to justify air strikes that predominantly kill civilians, or targeting schools and hospitals. And of course, the disproportionate numbers of medical workers and journalists that they kill are because Hamas was disguised as them. The same arguments are used in Lebanon: Hezbollah was hiding their missiles in a school, and the double-tap airstrike used to massacre a team of aid workers is justified because these are “Hezbollah medics”. It seems to always be the same old story.

Trusting these reports provided to us by Israeli media that is fed this information by the Israeli military is a questionable affair, and I think it would be the height of gullibility to think that the Israeli military would provide accurate information; it’s more likely they will say whatever they need to in order to justify the massacre they just committed.

In perhaps the most impartial, on-the-ground, international investigation of any of the conflicts in Gaza, in 2009 Richard Goldstone (on behalf of the UN) and 3 of his investigators looked into the circumstances of hundreds of deaths of Palestinians. Goldstone would interview Israeli military and medics, as well as Hamas fighters and Palestinian civilians. He would find that while Hamas had on several occasions put civilians at risk by firing rockets close to residential housing, they had found no evidence that the combatants were mingling with the civilian population to shield themselves from attack. He also found that the Palestinian Red Crescent, in contradiction to the Israeli army’s claims, did not use ambulances to transport weapons or ammunition.

It’s also important to consider that, particularly in high density areas (of which Gaza is one of the highest density areas in the world), there is simply not a lot of opportunity to separate military infrastructure from civil infrastructure. Even in some of the ballistic missile attacks from Iran that have targeted Israel in the last few years, you can see locations that are Israeli military bases and infrastructure that get targeted that are inside of the city, surrounded by civilian structures. Somehow, the Israelis escape criticism for “hiding their military behind civilians”.

While Israel does practice “roof knocking”, or notifying the inhabitants of a building that it is being targeted by an air strike, the consistency with which these warnings are issued is not uniform, and often there is not enough time to properly evacuate. Furthermore, “roof knocking” does not justify the wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure.

Let us say, for the sake of argument that Hamas does hide military supplies inside a school for example, is Israel justified in bombing that school and killing everyone in it?  I would argue that it is not justified; the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Fourth Geneva Convention state that while it is unlawful to hide munitions or launch attacks from civilian structures, doing so does not absolve the other party from their legal obligations with respect to civilian populations and taking precautionary measures. Multiple investigations by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN have found, that Israel consistently and repeatedly displays a flagrant disregard for civilian life and property, and there is often no evidence of targets of military value near the sites of airstrikes.

The Israeli Defense Forces claim to be the most moral army in the world, is that true?

This is a claim that is often made in response to criticism of the sheer number of Palestinians killed by the Israelis every time there is a “flare-up of violence”. War is, by its nature, brutal, ugly, and savage. There is not an army that has ever existed that did not partake in, either on an individual-scale or on a large-scale, excesses of killing of civilians, torture, sexual violence, looting, and destruction of property. In the modern age, by modern sensibilities, we judge these armed forces by the extent to which these excesses occur, measures taken by the authorities to curb these excesses, and steps taken to punish those who partake in these excesses.

Is the IDF more moral than its neighbors? It’s hard to make a comparison, but they probably aren’t much worse. In recent history, the Egyptian army massacred thousands of protesters during the Arab Spring, the Syrian Army committed an untold number of war crimes while killing hundreds of thousands of their countrymen in the Syrian Civil War, the Iraqi military gassed thousands of Iraqi Kurds along with myriad other war crimes against Kuwait and Iran, and the Iranian security forces massacred thousands of their own protesters, most recently (allegedly) in January 2026. Lebanon escapes criticism in this regard primarily because they lack a central government powerful enough to really control the country, but its militias committed war crimes aplenty during the civil war (ironically, Hezbollah, designated a terror organization by much of the West, is actually rather innocent in this regard. Or at least they were until they got involved in the Syrian Civil War).

So is the IDF more moral than these militaries? Maybe. But they certainly engage in war crimes, and their government certainly does its best to shield the perpetrators from reprisal. While an exhaustive list of their crimes would lead to a tome hundreds or thousands of pages in length, I will list some examples here focusing mainly on major Israeli conflicts from 1948 until now. (meaning this will largely exclude violence perpetrated upon Palestinians during the course of the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank since 1967)

1948 War:

• Starting in March 1948, orders were explicitly given to the nascent Jewish armies for the explicit expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Arabs from vast swathes of the country, resulting in the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes.
• There were at least 24 massacres committed during this war, with several other sources reporting as many as 70 massacres, each of these could range from as few as 4 victims to as many as hundreds, with Israeli militiamen/soldiers raping Palestinian women and then executing them in multiple instances. There are many examples of lone stragglers who did not flee the oncoming Jewish militias and stayed in their villages who were summarily executed. (disturbingly enough, Benny Morris, an excellent Israeli historian responsible for finding this information in Israeli archives, would go on to defend this ethnic cleansing, saying that Israel could not exist without having committed these crimes)

From 1948 to the Suez Crisis in 1956:

• Ariel Sharon would lead several raids into Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank that would each kill dozens of Palestinian civilians.
• During the Suez Crisis, after capturing Gaza from the Egyptians, the Israeli army summarily executed about 500 Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza, Khan Younis, and Rafah in several discrete massacres.

Six Day War in 1967:

• Several instances of the Israeli army summarily executing surrendering Egyptian soldiers as well as Egyptian civilians. It is unclear how many were executed in such a manner (likely at a minimum, several hundred) but for decades thereafter mass graves would continue to be found in the desert.
• In the conquest of Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, the Israeli army displaced (ie. ethnically cleansed) an additional 300,000 Palestinians and 100,000 Syrians.

1978 Invasion of Lebanon, 1982-2000 Invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon:

• About 1,000 Lebanese civilians were killed during the 1978 invasion by the Israelis
• About 15,000 Lebanese civilians were killed by the Israeli military during the initial 1982 invasion, and an additional 5,000 during the siege of Beirut
• The IDF, occupying the area at the time and literally surrounding the camps, allowed their proxy Lebanese Christian Phalangists to enter Sabra and the Chatila refugee camps and massacred anywhere from 1,300-3,500 civilians, with multiple instances of rape and torture in addition to the wholesale slaughter. In response, Ariel Sharon was forced to resign. (but would ultimately become prime minister during the Second Intifada, so not a permanent political exile)
• In 1993, in retaliation for attacks by Hezbollah, Israel launched attacks at multiple Lebanese villages killing about 120 civilians, destroying 2,500 homes, and destroyed infrastructure that tens of thousands relied on.
• In 1996, again in retaliation for attacks by Hezbollah, Israel launched attacks at multiple Lebanese population centers, killing 154 Lebanese civilians, 106 of whom were killed while sheltering at a known UN compound that the Israelis then shelled.

First Intifada 1989-1993 and Second Intifada 2000-2005:

• Both conflicts were characterized by mistreatment of the Palestinians manifesting as: stone throwing protesters would be met with live fire, collective punishment in the form of prolonged arrest and detention, mass arrests, curfews, use of torture, destruction of Palestinian land and property (to the tune of thousands of homes), cutting off electricity, fuel, and water to villages, blocking access to medical care, and a particularly grim policy of destroying the homes of family members of any suicide bombers.

2006 Invasion of Lebanon:

• Israeli attacks killed 900 Lebanese civilians
• Civilian infrastructure including bridges, power plants, and water processing facilities were intentionally targeted and destroyed
• As the Israelis were preparing to withdraw, they dropped hundreds of thousands of bomblets from cluster munitions, about half of which would lay dormant and killed dozens of Lebanese who happened to stumble across them in the following years

Gaza Conflicts (2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021):

• Israeli invasions and bombing of Gaza have led to thousands of Palestinian civilian deaths (approximately 80 in 2006, 1,400 in 2009, 105 in 2012, 1,600 in 2014, and 256 in 2021)
• In between each of these conflicts, there would be intermittent air strikes and raids into Gaza, regularly killing Palestinian civilians.
• Almost universally, these conflicts would be characterized by disproportionate use of force by the Israelis, targeting of journalists, destruction of infrastructure in Gaza, use of human shields by the Israelis, destruction of Palestinian homes, and targeting of civilians, who made up the overwhelming majority of deaths each time the conflict intensified

That brings us to the current conflicts. It is perhaps, a little bit mind-numbing to simply read out a list of casualty figures, and it starts to get very repetitive. It may be helpful then, to identify consistent trends of the behavior of the Israeli military.

First, the backdrop of all of this violence is the occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza, and we’ve already discussed earlier in this essay the problems and challenges this poses for the Palestinians. The very first act of the Israeli military was the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the majority of Mandate Palestine, with the expulsion of ¾ of a million Palestinians and literally dozens of massacres in the process of doing so. It is a nation (and military) that was founded by committing this great crime. Since then, there is a clear dehumanization of Palestinians (and neighboring Arabs) on the part of the Israelis.

This dehumanization is what permits Israeli war crimes and the underlying principle of collective punishment and the pattern is there every time the conflict intensifies: mass curfews, mass arrests, prolonged detention, extrajudicial executions and assassinations, ignoring borders of nearby sovereign nations, use of disproportionate force (whether this is live fire on protesters, or dropping bombs on schools, hospitals, police stations, power plants, factories, sewage plants, and media centers), use of blockades and security checkpoints to disrupt Palestinian economic development, destruction of Palestinian homes, bulldozing of agricultural lands, systematic use of torture including sexual violence and rape, use of human shields, ethnic cleansing, targeting of journalists, targeting of medical personnel, ignoring ceasefires, and a flagrant disregard for international law (with the use of white phosphorus on population centers, blocking investigatory efforts by international bodies, and expansion of settlements on occupied land).

All of this, present since the founding of the state of Israel, has only intensified since October 2023. The loss of life in Gaza alone is thought to have exceeded a staggering 80,000 people with virtually the complete destruction of all infrastructure and the re-occupation now of 70% of the Strip. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that every single one of the crimes I listed in the previous paragraph is occurring in a systematic and widespread fashion in Gaza with absolutely no disciplinary measures taken against the perpetrators (and indeed, how can we expect the Israelis to discipline their own when they continue to deny any of this is happening, and encourage this behavior to begin with).

The invasion of Lebanon, invasion of Syria, and attacks on Iran have only provided additional opportunities for these Israeli war crimes to manifest in theaters outside of Gaza.

Yes war is brutal and ugly and savage, but the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is not a war. The Israelis are at this point the regional superpower, with a well-developed economy and peerless military, and limitless financial, military, and diplomatic aid from the United States; they are vastly more powerful than the Palestinians or any of their Arab neighbors. In this context, it is laughable to suggest that the Israeli government as a whole, and the Israeli military more specifically, is carrying out warfare in a particularly “moral” manner.

The Palestinians mostly target civilians in their attacks, aren’t they terrorists?

At the risk of being accused of levity, I will quote The Battle of Algiers here:

A journalist asks Ben M’Hidi (a leader of the FLN rebels against the French): “Don’t you think it’s a bit cowardly to use women’s baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?”

To which Ben M’Hidi replies: “And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes, it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.”

First of all, the resources and capabilities of the Palestinian resistance are far less than the capabilities of the Israeli military. The Palestinians have, for the most part, needed to rely on relatively inaccurate homemade weapons and explosives for many years now.

I think it’s also easy for us to think in terms of international law and how civilians are not valid targets, but keep in mind that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have not had much benefit from international law, which Israel blatantly violates with its expansion of settlements, use of collective punishment, prolonged detention, and use of torture, to name just a few examples. Thus, if the Palestinians don’t benefit from “international law” while under the thumb of a far more powerful entity that does not itself respect it, why should they be limited by it? Ultimately, the damage and harm done to Israeli civilians by Palestinians is scarcely a drop in the bucket compared to the damage and harm done to Palestinian civilians by Israelis.

It’s also worth mentioning that in the eyes of many Palestinians, understandably, there is no such thing as an innocent Israeli. In the case of virtually all Palestinians in Gaza, and the majority in the West Bank, they will never come across any Israelis/Jews except for the ones overtly participating in their repression. The “democracy” that Israel so likes to tout has lately resulted in ever more right-wing governments who treat the Palestinians increasingly harshly.

There is also the curious phenomenon of suicide bombing, used of course, by the Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War 2, and appearing for the first time in the Middle East with Shia suicide bombers in Lebanon targeting the Israeli occupation, suicide bombing has become something of a staple of Islamist tactics: used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine (usually targeting civilians), Islamists in Iraq during the American occupation and by ISIS after the American withdrawal, and used by Islamists in Syria. Robert Fisk, a British journalist, in his book The Great War for Civilization would say that in a normal society where people are treated equally and with justice, suicide is viewed as an aberration, a clear sign that there was an imbalance in that individual’s mind. The situation in Palestine has led to that society’s collective mind becoming imbalanced: when society is dispossessed, when there appears to be no solution to the injustices thrust upon it, when the enemy is all-powerful and the people are bestialized by a never-ending parade of humiliations, then minds turn to the idea of the afterlife, and the idea that by their death, they can fight back. In this context, suicide bombing is not, then, an act of “mindless terror”, but the logical product of a people who have been crushed, dispossessed, cheated, tortured, and killed in terrible numbers.

As for calling any who take up armed resistance terrorists (whether targeting civilians or not, where suicide bomber or not), this is a meaningless term, used to try to discredit those who have just and valid reasons for taking up armed resistance against their oppressors. It is predicated on the idea that the “moral” use of violence lies only with state actors (and specifically, state actors friendly to our own government), and yet the sheer amount of human suffering caused by state actors “legally” using force is immense, how silly then, to use that as the definition for a “moral” use of violence.

For an example of Israeli hypocrisy, prior to the formation of the Israeli state, Irgun, a Jewish paramilitary group, carried out many attacks against Palestinian Arabs and British authorities as guerrillas, including a bombing of a British hotel that killed almost a hundred Brits. The leader of Irgun at the time was Menachem Begin, future prime minister of Israel. Other men affiliated with Irgun assassinated a British official in Egypt, and later they would be given a state funeral in Israel. To the British, these must have been terrorists, and indeed, were labeled as such. Yet these Israeli “terrorists” would either later lead the Israeli government or be honored by the Israeli government for their actions. When Israeli settlers kill Palestinians and then don’t face any consequences in Israeli courts, when Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Muslims at a mosque, and when Palestinians gathered to access the mosque where the crime occurred and the Israeli army opened fire and killed 25 more, are these not examples of terrorism?

To name an action terrorism, or its perpetrator a terrorist, is to make the decision to not examine why such an action occurred. Fisk, in “The Great War for Civilization” puts it better than I can:

“Terrorism is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence— our violence—which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing “commentators” of the American east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks.”

Haven’t the Israelis tried to reach peace agreements with the Arabs before? It’s not their fault that negotiations fall through.

This is a common claim that is made, that the current situation is the Arab’s own fault. If only they had accepted the UN partition plan in 1948, or if only they had agreed to peace following any of the disastrous Arab-Israeli wars.

This is an argument made in bad faith, because the Israelis only negotiate in bad faith. With regards to the UN partition plan of 1948, yes the Arabs would control more of the land now (assuming the Israelis did not eventually attack and take it anyway), but the partition plan gave the majority of the land to the Jews, who made up only 30% of the population, and the vast majority of whom were Europeans who had arrived in the preceding decades.

Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians or between Israel and other Arab states were often facilitated by the US, a profoundly biased mediator that provides unlimited financial and military support for Israel. During the Clinton years as it became clear that the Oslo Accords were not going well, the entire diplomatic team of the US was made up of American Jews, and was even led by a former staff member of AIPAC. This is certainly not a show of good faith to base mediation or negotiations on. Can you imagine the Israeli response if the American diplomatic team had been composed entirely of Arab-Americans or Muslims?

The fact that Israel generally had the upper hand in terms of territorial control and military strength compared to any of the Arabs they might be negotiating with meant that unless proper pressure was applied, the Israelis had little incentive to make any concessions, and the US has historically been unwilling to apply that pressure. This also meant that Israel could appear, on the world stage, to be the more reasonable actor as they could make offers that they knew the Arabs would never agree to, and then point to the Arabs as the unreasonable party unwilling to negotiate.

The Oslo Accords, where Arafat did break away from the other Arab delegations and negotiated with the Israelis in secret, might have given the Israelis an opportunity to show that they could be trusted negotiation partners, but they have since utterly disregarded this agreement. East Jerusalem was annexed, and the Palestinian right-of-return remains off-limits to discussion. Rather than working towards an independent Palestinian state centered around the West Bank, as the Oslo Accords stipulate, Israel has instead continued direct administrative control over the majority of the land (Area C), and has aggressively expanded its settlement program, and continued to disrupt life and stifle economic growth for the Palestinians in the area. This is the reward for the Palestinians for agreeing to come to the negotiating table.

Nor is Palestine the only place where the Israelis have shown they’re not interested in abiding by negotiations. One recent example is the approval of additional settlements in the Golan Heights. This was territory conquered by the Israelis after the War of 1967, and was later annexed. This was never a part of Mandate Palestine. Now that additional territory in Syria beyond the Golan has been invaded and occupied following the fall of Assad’s government in 2024 (surely an opportunity to start off on the right foot now that one of Israel’s most stubborn enemies was out of power, but Israel had other plans), it suggests that Israel believes the military situation to be so lopsided in their favor that they can expand their territory and then consolidate the previous occupied areas with settlers and do so with impunity.

What lesson can be taken from this other than the fact that Israel is not interested in improved relations with the new government in Syria? The Golan Heights are the single biggest point of contention between the two countries, and this is telling them, in no uncertain terms, that the only way to get the Golan Heights back is through war, since negotiations have only led to further loss of Syrian land and now movement of Israeli colonists into that land. Israel certainly does not behave like a country that is interested in negotiations or peace, and America’s continued unconditional support provides them little incentive to do so.

Israel is surrounded by hostile populations. Doesn’t Israel have a right to defend itself?

This is not untrue, but it doesn’t really tell the whole story.

Israel did not get off to a great start with its neighbors, to put it mildly. The very basis for the country relied around bringing Jews (and their considerable resources) from all over the world to Palestine, and then displacing the native population, so that the land could be used as the basis for a Jewish homeland. It is eminently understandable that the Arabs would take issue with that, and because neither side wanted to compromise in negotiations in the UN, war broke out and the Arabs lost.

Since then, Israel has through a combination of American support, superior morale, military technology, and military intelligence, defeated the Arabs at virtually every encounter, and the only times Israel has meaningfully faced a military setback was briefly in the 1973 War when they came under surprise attack but ultimately prevailed, during their occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982-2000, and the 2006 invasion of Lebanon.

This string of military successes has sufficiently cowed their neighbors (or at least their neighbor’s governments; Arab populations are one and all vehemently opposed to Israel) such that Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, and the UAE normalized relations with Israel, while other Gulf countries are at least cooperating in a more clandestine manner. Iraq (aside from some Shia militias) and Syria (post-Assad) are very careful not to antagonize Israel due to their weakness (a lot of good that did the Syrians, given the massive air campaign the Israelis launched after the fall of Assad and completely unprovoked seizure of additional Syrian territory). That leaves Iran, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Palestine as the only factions currently actively participating in armed resistance against Israel.

While I personally find armed struggle against the Israelis to be entirely just, it’s also only human that the Israelis would want to neutralize those threats against themselves. But it is also necessary to do so in a proportionate manner. I would say that it is indefensible, for example, that in order to neutralize the threat of Hamas, the Israelis have tried to justify the massacre of almost 80,000 Palestinians and have turned Gaza into a wasteland. It is indefensible that, in trying to destroy Hezbollah, whose rocket attacks into Israel have killed a small handful of Israeli civilians, the Israelis have displaced over 20% of the Lebanese population, killed thousands, and destroyed large amounts of infrastructure in a country that was already in an economic crisis.

The idea of a disproportionate response is a codified and established part of Israeli doctrine. When looking at the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, the head of the Israeli army in the North was quoted as saying “What happened in the Dahiyah quarter of Beirut…will happen in every village from which Israel is fired upon… We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, there are no civilian villages, there are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”

Israel, by using its military to bulldoze any opponents, by using its military strength and unconditional support from the US to refuse to negotiate or do so in bad faith, by making living conditions deplorable for the Palestinians and killing them, is directly responsible for creating the conditions that make their neighbors hostile to them. When an Israeli airstrike wipes out half of your family or kills your spouse and your children, wouldn’t anyone devote their life to the destruction of the perpetrators of that crime?

This is likely all by design. There have been successive right-wing governments in Israel for many years now, they have significant electoral success and by ensuring that they continue to antagonize the Palestinians and their neighbors, they create enemies and conflicts that keep the population of Israel scared and feeling like they need to vote for a government that will take an ever-harsher stance.

And indeed, this concept of a “forever war”, so commonly used by governments to justify staying in power is codified into Israeli military doctrine. The expression, “mowing the grass” is used to signify the idea that Israel is never going to have peace with its neighbors (and more specifically, with the Palestinians) and their chosen way of dealing with it is to have short, targeted military operations to prevent their enemy from getting too strong, while never having to commit to a long-term solution for peace. In this manner, Israel has justified random air strikes on their neighbors to prevent nuclear weapons development (in Syria, Iraq, and Iran), for example, or carried out assassinations against their opposition (such as in Iran), or used the smallest pretext to bomb villages in southern Lebanon, but it’s primarily implemented against the Palestinians themselves. Unfortunately, it’s this military doctrine that has contributed to the persistent miserable condition of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and keeps them trapped in endless violence. (it also is perceived to have failed in Gaza after the October 7 attacks, and in Gaza Israel is now implementing a scorched earth policy instead).

So yes, Israel has a right to defend itself, but this is not an excuse to massacre civilians, and it is not an excuse to perpetuate the conditions that will only feed into more conflict, two things that Israel truly excels at.

Is what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians a genocide?

I don’t think this is a terribly helpful question. What is a genocide anyway? According to its initial codification by the UN in 1946, it means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group such as: killing members of that group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births, or forcibly transferring out their children.

Insofar as the Palestinians of Gaza are a discrete, national, ethnic and religious group separate from the Israelis attacking them, I think it would be impossible to argue that what is going on in Gaza is not a genocide. Over 80,000 Palestinians are dead, and much of the remaining population lives in tents on the cusp of starvation in a wasteland without electricity and scarcely any medical supplies or water, hemmed in on all sides by the Israeli army and with death in the skies. Hundreds of thousands of children (the ones who don’t die, anyway) will grow up with profound trauma and a lack of education and opportunity. Of course it’s a genocide.

And what if it isn’t a genocide? What if you try to make the argument that it’s not a genocide because the Palestinians of Gaza are not a discrete national, ethnic, or religious group? If the horrors ongoing in Gaza do not have the label “genocide” placed upon them, does that make it any better? Is it somehow acceptable to do this because it isn’t as bad what the Jews suffered during the Holocaust? And if it is unacceptable, “genocide” or no, why the quibbling about vocabulary?

It calls to mind Arie Caspi’s (an Israeli journalist) comment on the Israeli attack on Jenin in 2002 during the Second Intifada. Initial reports were of a massacre of hundreds of Palestinians, and it later came about that “only” 50 or so Palestinians died, after which many of the people who called it a massacre backtracked.

“Okay so there wasn’t a massacre. Israel only shot some children, brought a house crashing down on an old man, rained cement blocks on an invalid who couldn’t get out in time, used locals as a human shield against bombs, and prevented aid from getting to the sick and wounded. That’s really not a massacre, and there’s really no need for a commission of enquiry, whether run by ourselves or sent by the goyim. The insanity gripping Israel seems to have moved beyond our morals…many Israelis believe that as long as we do not practice systematic mass murder, our place in heaven is secure. Every time some Palestinian or Scandinavian fool yells “Holocaust!”, we respond in an angry huff: This is a holocaust? So a few people were killed, 200, 300, some very young, some very old. Does anyone see gas chambers or crematoria?”

At the end of the day, there will not be a solution until the Palestinians stop pursuing violence as a way to achieve their political aims.

This is the very heart of the issue, isn’t it? If the Palestinians would just accept what Israel is giving them, and be happy with that instead of choosing armed resistance, then Israel wouldn’t be forced to subject the Palestinians to overwhelming humiliation and violence and torture and rape and death.

How often have we heard “what would you do if Hamas was your neighbor and the town next to yours was launching rockets into your backyard?”, and “there won’t be peace until the Palestinians learn to love their children more than they hate us”?

But this take ignores history, it ignores the facts. It ignores the fact that only 2% of the population of Palestine was Jewish in 1880, and it was only the concerted effort of political Zionism and the persecution of European Jews by the Europeans that led to immigration to Palestine of these foreigners (ie. demonstrating that in its origins, Israel is a settler-colonial project). It ignores the fact that even by 1948, despite all of these foreign Jews coming into Palestine, they only made up 30% of the population yet were given 55% of the land of Mandate Palestine. It ignores the fact that the creation of Israel occurred concurrently with the Nakba, the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians who had been living in that land for generations beyond count, and the perpetrators of this ethnic cleansing and their immediate descendants are enjoying the fruits of this crime, while the victims and their immediate descendants still hope to return to the lands taken from them (this is not ancient history after all (unlike the 2,000 year old claim of a Jewish homeland), many of the displaced individuals are still alive, or else are only 1 or 2 generations removed from the Nakba). It ignores the fact that since 1967, Palestinians have had to live under an oppressive Israeli occupation that denies them statehood, limits their economic opportunity, destroys their houses, bulldozes their orchards, surveils them, harasses them, jails them, tortures them, rapes them, and kills them. It ignores the fact that despite “successful” negotiations and the 1993 Oslo Accords, the promise of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank has been reneged on by the Israelis, and instead an aggressive campaign for settlement expansion continues and all signs point to Israel’s eventual plan to annex the West Bank. It ignores the fact that the Israelis have left the Palestinians no avenue but armed resistance.

Injustice after injustice after injustice. The fruits of “peace” that Israel promises are predicated on ignoring a century of history that has proven only one thing: Israel has no intention of ever allowing a Palestinian state. The idea that Israel can “beat the violence out” of the Palestinians is a self-defeating one, improvement in living conditions and assurance of basic rights is what will start to convince them of an alternative to armed resistance. As it is now, can anyone blame the Palestinians that choose to fight?

Haven’t the nearby Arab countries shown they’re not interested in helping the Palestinians?

This is certainly true, and is a shameful fact. The reality is that many Arab countries have turned their back on the Palestinians.

For the most part, the Israelis have soundly defeated Arab armies every time they have fought. Each of these wars usually ends with vastly more Arab dead than Israeli dead, a failure to meet Arab objectives, and in the case of the 1967 war, loss of territory. While Arab governments may then have been unwilling to militarily confront Israel for that reason, the Palestinian guerillas would not give up their fight for their home, and would, as a result, become nuisances to the countries that hosted them. In some cases, Palestinians would be expelled wholesale from a country, examples include Jordan after Black September, Kuwait after the first Gulf War, Libya after the Oslo Accords (though interestingly, Gadaffi did this in spiteful protest of the Oslo Accords, stating that if the Palestinians now have a state of their own, it should be no problem for them to go there, and predictably they were turned away at the border, as Israel would not let them in).

In the 80 years since the Nakba, the majority of the Palestinian diaspora have largely integrated into the societies they now find themselves in, but there are also many that still live in refugee camps outside of Palestine, and those who live in the West Bank or Gaza, where opportunities for education are more limited and poverty levels are high. For countries interested primarily in taking in wealthy or highly educated immigrants, these Palestinians become just like refugees from other poor countries: undesirable.

While the populace of virtually every Arab country is still highly sympathetic towards the Palestinian cause, many of the governments of these countries (monarchies or military-based autocracies one and all) have essentially abandoned the Palestinian cause and moved towards normalization with Israel.

This argument that “not even the Arabs want Palestinians in their countries” is almost universally made by Zionists who seem to imply that this is somehow indicative that there is an inherent inferiority of the Palestinians, something wrong with them that even “their own kind don’t want them,” which is completely baseless and betrays their own racism.

Are critics of Israel accurate when calling it a settler-colonial state? An apartheid state? A Jewish ethnostate?

First, it is necessary to establish, what is settler-colonialism? It is a technique by which a group of people move into a land and either displace, kill, or assimilate the native people of that land such that the settlers come to rule over it, and is distinct from other forms of colonialism in that the native is eliminated rather than exploited. A settler-colonial state then, is when the settler-colonists have successfully eliminated the native population to an extent that they now hold political supremacy over them and have created a distinct political entity.

While there are many historical and contemporary examples of settler-colonialism, the one that will be perhaps most familiar to readers is colonization of North America, and the US in particular, where over the course of the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries, European colonists displaced and killed the vast majority of Native Americans, suppressed their culture, destroyed their environment and way of life, and set up a nation where the colonists had political primacy.

Zionism is certainly a settler-colonial project, notwithstanding the historical, 2+ millennia-old connection of Judaism to the region. Zionism explicitly involved the migration of Jews from Europe and North America (ie. settlers/colonists) to displace through force the native Arabs and create their own state in their stead. Early Zionists, perhaps before there was so much awareness in modern sensibilities about the negative connotations of colonization, explicitly described Zionist as being a colonial project. I have shared these numbers already several times, but it is worth remembering that prior to Zionism-motivated migration of Jews into Palestine beginning in the 1880’s, Jews made up 2% of the population, and by 1948 were still only 30% of the population, and there were successive waves of migration after that.

How did the British rulers of the land in the interwar period view Zionism? We can look at Winston Churchill, who said:

“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place”.

The attitude of the British government seems quite clear as they encouraged Jewish migration during the time of their Mandate. And this process of settler-colonialism is ongoing, recall that the goal of making life as miserable as it is in Gaza and the West Bank, and the expansion of settlements in the former, can only be done with the intention of further displacing or killing the Palestinians with an eye to eventually annex these territories. When one looks at the population changes in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank, since 1967, Arab populations are 1/6 of what they were, while in that same time period and in that same place the Jewish population has increased (and this is not an exaggeration) 300-fold. While the majority of Jews currently living in Israel were born there, ultimately many are descended from colonists from outside of the Middle East, and if Jews are now a majority in Israel, it came about as a combination of migration from outside of Palestine as well as the expulsion of the native Arabs.

So if Israel is a settler-colonial state, is it an apartheid state? It will again be helpful to first define Apartheid, which according to the International Criminal Court, is defined as crimes against humanity committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.

I would posit that Israel is an apartheid state, and has been since its inception. Certainly since 1967, when it gained control over Gaza and the West Bank, and while occupying these territories has deprived the people therein of the right to statehood or any of the other legal protections provided to Israeli citizens. Israeli settlers living in the West Bank for example, are subject to Israeli civil law, while Palestinians living in the same territories are subject to military law. Settlers are provided with special military protection, and have access to infrastructure that the Palestinians are not allowed to use, all this at the expense of the Palestinians who have their homes bulldozed, land seized, and movement throughout the West Bank inhibited by security checkpoints, all without meaningful legal recourse. There are multiple laws discriminating against Palestinians with regards to security, citizenship, political representation and participation, education, culture, freedom of movement, and the ability to own and develop land.

Since 1950, with the Law of Return, Jews anywhere in the world, if able to prove Jewish heritage, are provided with the right to move to Israel and become citizens, but the Palestinian Arabs displaced in 1948 are not provided with such a right. Israeli laws further discriminate against Palestinians, with the 2003 Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law that denies Palestinians Israeli citizenship even upon marrying an Israeli. The 2018 Nation-State law explicitly states that it is a Jewish nation and effectively elevates Jews above non-Jews.

The Israeli government will vehemently deny that its policies mirror those of Apartheid South Africa, but multiple human rights organizations, inside and outside of Israel (eg. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’tselem, UN Human Rights Council, the International Court of Justice), would claim otherwise, and I think the evidence speaks for itself. Ultimately, as Henry Siegman of the American Jewish Congress puts it, denying Palestinians both self-determination and Israeli citizenship amounts to a double disenfranchisement, which when based on ethnicity amounts to racism.

The Palestinians are certainly forced to live in an apartheid system, but what about Arab-Israelis, those of Arab origin with Israeli citizenship who make up about 20% of the Israeli population? Looking at those Arabs who stayed within the borders of Israel after 1948, they were conferred Israeli citizenship, but lived under strict martial law until 1966 (hence why the argument could be made for an apartheid system between 1948 and 1966 as well), and in many cases had their land confiscated. In the current day, while these Israeli Arabs have similar legal rights as Israeli Jews, they are on average poorer, less educated, and have less political representation in government, all of which points to some degree of structural discrimination. Even up until very recently, landowners could deny housing to Israeli-Arabs on the basis of their race. Just earlier this month in June 2026, Ben Gvir stated, in response to the shooting of an Israeli, that the law that specifies the death penalty for killing a Jew applies to both Palestinians and Israeli Arabs (with no mandated death penalty for the killing of an Arab by a Jew). Whether this reaches the level of apartheid specifically in regards to Israeli Arabs is unclear, particularly in the current day, but there is no escaping the fact that the Israeli government has made it clear that Israel is a nation for Jews, and therefore everyone else is necessarily a second-class citizen.

I will quote here Ronit Lentin, an Israeli-Irish writer in response to the aforementioned 2018 Nation-State Law, who I think summarizes the situation more eloquently than I can:

“It was socialist liberal Zionism that colonized Palestine, discriminated against the Palestinian owners of the land, occupied Palestinian lands in 1948 and 1967, stole their lands and properties and declared them ‘present absentees’, enacted laws that grant racially based automatic citizenship to people with a Jewish mother but not to the Palestine-born owners of the land, conducted a permanent war against the Palestinians, enforced a military regime on the Palestinians [in Israel] between 1948 and 1966, started the settlement project in the West Bank, and illegally annexed Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

Since the advent of the alt-right Israeli regime, the Gaza Strip has been under bombardment and siege, its people starved and deprived of livelihood, electricity, and drinkable water; villages of Bedouin citizens have been repeatedly demolished; and extrajudicial executions of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers go mostly unpunished. And the list goes on: night raids, administrative detention, the detention and torture of children, etc. Meanwhile Israeli Jews harken back to an imaginary past ‘democracy’, live in a consumers’ bubble and tell themselves they are the real victims, and that Israel has the right to defend its never-declared ‘borders’.”

So with everything we’ve covered so far, it would be entirely accurate to label Israel as a genocidal, settler-colonial, apartheid, ethnostate. And we are meant to believe this is the sole shining beacon of liberal democracy and Western values in the Middle East?

There is no such thing as a “Palestinian” people, as they are indistinguishable from other Arabs.

This is another common Zionist argument, that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, that they are simply Arabs, indistinguishable from other Arabs. This is meant to make us somehow believe that the land of Palestine was never really theirs. This is a dumb argument to make in defense of Israel, even if it were true.

Yes, Palestinians are Arabs, but such a categorization is vague and doesn’t tell us very much. The culture of a Moroccan Arab is very different to the culture of an Iraqi Arab which is very different to the culture of a Yemeni Arab. What unites them is the Arabic language, but otherwise their history and how this has shaped the culture is vastly different across the Middle East.

So is there a distinct Palestinian identity? Prior to 1948, (and maybe it would be more accurate to say prior to the beginning of Zionist-motivated migrations in the 1880’s) perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there was a shared Levantine Arab cultural identity corresponding to Arabs living in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria (recall that these national borders were artificial lines drawn by the British and French after World War 1, and not corresponding to real divisions amongst actual communities that were present).

But in response to Zionism, which was looking to create a nation at the expense of those Arabs living within those borders of the Mandate, and certainly after 1948, there has been much more of a sense of Palestinian identity corresponding to those Arabs expelled from their lands by the Jews, and it is that exile that has helped set them apart from other existing Arab communities.

Let us suppose that the Palestinians are culturally indistinguishable from other Arabs. Does this change the fact that hundreds of thousands of Arabs were living in lands called Palestine (and thus, Palestinian), for generations beyond counting? No, of course not. Does this change the fact that when these Arabs were expelled from these lands by the Jewish colonists, many of these Arabs feel a strong sense of connection to that land, a kinship with those who were similarly displaced, and a strong desire to return? Also no.

If Jewish immigrants/settlers from Europe and North America are currently colonizing Palestine, didn’t the Arabs colonize the land first?

This is a valid question, but it isn’t really the same thing.

It is true that the Arabs conquered the Middle East in the 7^th century, and where before Greek and Aramaic were the dominant languages and Christianity was the dominant religion, now Arabic is the dominant language and Islam is the dominant religion. However, even though these conquests occurred rapidly, and were achieved through a combination of violence and diplomacy, the goal at the time of the conquests was not to spread their language and religion, but rather to rule over the conquered lands and collect taxes and tribute. Early Umayyad rulers even had policies in place to keep Arabs and non-Arabs separate and generally discouraged the conversion of non-Arabs to Islam, partially to continue collecting taxes but also not to threaten the Arabs’ favored social status in the conquered territories at the time.

So it certainly isn’t the case that Arabs enforced Islam or forced people to learn Arabic. Of course, any society that is conquered and has a new social hierarchy imposed will experience social pressures that encourage adoption of the culture of the elites. Ultimately, the conversion to Islam and adoption of Arabic took hundreds of years and occurred gradually, and it was at least 400 years before Islam become the religion of the majority in the Middle East.

This is different from a settler-colonial process where the goal is explicitly replacing one group with another. Look at the example of the colonization of North America, where European colonists forced natives onto reservations and otherwise replaced them entirely across the country. They weren’t trying to tax the natives, they were trying to get rid of them. When the Arabs conquered the Middle East, they left the societies they ruled over intact, and those societies gradually transformed over the course of hundreds of years. The time scales of the process of settler-colonialism, and the nature of the demographic change, are therefore very different from what occurred in the Arab conquests.

While the Arabs did create an empire where they were the ruling elite and extracted wealth from subjects who were considered part of a lower social class, and occupied those territories with their armies, this is just regular imperialism seen throughout all of human history over and over again, and is different from the settler-colonialism that afflicted the New World, and afflicts Palestine now.

Jews have been persecuted throughout history, don’t they need a country of their own where they can be safe?

It is undeniable that Jews have faced significant abuse and persecution throughout history. I’m no scholar of Jewish history, but they are one of the oldest, if not the oldest, extant monotheistic religions, and since their defeat and the scattering of their populations at the hands of the Romans at the start of the first millennium AD, they have lived primarily as relatively insular minorities in whatever society they find themselves in. The most well-known and horrible abuse the Jews experienced was of course the Holocaust, that genocide in the 1930s and 1940s at the hands of Nazi Germany wherein some 11 million “undesirables” in Europe such as Jews, the Roma, Soviet and Polish prisoners-of-war, the intellectually disabled or otherwise malformed, political dissidents, homosexuals, and Slavs (among others) were rounded up and systematically killed; of these 11 million dead, 6 million were Jews. Zionism predates the Holocaust, and largely came about as response to pogroms in Eastern Europe in the late 19^th century.

It’s helpful to put this into its correct context, the preceding centuries had been characterized by empires that encompassed within them multiple different ethnic groups, cultures, languages, and religions that were ruled by one sovereign. In the 19^th and into the 20^th century, as these empires began to fragment, and groups of people who were looking to break away from these empires, the most common organizing principle around these new nation-states is that they should be based around people with a common shared ethnicity, culture, language, and religion. Zionism then, particularly in the face of so much persecution, is a natural idea to have come about when it did. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of a nation where Jews can feel safe.

Where the problem lies, is that in order to create this state, 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from land they had lived in for untold generations and this displacement primarily occurred as a result of mass migration of foreign Jews to Palestine. This nation will not allow those displaced people or their descendants to return, and the 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are kept in a state of limbo and subject to all of the abuses and humiliations we’ve already discussed in some detail in these essays thus far. And when these Palestinians, who have been shown that they are unable to change their situation through peaceful or legal means, choose armed resistance, this Jewish nation uses it as an excuse to further intensify the “abuses”, which in turn only further galvanizes the Palestinians.

First of all, and this is manifestly obvious but it is worth making it explicit, the Holocaust was not carried out by the Arabs. The Eastern European pogroms that political Zionism gained traction as a result of were not carried out by the Arabs. In fact, it was the lack of persecution against Jews in the Ottoman Empire that made it an attractive place to immigrate to. Why then, was it Arabs who were massacred, driven from their lands, and had their homes destroyed as a result of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust? Jerusalem is a holy place for Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and members of all three Abrahamic faiths have historical precedence for claiming a connection to the land.

It seems fairly obvious to me that somewhere else would have been a more sensible choice for the Jewish homeland, and if it required displacement of people, perhaps the very people who had persecuted and massacred the Jews should have been the ones to pay the price. But what’s done is done, that’s not what happened, but how silly now that European countries whose Jewish populations were massacred in the Holocaust, now, perhaps out of guilt, will blindly support Israel, violently attack people who protest against Israel, and outlaw criticism of Israel as antisemitic, of course at the expense of the Arabs. 

Defenders of Israel will say that they are surrounded by antisemitic neighbors. That, in fact, about half of the Jews in Israel actually originate in the Middle East and Africa (a claim also used to defend against accusations that Israel is an American/European settler-colonial project) because of the antisemitism they faced in their home countries. I would argue that it is Zionism itself, and the appalling behavior of Israel towards the Palestinians, as well as the humiliation that the Arabs are subordinate to Israeli military power, that has created antisemitism where none previously existed. And there is admittedly certainly antisemitism now throughout the Arab world. Where before 1917 the targeting of Jews in the Middle East was a rarity, since then there have unfortunately been multiple instances of persecution of Jews: the Aden riots in 1917 where about 80 Jews were killed, the Farhud Pogrom in Iraq in 1941 killed about 150 Jews, the 1945 Tripoli pogrom killed 140 Jews, the 1947 Aleppo pogrom killed about 70 Jews. The Arabs have done themselves no favors with this persecution.

I will quote here Eva Stern, an American secretary at a law firm interviewed by Robert Fisk who is a descendant of survivors of the Holocaust, and whose articles criticizing the Israeli punitive military operations in southern Lebanon in 1996 were suppressed by American newspapers.

“My parents are still alive and know my feelings about Israeli atrocities. They are sort of ambivalent about it. They believe I’m right in condemning it. But because of what they went through, they believe all the world is antisemitic. So when there’s a terrorist attack against the Israelis, they are unable to see it in the context of the Arab-Israeli dispute. I strongly condemn any terrorist attack. But my parents see it in terms of ‘the Arabs are antisemitic and that’s why there’s a terrorist attack.’ I refuse to condemn my parents for these feelings. They see all Germans, for example, as Nazis, because in their experience, they only met Nazis. And for most Palestinians, the only Jews they know of are the oppressors. The Palestinians in the refugee camps…probably never met a decent, moral Jew.”

What is, for me, a particularly sad example: there was a vibrant Jewish quarter in Beirut that had been around for centuries. After the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, killing of 15,000 Lebanese civilians, and occupation of the south of the country, Jews that had roots in the city stretching back centuries were targeted by the local Arabs and virtually the entire Jewish population of the city fled the country. This persecution of the Lebanese Jews was unequivocally wrong, but it was also precipitated by Israeli military aggression. If it is not excusable, it is perhaps understandable.

Israel has continued to portray itself to the international community as the underdog. The lone bastion of liberal rights and democracy that is the last safe haven for Jews, an aegis without which the Jews would be exterminated, an island of Western values in a sea of antisemitic Arabs who hate the West and democracy. A group of people who is above criticism because of their experience with the Holocaust.

The reality of course, is that Israel is the regional superpower. It has the strongest and most diverse economy, the most powerful and technologically advanced military that possesses hundreds of nuclear warheads, the countries and forces surrounding it cannot pose a credible existential threat to it, and it receives virtually unlimited financial, military, and diplomatic support from the world’s most powerful country. Any internal policy or military campaign that it undertakes, it does so from a position of overwhelming superiority in strength. That brings with it a responsibility to be judicious in the use of that force, but that portrayal of themselves as the real victims is a way to try to unburden themselves of that responsibility. In response to the 2008 Gaza War, Fintan O’Toole, an Irish reporter, said:

“At what stage [does] the mandate of victimhood expire? At what point does the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews cease to excuse the state of Israel from the demands of international law and of common humanity? At the point, surely, when that special pleading dishonours the memory of the Holocaust itself…Hamas’ campaign of rocket-firing indiscriminately into Israeli towns was a terrorist crime, but Israel’s response to this terrorism is not merely criminal in exactly the same sense. It adds a further dimension of depravity by playing a game of revenge in which one Israeli life is worth at least twenty Palestinian lives.”

That historical trauma of the Holocaust goes one step further than portraying themselves as victims however. It has seemingly become a useful tool for the dehumanization of the Palestinians, by portraying the Arabs as inheritors, or else a continuation, of the Nazi doctrine of Jewish extermination. Menachem Begin, as the Israeli army marched to Beirut, would write to Ronald Regan and say that he felt like he was marching to Berlin to depose Hitler. When Haj Amin Al-Husseini would go to Germany during the second World War to try to get help against the British (and to prevent Jewish migration to Palestine), this has somehow been twisted by the Israelis to mean that Palestinians must be pro-Nazi, though this ignores that Haj Amin was scarcely able to recruit 130 Arab volunteers to fight for Germany, while 9,000 Palestinian Arabs fought for the British. This did not stop Netanyahu from making the absurd claim in 2015 that Hitler wasn’t originally going to kill Jews, but got the idea from Haj Amin to kill them instead so they wouldn’t go to Palestine.

Equating the Palestinians with Nazis is a useful tactic for the Israelis. Because if their enemies are Nazis, how could their lives or property or rights be worth anything? Avigdor Lieberman, former Minister of Defense for Israel, was quoted as saying that “There are no innocent people in Gaza.” This dehumanization of the Palestinians, manifested in so many of the myriad humiliations the Palestinians must endure under occupation, has made their lives worthless in the eyes of their occupiers. Richard Goldstone, of the 2009 “Goldstone Report”, the UN fact-finding mission in response to the 2008 Gaza War is quoted as saying.

“If things happen to people whom you don’t consider your equals, it’s easier to swallow. And this is why the dehumanization process, certainly from what I’ve learned, is an absolute sine qua non of any genocide. You have to reduce the victim to a level that’s below you. Otherwise it’s not going to work”.

Is it antisemitic to criticize Israel?

This is certainly the most common defense invoked by Israel and its proponents in the sphere of public discussion. If you criticize an action taken by the Israeli government, it’s because you must hate Jews. If you criticize Israel for its systematic and deliberate abuse of human rights, you are antisemitic, racist, pro-terrorist, a Nazi, and evil. This is, of course, a ridiculous claim meant to steer the discussion away from the abuses committed by Israel in the name of Zionism, in effect, “weaponizing” antisemitism.

First of all, from other Arabs, I will often hear the defense “How can we be antisemitic, we’re semites too!”. This is a silly argument based in semantics, because while it may be true, antisemitic here is being used to refer specifically to racism against Jews, and this is simply not a helpful defense.

This “weaponized antisemitism” is a defense tactic that has been used by Zionists even before the creation of the state of Israel, however we will defer specific examples to the next section, where we discuss American support for Israel.

To be against the actions of Israel, and to be against the political idea of Zionism, does not mean that one is against Jews specifically, and the insistence on the part of the Israelis to try to conflate Zionism with Judaism is by design and is very deliberate. The Anti-Defamation League, in the 1970’s, explicitly wrote about the idea of “The New Anti-Semitism”, where they portrayed anti-Zionism as simply an evolution of antisemitism, and equating the two as being one and the same.

This is a dangerous game to play though. If people come to be disgusted by Zionism when they see all the evidence of decades of systematic human rights abuses against the Palestinians, and these same Zionists insist, over and over again, that to hate Zionism is to hate the Jews, that they are one and the same, they may just succeed in convincing people that they are antisemitic.

Does Israel really have a disproportionate amount of influence in the US? Has the US really done so much in terms of financial, military, and diplomatic support for Israel?

I have stated it several times thus far in this series, but the US provides Israel with essentially unlimited financial military, and diplomatic support, such that it would be fair to say that Israel is only able to behave in the militarily cavalier way that it does now, because of this support.

Virtually the last time the United States had a foreign policy at odds with Israel, is when Eisenhower pressured the Israelis off of Egyptian land in the Suez Crisis. Since the Kennedy administration in the 1960’s, American foreign policy in the Middle East has essentially revolved around unconditional support for Israel. There are several reasons for this.

First, politicians in the US can find their careers in jeopardy if they do not support Israel; we will give some examples later. There is a decent proportion of the voter base in the US that are Zionists themselves, for example right-wing fundamentalist Christian Zionists, American Jews who are pro-Israel, and Israeli-American dual citizens (there are almost 200,000 of these inside the US, and about 300,000 in Israel). There is a powerful lobby (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC) in the United States that helps fund the campaigns of politicians who are pro-Israel, and will fund the opponents of those that are not pro-Israel. During the Cold War, Israel acted as a useful bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East. Israel provides useful intelligence to the US for the region, a region the US has significant geopolitical interest in due to oil and trade routes. Finally, the sheer number of conflicts Israel involves itself in means that American military equipment sees a lot of use, and Israel can act as a sort of testing ground for American equipment.

So how does this support for Israel manifest? One example is direct military support. Prior to October 2023, US aid accounted for a huge portion (~20%) of Israel’s defense budget. The US has recently approved direct military funding of almost $4 billion per year through 2028. There is currently an effort being pushed through the government to integrate the American and Israeli militaries so that Israel will be treated as a domestic buyer for arms sales, allowing them to circumvent congressional approval for buying military equipment. It has been formally adopted in US law since 2008 that the US government must maintain Israel’s ability to defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors, while sustaining minimal damage and casualties (essentially enshrining the idea that Israel’s military must not just have parity with its neighbors, but must be markedly superior). In addition to exchange of war materiel, there is obviously a tremendous amount of cooperation in regards to sharing intelligence, and in recent years direct military cooperation with regards to attacking Iran.

While some may say that a large proportion of this aid is in “defensive” missile systems that can’t be used to kill Palestinians, I would argue that when Israel can hide behind this missile protection and curb the effectiveness of one of the few tools the Palestinians have to resist, this just invites the Israelis to behave as they wish without fear of consequences or reprisal.

Beyond just military and financial support, Israel receives significant diplomatic support from the US. The US has used its veto power 42 times in the UN Security Council against resolutions condemning Israeli actions (more than half of all the vetoes the US has ever invoked in the UNSC). For a few recent examples, I’ll focus on the Obama administration, supposedly a time when Obama’s “hardline stance” created friction with the two countries. While the Obama administration publicly criticized Israel for West Bank settlements and made a lot of noise about “restarting the peace process”, they would go on to veto a UN resolution that would have declared Israeli settlements illegal, sell bunker buster bombs to Israel for a potential attack on Iran, and veto the Palestinian application in the UN for recognition as a state. The greatest amount of condemnation Obama could muster was to have the US abstain from a UNSC vote about a resolution that would call for an end to Israeli settlements, and this was after Trump had been voted as president-elect. Trump, and Biden in the interim between the two Trump presidencies, would not even pay lip service to curbing Israeli crimes, and have gone on to expand the amount of aid that Israel receives, capitulating to Israeli requests for war with Iran, and recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

These are just some of the more recent examples in a long history of diplomatic support that goes back now about 60 years. Even when lip service is paid to criticizing some aspect of Israeli activity, particularly expansion of the settlements in the West Bank, no concrete actions are taken by the US to apply pressure to the Israelis to curb that behavior. Virtually any time there are negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians or one of its Arab neighbors, the US will support Israel, and having support of this superpower gives the Israelis tremendous leverage such that it undermines virtually any negotiation and allows them to act in bad faith, as we’ve discussed in multiple examples in this series thus far.

We also must expound a little more on AIPAC, perhaps Israel’s greatest tool for ensuring that American governmental policy remains favorable to Israel. AIPAC came to prominence in the 1970’s, and since then has only increased in power and influence, with the stated goal of lobbying Congress on issues related to Israel. It is difficult to gauge precisely how much money is being funneled into US politics, because there are many PACs that donate to campaigns that are not directly linked to AIPAC, but are run by an AIPAC official. In addition to donating to the campaigns of pro-Israeli politicians (and identifying non-pro-Israel politicians to try to defeat), AIPAC will fly legislators out to Israel on paid vacations, match AIPAC members with members of Congress to convey their wishes, and generally focus on ensuring there is sympathy for Israel among the general public in the US by ensuring positive portrayals in the media. Their influence is such that one former congressman has said that “When key votes are cast, the question on the House floor, troublingly, is often not, ‘What is the right thing to do for the United States of America?’, but ‘How is AIPAC going to score this?’”.

To go over all the ways AIPAC has influenced American politics would require a book, and so I will instead quote here The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, an excellent book by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt:

“[AIPAC’s] success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish whose who challenge it. …AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. …The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world.”

In addition to direct lobbying by Israelis and American Jewish Zionists, Israel enjoys American support in the form of right-wing fundamentalist Protestant Christian Zionists, “Evangelicals”. Part of their belief system is that Jesus will return to the “Holy Land”, and one of the prerequisites for this is that the Jews must control the Holy Land. Those Jews who have not converted when Jesus returns will then perish in Armageddon. Ironically, this is inherently an antisemitic belief, but it has not stopped the Likud from cynically encouraging this pro-Israel stance from these churches, and opening an “International Christian Embassy” in Jerusalem. A further irony is that these American Christian Zionists do not seem particularly bothered by the ill treatment that Palestinian Christians have faced under Israeli occupation.

We haven’t even touched on bias within the media, another huge topic that I can only inadequately summarize here. One can scarcely listen to the news without seeing evidence for the media’s bias when it comes to reporting on Israel and Palestine. Whenever a Palestinian kills an Israeli, even an Israeli soldier, he is a “terrorist”, but when an Israeli civilian kills Palestinians he is a “vigilante” or “lone wolf” or “extremist”. Israelis are “killed” or “murdered” by “terrorists”, but Palestinians “died” in “clashes”. Israelis are “kidnapped”, while Palestinians are “arrested”. The IDF “confirms” information, while Palestinians make “claims”. The Israelis don’t “assassinate” people or “break ceasefires”, they launch “pre-emptive strikes” or “preventative strikes” (and always, “pinpoint” or “precision” strikes, no matter how much “collateral damage” there is). The West Bank is not “occupied” it is “disputed”. The Israeli colonies in the West Bank are “settlements” or “neighborhoods” full of “settlers”, not “colonizers” (language which I have been guilty of using as well in this series of essays, for the sake of familiarity).

I want to end this section by discussing specific examples of “weaponized antisemitism” within the US, which has had the effect of suppressing almost all mainstream political condemnation of Israel. For many of these examples, I’ll be drawing from Robert Fisk’s posthumous publication: The Night of Power, wherein he interviewed many people (including politicians) whose lives and careers were destroyed by accusations of antisemitism. (as an aside, while we will focus primarily on the US, Israeli pressure on other media organizations on countries around the world is also significant, particularly in Europe)

His first example is Dennis Bernstein, a Jewish radio host in California, who had covered the story of the Israeli attack on Jenin, in the West Bank in 2002. He read aloud the vast amounts of hate mail cursing him and wishing him death, calling him a self-hating Jew on his radio program. Bernstein, in response, would claim that a combination of Israeli lobbyists and conservative Christian fundamentalists had effectively censored discussed of Israel in the US public domain. Bernstein would go on to say, “Any US journalist, columnist, editor, college professor, student-activist, public official, or clergy member who dares to speak critically of Israel or accurately report the brutalities of its illegal occupation will be vilified as an anti-Semite.”

Adam Shapiro, a Jew married to a Palestinian, was working with an NGO when in 2002 he was trapped in a building under Israeli bombardment. When he told CNN that the Sharon government was acting like “terrorists” while receiving $3 billion a year in US aid, the New York Post called him the “Jewish Taliban”, Israeli supporters publicized his family’s address, and his parents were forced to flee their home.

Norman Finkelstein, an American-Jewish academic and the son of Holocaust survivors is an outspoken critic of Israel, for which he was refused entry into Israel, and was refused tenure at his university.

J. William Fulbright, a senator, gave testimony in 1963 regarding how charitable funds from the US were sent to Israel and then recycled back into organizations in the US to turn public opinion towards Israel. This cost him the chance to be Secretary of State, and 11 years later he would lose his primary after AIPAC funded his rival’s campaign.

Paul Findley, a congressman from Illinois, would have his 22-year career destroyed after he campaigned against AIPAC specifically.

Earl Hilliard, US representative from Alabama, made the mistake of expressing sympathy for the Palestinians, and his opponent in the primary would beat him after raising large amounts of money from supporters of Israel.

Haaretz in 2009 reported that every American appointee to the American government had to “endure a thorough background check by the American Jewish community before appointment”. This comment was made after Charles Freeman was forced to withdraw from the US National Intelligence Council after saying that “as long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected.”

When General David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2010 that “the conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel”, he was forced to backtrack after the Anti-Defamation League criticized him for his statements.

When Kenneth Roth, a Jewish legal scholar and executive director of Human Rights Watch, criticized Israel’s actions in Lebanon during the 2006 war, he was condemned as an antisemite, and media within Israel and the US would go on to say that Human Rights Watch had destroyed its credibility.

We’ve already discussed his work on several occasions in this essay series, but what we have not yet discussed is the personal fallout that the Goldstone Report had on Judge Richard Goldstone. Goldstone was a South African Jew (and avowed Zionist) who had helped make his name by investigating human rights abuses in the Balkans in the 90’s. He was selected as the leader of the UN Fact-Finding Mission for the 2008 Gaza War, and while the UN had initially instructed him to inquire about violations of international law committed by Israelis against the Palestinians, he himself insisted the mission be changed to finding violations of international law committed by both Israelis and Palestinians. Over the following months, Goldstone and his team would investigate the deaths of more than 220 people, traveling throughout Gaza and the limited areas of Israel he was able to access, interviewing hundreds of people and going through thousands of pages of documentation, videos, and photographs, to create an exhaustive 452-page report. In this report, he demonstrated no favoritism for either Hamas or Israel, and was harshly critical of the former, but would find the latter guilty of targeting civilian infrastructure, using white phosphorus shells in an unjustifiable manner, using human shields, and intentionally targeting civilians.

His report, written as it was by such an internationally renowned and eminent figure, made him “the most hated man in the Jewish world”. He was harshly criticized in American and Israeli media, called a “traitor to the Jewish people”, and “evil, evil man”. The spokesman for the Israeli prime minister said, “the report was conceived in sin and is the product of a union between propaganda and bias”. The American government called the report deeply flawed (though would not specify what these flaws were), and Hillary Clinton (Secretary of State at the time) went to great efforts to quash the findings. He was ostracized from the South African Jewish community, his daughter would stop speaking with him, and protests would even prevent him from attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah. He would have his history as a judge in apartheid South Africa brought back to discredit him. In the aftermath of PTSD from the horrors he had seen in Gaza, and now the relentless slandering he was experiencing, this broken man would meekly defer his findings in favor of Israel’s own internal investigations into its military’s activity. Norman Finkelstein summarized the situation with the following quote:

“[Israel had over thirty years refined its ideological weapons so that any critic of Israel was an anti-Semite, a self-hating Jew or a Holocaust denier] but now along comes Richard Goldstone. He’s Jewish, he’s a Zionist, he says he loves Israel, he says his mother was an activist in the Zionist women’s organization, his daughter went to live in Israel, he sits on the board of governors at the Hebrew University, and he’s also a distinguished international jurist…He wrote what he wrote because it is true.”

These are just a small handful of examples to show the profound and systematic suppression of criticism of Israel that has affected academics, journalists, and politicians, and is aimed at ensuring that American support for Israel is viewed by the American public as inevitable and the natural way of things.

I want to end this section by being clear on one thing, this is not meant to convey the idea that “the Jews are controlling America”, in fact, to some extent, it’s quite the opposite. Zionism has been a useful tool for furthering American imperial interests in the Middle East, in that the colonial entity that is Israel acts as a sort of base from which the US projects power into the Middle East.

There are so many terrible things going on in the world, why does the media spend so much time covering events in Israel when there are arguably worse events going on that get less coverage?

This is a fair point, or at least it might have been before October 2023. Why so much media attention on a conflict where, even at its worst, it might result in a few hundred or a thousand Palestinian deaths. How can that compare to other conflicts even in the last few decades?

1.5 million dead in the Iran-Iraq War. 300,000 dead in Syria. 150,000 dead in Lebanon. 150,000 dead in Algeria. Half a million Iraqi children starved to death in the 90’s. Maybe as many as a million dead Iraqis in the Iraqi Civil War. And that’s just conflicts in the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of dead Sudanese. 100,000 dead in Myanmar. Hundreds of thousands dead in the Congo, in Mali, in Niger. Half a million dead in Ukraine and Russia.

In the face of these staggering numbers, why do people care about Israel and Palestine? It’s a fair question. First of all, since October 2023, there have been about 80,000 Palestinians killed, so Israel is making a worthy effort of deserving the scrutiny and attention they receive.

But even prior to 2023, I have a few theories. The Israelis would have us believe that this attention they receive is due to antisemitism: people are looking for any excuse to make the Jews look bad. I think it’s more likely that the conflict receives extra attention because it is, in many ways, the last colonial war. Other examples of settler-colonialism throughout the world have essentially concluded that phase of their nation’s history. The US fulfilled its “Manifest Destiny”, reaching from sea to shining sea. The British replaced most of the aboriginal population of Australia and New Zealand. While many parts of the world are still confronting the legacies of their colonial histories, I can’t think of other examples where the displacement of the native population is actively happening now.

Another explanation is that Palestine captures the imagination of peoples from all 3 Abrahamic faiths, and will draw increased attention for that reason. And I think the final reason has to do with the incredible amount support Israel receives from the US. There is a big subset of the population that is simply not okay with their tax dollars going directly towards massacring or otherwise oppressing the Palestinians. In a very real sense, Americans are culpable for what is happening to Palestinians in a way that they are not for many of the other conflicts around the world today.

Israel claims to be the only democratic country in the Middle East, shouldn’t the US protect that?

I won’t belabor this point too much since we’ve talked about it previously, but Israel is an apartheid state in the way that it treats the Palestinians that it has direct control over. (and I won’t belabor the fact that the Israelis do end up having direct control over both the West Bank and Gaza, as it’s been previously discussed).

While it may offer democracy for people with Israeli citizenship, I’m not sure we can hold it up as a beacon of democracy and liberal values when a third of the population of mandate Palestine, the entirety of which is under control of the Israeli state, is kept in a stateless limbo.

Ehud Barak, when discussing the one-state solution, states that he is against it because in that scenario, Israel could choose to be Jewish, or it could choose to be democratic, but it cannot be both. This is precisely the situation being faced today, with Israeli control over all of Palestine. I have also previously quoted Henry Siegman in this series, but will repeat his quote here, this time in its entirety: “[Israel has] crossed the threshold from ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ to the only apartheid regime in the Western world…Denying Palestinians both self-determination and Israeli citizenship amounts to a ‘double disenfranchisement’, which when based on ethnicity amounts to racism, and reserving democracy for privileged citizens and keeping others ‘behind checkpoints and barbed wire fences’ is the opposite of democracy”.

Finally, it is perhaps worth asking, since when is the US motivated by the spread of democracy throughout the world? The US will at times support democratic governments and dictators, or topple democratic governments or dictators, as the geopolitical circumstances suit them. I am not convinced that there is any pattern of American action on the international stage that would allow us to consider them “defenders of democracy”.

Is there any way you can shoehorn in leftist politics before you wrap up these essays?

I won’t belabor this point too long, as I feel like it’s pretty self-explanatory how those who ascribe to leftist ideologies and philosophies are going to find a settler-colonial project reprehensible.

It is maybe worth mentioning that ironically, many early Zionists were themselves secular nationalists who believed in socialist views on labor, though this did not prevent the hypocritical reliance on settler-colonialism to establish their state. Of course now, in the last few decades, the “left” in Israeli politics has grown progressively weaker, marginalized, and irrelevant, and the governing coalitions in the Israeli government are much more right-wing and overtly religious.

For some leftist perspectives, I’ll draw from an excellent article written by Alain Alameddine published on 5/26/26. Karl Marx (that most foundational of leftists, an ethnic Jew, though an avowed atheist), in his analysis of the dynamics between capitalist and worker, reached the conclusion that the exploitation of the worker would inevitably lead to revolution. Yet, in the most industrialized societies, where this was predicted to happen more rapidly, this did not occur (and in fact happened more commonly in agrarian societies with limited industrial capacity). It was the work of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist that helped explain this contradiction.

Gramsci would posit that those in power help to propagate their exploitative system in part through cultural hegemony, where they propagate a system of values and beliefs that portrays the current reality as common sense. Once society views the reality as inescapable and the natural order of things, it accepts that system, and the masses will thereafter not even consider changing it because the current system is thought to be inevitable and natural.

Through the control of the media that we are exposed to, America’s politicians and media moguls seek to convince us that the current state of affairs in the Middle East, the oppression of the Palestinians, is the inevitable and natural order of things. We must strive to be aware of this tactic, and not let it lead us to malaise and inaction due to a sense of hopelessness.

I’ll finish by shoehorning in this quote from Karl Marx in 1875 that discusses Poland, divided as it was in the 19^th century by Russia, Austria, and Prussia, but I think you can see that if you did not know it was about Poland, it could almost letter-for-letter be about Palestine:

“First of all, of course, sympathy for a subjugated people which, with its incessant and heroic struggle against its oppressors, has proven its historic right to national autonomy and self-determination. It is not in the least a contradiction that the international workers’ party strives for the creation of the Polish nation. On the contrary, only after Poland has won its independence again, only after it is able to govern itself again as a free people, only then can its inner development begin again and can it cooperate as an independent force in the social transformation of Europe. As long as the independent life of a nation is suppressed by a foreign conqueror it inevitably directs all its strength, all its efforts, and all its energy against the external enemy; during this time, therefore, its inner life remains paralysed; it is incapable of working for social emancipation.”

What is the one-state solution? What is the two-state solution? Why hasn’t either one been implemented?

The one-state solution is, simply, the idea that all of the former British Mandate of Palestine should be a single nation, within which Arabs and Jews live together as equals. This has generally been an unpopular idea amongst Israelis because it would result in Jews no longer being a majority in Israel. If you include the ~2 million Israeli-Arabs, the ~5 million  Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and the exiled Palestinians in other countries who would want to return, the ~8 million Jews currently in Israel may find soon find themselves outnumbered. For many Israeli Jews, the Jewish character of the nation is of vital importance, and is an inherent part of the Zionist ideology. There’s also the practical matter of what will happen to the Jews who have been living in the land that Palestinians were kicked out of 80 years ago when those Palestinians want to return?

The two-state solution is ostensibly what was agreed to in the Oslo Accords of 1993. It is the idea that Israel would exist on the land the Jews captured after the 1948 War, while the West Bank and Gaza would be part of a Palestinian state. We’ve previously discussed how this has been undermined: Israel blockades Gaza and ultimately has “remote” control of its infrastructure, land, airspace, and territorial waters; while the majority of the West Bank is still directly under Israeli occupation (Zone/Area C) and Israel continues to move more settlers into the West Bank. Many on the Israeli right believe that the West Bank (or as they refer to it, Judea and Samaria) is historically supposed to be a part of Israel, and are not willing to concede it to the Palestinians (hence, why Rabin was assassinated after Oslo).  Gaza is also too small to really be a viable nation on its own, and so there would need to be some concession by Israel to connect it to the West Bank if they are to form a viable country. Of course, Gaza and the West Bank are ruled by different political parties that hate each other so that’s another thing that would need to be sorted out, even if the Israelis allowed the two separated enclaves to connect. A two-state solution also does not address the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living outside of the country who are the descendants of people driven away from territory that is currently in Israel.

So both of these possible “solutions for peace” have significant hurdles to overcome to be a reasonable solution.

What do you think are some alternate solutions?

While the one- and two-state solutions are what we most commonly hear in popular discourse (and really, nowadays only the two-state solution is discussed), there are other possibilities.

First of all, I think it’s important to establish that a just solution has to take into account the ancestral right of the Palestinians to return to land in Israel that they were driven from in 1948. This is not ancient history after all, some of those who were exiled are still alive, and if not, then their children are still alive. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that there are Israelis who are living in that land (potentially for several generations now) who may themselves have not participated in the ethnic cleansing that founded their nation, and any just solution has to take both of these factors into account. To simply say that too much time has passed, and the land belongs to Israelis now, is to ensure that this moral injustice persists, and that the exiles will continue to try to find avenues to return, by force if needed.

One possible solution, is to have Egypt annex Gaza and Jordan annex the West Bank, this was the situation that existed between 1948 and 1967. This would provide some measure of protection for the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, and the barrier for Israeli abuses is much higher if they have to invade a sovereign nation to do it. These are also Arab countries that are Muslim majority, which the Palestinians (the Muslim ones, anyway) will have a lot in common with, culturally. Of course, neither one of those countries has any interest whatsoever in annexing these territories, and we’ve discussed earlier in this series why that is the case. For Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza who were exiled from land that is currently in Palestine, there is a high likelihood that they would continue to launch attacks into Israel (as was the case from 1948 to 1967), and neither the Egyptian or Jordanian governments want to antagonize Israel. This “solution” also doesn’t account for the Palestinian right of return into land that is currently in Israel.

My dream, (and I fully acknowledge that this is not likely to happen, and as time passes from the signing of Sykes-Picot, it becomes increasingly unlikely), is for all of the Middle East and North Africa to unite into a single country based on the commonality of the use of the Arabic language. This would include Israel, since as recently as 80 years ago the vast majority of the country was Arabs. This would be a secular country, with a relatively weak central government that would primarily be responsible for ensuring free trade within its borders, managing the military, and other civic aspects that make more sense to be run by a central authority (eg. a healthcare system, or transportation/infrastructure standards for example). Otherwise, the country would be divided into smaller provinces based on more granular demographic, religious, and cultural breakdowns (for example, areas of Israel that are predominantly Jewish could be their own state, the Kurds could have their province, the Druze in Israel, Syria, and Lebanon could have their own province, the eastern half of Iraq that is predominantly Shia might be its own province, etc.) such that each of these provinces is given wide latitude with the laws within its own territory to ensure people are able to live following laws that agree with them, while each area is given representation within the legislative body of the central government, and the executive of the central government can come from different provinces in a rotating fashion. A federalized system that has some parallels to the early American government after independence from the British. Of course, there is no real movement pushing for such a unification, and this description is purely an indulgence of mine.

What I think is slightly more realistic, and is the ideal solution for Israel and Palestine is the one-state solution occurring in a graduated fashion. Ultimately, there will not be peace in the region unless the Arabs and Jews learn to live alongside one another, and the unification of both peoples in one nation is the ideal solution. However, there is a lot of animosity between the two groups to simply dissolve the borders between Israel and Gaza and the West Bank and expect it to work out well. It is probably reasonable for a transition period of two states, with a Palestinian state in a combined West Bank and Gaza, not under the Israeli thumb (meaning no settlements, no blockades, no checkpoints, no controlling the flow of water and electricity into the land). After a proven period of stability and the two countries getting along, they would then integrate into a single country. In the preparation for this unification, a new constitution would need to be created to enshrine important political rights regardless of a citizen’s ethnicity or religion, and the nation itself would need to be secular given the mix of Jews, Muslims, and Christians within it. Preparations would need to be made to allow for the return of the Palestinian exiles, and new housing would need to be made in the villages/towns/cities they were exiled from (in lieu of displacing Jews that have been living in these areas for decades). A general amnesty would need to be implemented, and any revenge killings on either side would need to be punished harshly. This solution would also allow for continued movement of Jews into the West Bank, should they feel religiously compelled to live in that land.

Obviously, this is very much a utopian vision, but it is the best avenue for long term peace in the region that sees Israel become another country in the Middle East among equals, rather than continue as a Western settler-colonial project that “bullies” all of its neighbors and leads to hatred without end between Jews and Arabs. The main obstacle to this, is that as the party with significantly more wealth, power, and control of the land, in order to bring the Palestinians up to parity to allow both peoples to share the land as equals, the Israelis would necessarily have to make concessions that thus far, they have been completely unwilling to make, and no one is willing to apply the pressure needed to bring them to the negotiating table to make these concessions that can put the country on a meaningful path to peace.

What is the future likely to hold?

It’s always a tricky business predicting the future. There are some easy patterns to comment on since Israel’s formation, however. First of all, Israel has had a tremendous amount of success being aggressive towards its neighbors. It has won every war it has waged against its neighbors and gained large amounts of territory from it. Even in conflicts where they don’t meet their stated objectives (eg. the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the 2006 invasion of Lebanon), they walk away from the conflict having inflicted many more casualties on the enemy than they suffer.

Recent years have seen the virtual total ascendancy of hawkish right-wing governmental coalitions in Israel. These political factions have had great political success by taking a “hardline” stance against Palestinians and their other Arab neighbors. This confrontational approach to the Palestinians, nominally meant to crush resistance to Israeli oppression, only encourages further resistance. As we’ve pointed out multiple times in this essay series, the behavior of the Israelis has shown that the Israelis will not negotiate with them in good faith, and have left the only avenue for change as armed resistance. But this is, I suspect, by design. When the Palestinians fight back, it further pushes the Israeli populace to the right, and keeps the right-wing coalitions in power. Because of the sheer imbalance in power between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Palestinians are not able to cause enough damage to the Israelis to cause the Israeli population to rethink the efficacy of these “hardline” policies. Unfortunately, this is a difficult cycle to escape from, and I struggle to see in the near future how to escape this cycle that pushes Israeli politics further to the right (because, in the short-term, it’s working out nicely for the Israelis, though this comes at the expense of horrific abuses of the Arabs).

When we look at what the Israeli stance seems to be towards the West Bank and Gaza, the future looks grim. While Gaza has been in fairly dire straits since at least 2005, since October 2023 virtually all major urban areas have been leveled, 80,000 have been killed, infrastructure is nonexistent, and the remaining Palestinians live on the razor’s edge of poverty, famine, and sickness. 70% of the Gaza strip has been directly occupied by the Israeli military, with profound surveillance and regular raids and airstrikes on the remaining 30%. It’s hard to believe that the Israeli military will withdraw in the near future. In the West Bank, the Israeli government continues to promote settlements and makes life hell for the Palestinians through the use of settler attacks, destruction of infrastructure, destruction of homes, restriction of building permits, destruction of agricultural land, security checkpoints, and the ever-present threat of violence. It is clear that this current government has no intention of working towards an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and their behavior indicates an intent to annex these areas outright in the near future.

One must wonder, if the West Bank and Gaza are annexed, what is going to happen to the people there? In the event of annexation, there are only 3 possibilities: the remaining Palestinians will be codified as lower-status guest workers without legal protections (a continuation of the current apartheid dynamic), they will be ethnically cleansed and driven into Egypt or across the Jordan River (or else massacred), or they will be granted full Israeli citizenship and rights (a sort of one-state solution, exceedingly unlikely to occur in the current Israeli political climate where successive elections seem to reinforce the popularity of the right-wing).

Any hope for peace in the future has to start with abandoning the Israeli strategy of oppressing and killing the Palestinians until they no longer wish to fight (ie. to “beat the violence out of them”), and should instead revolve around the idea that improvement of Palestinian living conditions and treating them like people with rights is the first step towards bringing them to the negotiating table and showing that there is an alternative to violence.

But what incentive does Israel have to look for peace? They have done so very well with war for almost 80 years, that what incentive do they have to come to a negotiating table, if their more powerful patron refuses to pressure them to stop their excesses of violence and persecution and negotiate in good faith?

If there is to be peace then, and a peace that does not come at the price of annihilation of the Palestinians, the US must stop support to Israel. As we’ve previously covered in this series, the US provides virtually unlimited financial, military, and diplomatic support to Israel. So long as Israel has such an ally in the form of the world’s dominant superpower, what possible incentive do they have to curb their behavior that has served them so well for 80 years? Why would they make any concessions to the Palestinians? If the Palestinians don’t like it, and decide to fight back, 50 are killed for every dead Israeli. This is fundamentally the issue at the heart of this conflict. When one side is vastly stronger than the other, negotiations cannot happen in good faith.

Along this line of thinking, I will say, unequivocally here, that there is nothing inherently evil about the Jews of Israel. It is simply human nature; the logical course of action when they have faced minimal tangible consequences for their treatment of the Palestinians and have known nothing but military dominance. Why abandon a strategy that works well for your own people? Why make concessions to people you view as your enemy when you have no reason to, when you know that you can dominate your enemy’s military and punish them a hundred-fold for any slight against you?

There is reason to be pessimistic. One possible future is that the US will continue its unlimited support of Israel, which will allow Israel to continue its belligerent behavior towards its neighbors, and Gaza and the West Bank will be annexed. The Palestinians will be driven out or massacred. Surrounding Arab states, faced with no reasonable prospect for military success against Israel will normalize relations (even if their populations are sympathetic towards the Palestinians). And ultimately, as the years pass and the descendants of the Palestinians-in-exile age and new generations grow up away from their homeland, the Palestinian cause will be abandoned. The reality is that the historical precedent with which we are faced is that the natives displaced by settler-colonialism lose. They lose their land, their independence, their culture, and their lives. And the colonists face no consequences as a result.

If I’m not happy about the state of Israeli dominance in the Middle East, what can I do? It feels hopeless.

What I’ve just described is just one possible future of many. It may seem like the Middle East is destined to be embroiled in endless wars, but we should consider that this was the case in Europe until 80 years ago, so while there is reason to be pessimistic, there is room for cautious optimism as well. So let’s end on what actions we can take.

Obviously, I am not here to encourage you to do anything illegal. I’m not suggesting you go join a Palestinian militia or give money to an organization designated by the US as a terrorist organization, righteous though their cause may be. But as we’ve previously established, a requirement for actually moving towards peace is cessation of American support for Israel. Israel must feel pressured to negotiate in good faith.

So if you are an American, and if this is an issue you care about, you should make it a point to not vote for any politician that does not pledge to stop American support for Israel (when it makes sense, it probably doesn’t matter for your local schoolboard elections, but it certainly matters for your senator or presidential elections). Even if one side is worse than another, if this is an issue that matters to you, don’t compromise on it. Just looking at the last presidential election, yes Trump is worse for the Palestinians than Harris would have been, but if we keep letting candidates skate by on being the “lesser evil”, the political establishment is not going to feel any pressure to stop support for Israel. Make it loud and clear to those running for office: your vote is contingent on stopping American aid for Israel.

And yes, other issues are important. Economic inequality at home is important. The environment is important. Immigration is important. Protection of ethnic and religious minorities is important. Funding education is important. Maintaining our infrastructure is important. Having public safety nets for our society’s most vulnerable is important. LGBT rights are important. But the fact that our tax dollars are used to provide weapons to a nation that is using those arms to commit genocide is more important, and by virtue of the fact that it is our labor that generates the governmental revenue that facilitates the abuse of the Palestinians, not one of us (ie. Americans) is innocent.

So make your beliefs clear to those running for office, and spread the word among your community. I know it can be dangerous to speak out, and many, many people have faced devastating consequences in their lives and career for publicly speaking out against Israel. But make people aware of what is done in our name. Pressure the government into stopping American support for Israel at a minimum, but while we are stating our goals, we should strive for more. It’s obviously not realistic for American troops to land in Israel as liberators of the Palestinians, sure, but pressure must be applied to the Israelis. Cessation of US aid yes, but what if we applied sanctions to them? Made their people feel unwelcome wherever in the world that they travel? Or ban Israelis outright from visiting the country so long as Palestinians are oppressed. They claim to be a democracy, so every Israeli citizen, Arab or Jew, is also culpable for their government’s actions. If every Palestinian in Gaza is treated like Hamas, treat every Israeli like Likud. How would things change if this could be accomplished?

Israel is obviously in a position of tremendous strength, and we must not forget that it is a nuclear power with hundreds of nuclear warheads, but it is also in a more tenuous position than it may seem. It may seem unstoppable, but ultimately, they have had the advantage of limitless American support. If the political winds should change in the US, if that aid were to be cut off, yes they will still have a powerful economy and a powerful military, but one that is subject to the ever-changing fluctuations of a global market and one that is isolated and surrounded by countries hostile to it (and deservedly so, given their history of belligerence to their neighbors). Public opinion in the US is turning against Israel, and more of the public is beginning to question the sheer amount of support given to Israel after the immense amount of death they have dealt out in Gaza and Lebanon, and for the geopolitical disaster they’ve dragged us into with the war against Iran. Never before have so many people (even some public officials) been so vocal about supporting cessation of aid to Israel.

In such a situation where they lose American support, rather than endless belligerence, Israel would be better served to try to foster the friendship of the Arabs, to try to fit in as part of the community of states in the Middle East (and to that end, perhaps work towards the last of the solutions I outlined above), rather than their current approach of setting themselves apart as a Western settler-colonial project with an aggressive attitude. All this does is ensure that they will be locally isolated, and have the Arab powers always looking for a sign of weakness (even if the Arab governments themselves normalize, the Arab people will remember the abuse they or the Palestinians were subjected to by the Israelis). That weakness will eventually occur, that much is inevitable.

Because we must remember the long arc of history. It may not happen in our lifetime, it may not happen for hundreds of years, but nations and empires rise, and then no matter how powerful, eventually fall. History is full of nations and empires that learned that painful lesson: eventually you will reach the limits of your military power, and the consequences that come with that, whether it is an end to imperial ambitions, or the destruction of the nation in its entirety, or simply a temporary setback.

The Persians learned it on the waves of the Aegean Sea near Salamis, and thereafter would not convincingly threaten the Greeks until their obliteration by Alexander the Great. The Macedonians, inheritors of Alexander, would learn it in the marshes of Pydna, as they were crushed and conquered by the Romans. The Carthaginians learned it in Sicily, and then in the hills of Italy, and then as the Romans overran Carthage itself. The Romans learned it in the Teutoberg Forest and would never conquer Germania. The Arabs learned it at the unbreachable walls of Constantinople, halting the spread of Islam into Eastern Europe until the time of Ottomans. The Ottomans learned it at the walls of Vienna and would thereafter be slowly pushed out of Europe. The Aztecs learned it on the pyramids and floating bridges of Tenochtitlan, as a handful of Spaniards robbed them of their Empire, with the gleeful help of those they had oppressed. The Spanish learned it in the waters of the English Channel, as the British sank their Invincible Armada to the bottom of the sea. The French learned it in the snows of Russia, as they began to lose their hold on the Europe they had conquered. The British learned it in the hills of Verdun, the beaches of Gallipoli, and later in the sands of Egypt as they thereafter abandoned all imperial pretense. The Germans learned it in the crumbling walls of Stalingrad and in the bloody fighting retreat that led to the partition of their country. The Japanese learned it as they were burned out of their tropical subterranean bunkers and incinerated in nuclear fire.

The Americans, hailing from that young nation, experienced it in the jungles of Vietnam, and in the mountains of Afghanistan, but have failed to learn the lesson, and their military adventurism continues. Perhaps this latest conflict with Iran will be their “Suez Crisis”, and show the world the limits of American military might, we shall have to see.

Israel, an even younger nation, has so far, only learned the lesson of the Holocaust. The lesson that capitulation and inaction and the vulnerability of disunity almost led to their obliteration. They use the trauma of this history as an excuse for the abuses they subject the Palestinians to, as an excuse for disregarding the sovereign territory of their neighbors and seizing land as they wish and bombing with impunity. But they too must learn the lesson of the limits of military power eventually, whether in the near-future or in 500 years. We can only hope that it happens while there are still Palestinians left to speak of.

Sources:

• The Modern Middle East: A History by James Gelvin
• The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years by Bernard Lewis
• The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk
• Pity the Nation by Robert Fisk
• Night of Power by Robert Fisk
• Osman’s Dream: A History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel
• The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories by Ilan Pappe
• Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007 by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar
• History of Rome podcast
• The Hellenistic Age podcast
• 1998 Amnesty Internation Annual Report and Amnesty International 2001: Israel and the Occupied Territories: State Assassinations and other Unlawful Killings
• 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris
• Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict by Benny Morris
• The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
• Amnesty International Reports on 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021 Conflicts in Gaza
• UNOCHA 2011 report on the effect of the blockade in Gaza
• UNOCHA 2005, 2013, and 2026 reports on settler activity in the West Bank
• https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-database-with-500-instances-of-israeli-incitement-to-genocide-continuously-updated/
• United Nations webpage on genocide
• Institute for Policy Studies: Destroying the Lawn in Gaza by John Feffer
• Were the Muslim Arab Conquerors of the Seventh-Century Middle East Colonialists by Robert Hoyland
• The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism by Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini
• Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court
• The Work of Comparison: Israel/Palestine and Apartheid by Julie Peteet
• UN Human Rights Council Report on Occupied Palestinian Territories 2007
• Council on Foreign Relations: U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts
• The De-Colonial Horizon
• For events since 2023: mostly news sources such as Al Jazeera and Reuters