On Israel and Palestine- Part 4

Introduction:

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.

This will be an 8-part series that I will post over the following weeks/months, with this identical introduction in each. I will list sources I referred to at the end of each post but, as this is not an academic treatise, the formatting will be informal and will not be embedded into the text itself.

Parts 1-3 are going to 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.

Parts 4-8 are going to 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. 

This is Part 4, where we will discuss and address some of the claims made by the defenders of Israel to justify their actions with regards to the Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries.

 I highly recommend reading these essays in order, and you can find the other essays here:

Part 1- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-1/

Part 2- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-2/

Part 3- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-3/

Part 5- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-5/

Part 6- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-6/

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.

 Part 5- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-5/

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
• Night of Power by Robert Fisk
• Pity the Nation by Robert Fisk
• 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
• 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris
• Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict by Benny Morris
• For events since 2023: mostly news sources such as Al Jazeera and Reuters
• 1998 Amnesty Internation Annual Report and Amnesty International 2001: Israel and the Occupied Territories: State Assassinations and other Unlawful Killings
• 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/