On Israel and Palestine- Part 6
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 6, where we will discuss the idea that Israel is inherently justified to exist as a state because it is a home for Judaism.
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 4- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-4/
Part 5- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-5/
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 17th, 18th, and 19th 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 7th 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 19th 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 19th and into the 20th 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”.
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
- 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