One thing that bothers me about the war between Hamas and Israel is the large number of manifestly dumb beliefs that pervade the discourse. This is also true about Israel itself. Here’s a list of a few, all them wrong and all of them easily refuted.
A two-state “solution” will end Palestinian terrorism towards Israel as well as the antagonism between Palestinians and Israelis.
Likewise for a permanent ceasefire.
The IDF deliberately targets civilians.
The IDF rapes Palestinian women and children (see Tlaib, Rashida).
Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Israel is an apartheid state.
Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel, while Arabs have lived there from time immemorial (This is embodied in the recent slogan, “Jesus was a Palestinian”).
Israelis are pretending to like and tolerate gays (this is called “pinkwashing”), but only to cover up their horrible crimes against Palestinians.
There are two discrete groups of Gazans, easily separated. Those who actually belong to Hamas or other terror groups, and then the peaceful Gazans who don’t support terrorism.
Gazan civilians in Rafah have nowhere to escape to, and so an Israeli assault on Rafah will mean the deaths of thousands of civilians.
Add your own if you wish, or refute the ones above. I know that Douglas Murray had a podcast late last year called something like “Five lies about the war,” but I haven’t listened to it.
Ditto to all of the above.
What is really called for is much more nuanced and in-depth considerations of the issues at work. To that end, “Foreign Affairs” has two excellent pieces this month. One, By Martin Indyk (former Clinton era Middle East negotiators) argues that no solution other than a two state one can resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although he fully recognizes the difficulties of getting to one. The other, by political scientists Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami, agrees that while a two state solution would be best in theory, it will be impossible to achieve. It then goes on to suggest steps that could be taken, particularly by the US, to ensure that the rights of both Jews and Palestinians could be protected in the context of a single state. Both are well worth reading (don’t know about paywall issues – I am a subscriber).
Another misconception is that civilians are not normally killed inadvertently during war. For example, during WW2 hardly anybody in the US or the UK argued for a ceasefire to protect civilians. The best way to end a war is to win it.
Even in 1948, Israel could have finished off the Palestinians without suffering many repercussions (I know that Israel relented back then).
The humanitarian standards that limit what states are allowed to do in armed conflict have changed a lot since WW2. Western countries are expected to follow them.
There has never been an armed conflict since WW2 where a western country faced an existential threat with its back to the wall, as Britain did from U-boats at least till late 1943, even as the military situation had started to improve in other theatres after three years of defeats. I don’t think any of us know what we would countenance were we in the same position today. What an outsider said were standards of behaviour we were “allowed” to follow would be met with a rude noise, followed by, “Here’s a rifle and a shovel. Dig in.”
The only major change in conflict standards since WW2 is that incendiary bombing of civilian concentrations, like cities, is now a war crime. Cluster munitions and land mines are prohibited to those countries that have signed the relevant conventions. But bombing of military targets, including war-effort factories located necessarily close to where civilian workers live, is still acceptable as long as the killing of civilians is not the specific goal. This has always been an accepted limitation on armed conflict and is no different today. The inability to discriminate does not proscribe the collateral damage.
And all the nuclear countries hold out the threat to annihilate millions of civilians as their way of deterring nuclear attack on themselves. This a change in the opposite direction to the accepted standards of military conduct.
The only one of your list that I would take some exception to is “Israel is an apartheid state.” It’s certainly true for within Israel’s own official boundaries; Arab citizens and Jewish citizens are equal under the law.
But how it administers the West Bank is a different story. There, Israel really does impose different standards on Jews and Arabs. Now, you can reasonably argue that Israel has good reasons for doing this–but the effect is pretty damn ugly.
I like the writer Jesse Singal. He is a straight shooter, not an idealogue. (And he happens to be Jewish, which may matter here.) He toured Israel and the West Bank last year, and wrote a long essay about the experience, of which this is a small part:
“B’Tselem and other rights groups take foreigners to Hebron because it’s probably the worst part of the West Bank. It’s its own thing — particularly grotesque, and in a starkly visible manner. The rest of the West Bank demands slightly more nuance, even if, like me, you view the occupation as an ongoing disaster.
“Of course Israel isn’t occupying it, and enacting crackdowns, purely out of malice; Israelis see the West Bank as a genuine security threat, as the place that sent over many terrorists who murdered Israelis, sometimes by blowing themselves up on buses or in nightclubs in Tel Aviv, during the Second Intifada. Israel is a tiny country, so just about everyone either lost someone between 2000 and 2005, or knows someone who did. So it’s silly to pretend that Israeli policies in the West Bank — policies that I believe can be fairly described as apartheid — stem mostly from ancient tribal or religious hatred rather than very real, very recent events.”
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/more-jews-should-visit-the-west-bank (may be paywalled; I’m a subscriber)
Israel won the West Bank in an Arab imitated war. Not many countries “give back” land won in that manner. In the Islamosphere such a result ends badly for the defeated. Why do we have wildly different rules for different players?
D.A.
NYC
There is no point in Israel giving back the West Bank without getting something substantial in return.
The point about the “apartheid” accusation is not that Israel didn’t give back territory conquered in wars that would not even have happened had the Arab players simply accepted the results of the first war. The point is that there are no equal rights for the non-Jewish population there (they cannot vote or move where they want within the country and are subject to lots of restrictions, exactly as blacks in apartheid South Africa). Israel has good reasons for not giving all Arabs equal rights, but Apartheid South Africa also had good reasons, as can be seen from the deterioration of the country post Apartheid. The territory of South Africa was also conquered, still all of the Human rights activists everywhere agreed that this did not give the Boers the right to treat Xhosa and Zulu as second class citizens. (The Cape Coloureds, the admixed relicts of the indigenous San people of the Cape, had full voting rights under late Apartheid, as did Indians.) Also, it is no coincidence that Israel supported Apartheid South Africa during the boycott. Israeli governments saw the parallel.
I was talking about Israel. The state of Israel does not include the West Bank. I won’t open that can of worms except to say that Arabs in the West Bank who are Israeli citizens are treated as if they were in Israel, while non-Israeli Arabs in the West Bank are under the Palestinian Authority.
Jesus was a Jew, born of Jewish parents, in the small Jewish community of Bethlehem, in a land called Judea ruled by a Jewish Roman client king.
Jewish parents! Are you insinuating God is a Jew! The nerve! 😉
On a more serious note, what you wrote is only true if you consider the Bible a reliable historical document…I sure don’t.
Totally agree about the source. I was just countering the claim that Jesus was a Palestinian. Those folks can’t even get his name correct
Of course God isn’t a Jew! He’s a Hittite (El, to be precise).
And since the Hebrew form is elohim with a plural ending, we know that the Hittite God takes They as Their pronoun.
The bible , definitely not a reliable historical document. Bad fiction too.
There is no verifiable evidence that a person called Jesus of Nazareth ever existed let alone whether he was jewish or otherwise.
Yes there is evidence he existed. You may not consider it really good evidence, but it is there.
Sam Harris podcast “5 Myths about Israel and the War in Gaza” (Jan 29 2024) addresses the following:
Myth #1: Israel is guilty of “genocide” in Gaza.
Myth #2: International Humanitarian Law Requires that Israel’s response to Palestinian aggression be “proportional.”
Myth #3: The Jews Are Colonizers and the Palestinians are Indigenous People.
Myth #4: The atrocities committed by Hamas (and over one thousand Palestinian civilians) on October 7th were a legitimate response to oppression.
Myth #5: The two sides in this conflict are equally civilized, equally entitled to respect, and equally worth protecting.
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/351-5-myths-about-israel-and-the-war-in-gaza
The ultimate goal of the Palestinians is to have their own state. (In reality, their ultimate goal is for the Jews not to have their own state).
The British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin saw this as early as 1947: “For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”
“Israelis are white and privileged, while Palestinians are People of Color.”
Beat me to it, Sastra!
1) Israel is a “colonialist” state.
Still waiting to discover to which nation Israel was a colony. And isn’t voluntary resettlement of individuals from all over the world pretty much the exact opposite of “colonialization”?
If Israel is charged with being a “colonialist” state simply because colonial powers won WWI, it was the vote of every nation in the League of Nations which authorized the Mandate system, not just the colonial powers. Seventeen new nations were created by the Mandate system, including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan besides Israel. Why is only Israel accused of being a colonialist state, but never these countries?
2) Israel is “occupying” the West Bank
While it is technically true that Israel itself characterized its re-control of these territories in 1967 as a legal “occupation”, this was done as a temporary administrative measure. The real question is whose territory it is under International law. Israel has steadfastly, though quietly, maintained that “greater Israel”, ie, Israel as defined by its May 15th borders (plus a new section of the Golan Heights), is sovereign Israeli territory.
The legal borders of Israel in May 1948 included the West Bank. Jordan invaded and controlled these territories from late 1948 until Israel won them back in 1967. Whether one believes that wars of aggression validate the taking of sovereign territory, or whether one believes the opposite (as is the case of the UN and other International Conventions) only Israel appears to have a valid claim to the West Bank. Jordan ceded all rights to it more than a decade ago. And you can not “occupy” your own territory.
If the proposition is that the Palestinians somehow deserve the West Bank because of the right of “self-determination”, there are two problems. The first is that they have had self-determination via the Oslo Accords. The second is that they are not really interested in self-determination at all – their real goal is the elimination of Israel.
There are so many, but this is abundantly clear; anyone who calls Israel an Apartheid state knows nothing of either Israel or Apartheid.
One cannot use reason to argue someone out of a position they didn’t use reason to arrive at. So shouting the above in their faces seems the best course of action. At least it’d release some of the anger.
EdwardM, I love the piece of wisdom you shared: “One cannot use reason to argue someone out of a position they didn’t use reason to arrive at.” Knock me over with a feather, that one sentence explained why my attempts over a lifetime to convince some folks of whatever can be totally ineffectual as well as profoundly irritating. Thank you for this gift. I finally get it. And I get the arrogance of assuming that they didn’t use reason while I did. Don’t cha just love us humans!
“There are two discrete groups of Gazans, easily separated. Those who actually belong to Hamas or other terror groups, and then the peaceful Gazans who don’t support terrorism.”
This is somewhat troubling as the converse of this statement implies that all Gazans are Hamas and Prime Minister Netanyahu has swore to eliminate Hamas. I think Israel would lose even the support of the US if this policy was implemented.
The converse of this statement is not exactly what you said, nor what I meant. The truth is that there are Gazans of all stripes, some (many) sympathetic to Hamas and full of Jew hatred, while others want to live in peace. To pretend that all non-terrorists are peaceful, Israeli-friendly Palestinians is the error I was talking about. And there was no “policy” mentioned there just a misconception.
I would recommend looking at the data in this article.
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I agree with all of your points, Jerry – or maybe anti points as they are misconceptions. I was finally able to put a few paragraphs together on my position after hearing Lucy Aharesh with Bari Weiss: (I beg a one-time indulgence on length)
Some thoughts on a Bari Weiss interview with Arab/Israeli news commentator Lucy Aharesh & a moderated discussion between Sam Harris and Maajid Hawaz at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Lucy Aharesh is an Arab/Muslim/Israeli. That is, she is Arab and Muslim and was born, raised, lives, and works in Israel. So she is one of the population of non-Jewish (neither of the Jewish religion nor the Jewish people) Israelis who live in Israel itself, not the West Bank or Gaza or a neighboring Arab nation. She engages in a very emotional (to me) and informative interview with Bari Weiss at url
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LIcd7wHlCE
I just wanted to takes a few minutes to write down some personal thoughts to follow up on that interview with my take on her feelings about Israel and the larger issue of Israel’s existence. First, I believe strongly that the State of Israel or least some homeland on this Earth, that Jewish people can immigrate into, live in and defend from invaders must exist. This belief comes out of my upbringing and awareness of several thousand years of persecution and attempted genocides of the Jewish people in enough countries that there has never been a single safe place for them to live with control over their lives. Of course the most recent nadir of these global persecutions was realized by European Jews in the Holocaust (~1933-45). The Holocaust is still very real to me as I grew up in the United States in the 1950’s, just a decade after the extermination camps were liberated by the Allies and remember surviving prisoners living in my community with their concentration camp numbers still tattooed on their forearms.
The late 19th century Zionist movement combined with first, the British hegemony and later with post-WW2 U.S. hegemony allowed for, 1947, an area within the British Mandate to be proffered as a Jewish homeland and a democratic government was formed, followed by the initiative of various Israeli militias to fight off the immediate attacks from five surrounding Arab nations in 1948 and continual sporadic invasions and terrorist attacks through the years up through today.
My read is that the Arab/Muslim/Israeli Lucy shares this belief in the need for a homeland, along with an abhorrence for the extreme Islamists. She sees the Palestinian aim under Hamas to be the elimination of Israel, which cannot be allowed. She is very clear that Israel lost on Oct 7, but everything (short of suicidal nuclear weapons) must be done now for the state of Israel to survive. I obviously found her emotional positions to be very moving, persuasive, and comforting after knowing nothing about how someone of her background might feel. Of course she is but a single datum, but in math we would say that she demonstrates existence!
I think that I am trying to explain that with Lucy I have now seen one sane, rational representative from the Arab population of Israel. I had absolutely no knowledge of this population other than they numbered more than one million. I do not know what proportion of the population she represents, but before seeing her interview I did not know if there be even one. There are extremist, orthodox Jews. We see them in the Knesset, as settlers in the West Bank, and attacking Palestinians in the West Bank. But they do not dominate the Israeli population (I don’t think). So how many Lucies are there? Enough to dominate a Palestine in a two-state solution? Or is the Islamic terrorist mindset so prevalent among Arab-Israelis that there would just be continual massive civil chaos?…two failed states. Or would sniping and attacks with one’s and ten’s of deaths just continue as they have off and on as they have over the years since 1948. When I read Sam Harris (Sam Harris and Maajid Hawaz: Islam and the Future of Tolerance. Harvard University Press (2015)) –OR- a one-hour moderated you tube discussion from Harvard Kennedy School at url https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTd4-WXw2SM . I am very depressed that there is no sane Arab middle; similarly when I see the selected news footage after Oct 7; but seeing Lucy gives me at least some hope that there may be something there.
My read is that while there is racial animus from individuals which waxes and wanes with political events, she feels that there is no or maybe little structural prohibitions on Palestinians attending schools, getting jobs, and even marriage as she has demonstrated. There is racism. Things are not happy and comfortable. But it certainly does not rise to the level of apartheid. At least that was my take.
Jim Batterson asks:
“So how many Lucies are there? Enough to dominate a Palestine in a two-state solution? Or is the Islamic terrorist mindset so prevalent among Arab-Israelis that there would just be continual massive civil chaos?…two failed states.”
I think that there is an important distinction to be made between Israeli Arabs, like Lucy Aharesh, and the people of Gaza. I do think—and Israel has proved—that Arabs and Jews of good will can live together in relative, though not perfect, peace. The problem is that there is a large population (in Gaza and the West Bank) of Palestinians who are brought up to hate Israel and Jews. This is not the case for Israeli Arabs, (even though most Israeli Arabs went to Arab-run schools in Israel).* So, it is possible for Arabs and Jews to live without “continual massive chaos,” but that may not be possible with the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank—at least until steps are taken to build trust, which could take generations.
*Senor, B. And S. Singer. 2023. The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. 328 pp.
Thank you Norman. Your thoughts and the reference are very helpful and appreciated.
You’re welcome. Both my wife and I watched the podcast and were very moved by it.
You are forgetting the myth that Israelis kill Palestinians for organ donations. This is a blatant extension of the ‘blood libel’ claims going back to medieval times that Jews killed Christian babies to use their blood to make matzo. Seems pretty outrageous but apparently not only students but DEI officials at some of our top American universities believe this one.
I was going to add that one, but I thought, nah, hardly anybody in American could be so stupid as to believe it!
I apologize, not a top American University, just MIT:
Second, after a postdoc at MIT called Zionism a mental illness, said that Jewish Israelis want to enslave the world in a global apartheid system, falsely claimed that Israel harvests Palestinians for organ harvesting, and implied that the “average Israeli” is a Nazi, the DEI officer of his department replied by telling us that nothing he said was “hate speech” and that the organ harvesting conspiracy theory was “confirmed.”
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116625/documents/HHRG-118-ED00-20231205-SD003.pdf
“Confirmed.” OMG.
The fallacy I hear most is the “two distinct types of Gazans.” The MSM doesn’t want to report on the “pay to slay” policies, the systemic, en masse anti-Semitic brainwashing of Palestinian children, the fact that EVERY video depicting the 10/7 massacre shows the “average” Palestinian cheering for Hamas, or the fact that the vast majority of Gazans want Israel destroyed whether they’re affiliated with Hamas or not (at least according to polls). There is Hamas, and a majority of Palestinians who support them; now these Palestinian supporters might be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, but that doesn’t give much cover imo.
Of course, the implication of this reality is that Israel is creating multitudes of potential terrorists. Waging war against a morally bankrupt death-cult and winning is nigh impossible when utilizing “civilized” war practices. Yet Israel would become a pariah state if it unleashed what it probably needs to for a lasting victory in the region. It’s really an impossible situation and it staggers my imagination.
Let us not forget also that these, Palestinians are the self same peace loving people who danced in the streets of gaza cities and burned USA flags when the twin towers were destroyed in NYC 9-11. “Many support Hamas” respectfully I would suggest that the majority support Hamas and the requirement to destroy Israel and Jews and non muslims world wide.
I’ve started questioning my own sanity at times, as in am I missing something? Those on the side of Hamas/the Palestinians spew such obvious bullshit I can’t quite believe it and wonder if the simpler solution is that it is me who is mad.
So thanks again to websites like this one for keeping us all moored to reality.
I find it absolutely bonkers that people take at face value Hamas’ claims about death counts and whatever else. On one hand you have them caught red handed lying about the casualty count at the hospital THEY accidentally bombed, by at least two orders of magnitude, and then swallowing the number of women and children killed in the conflict credulously.
Nothing in the list about the West Bank so I’m going to go out on a limb and define another falsehood.
“Israel must give up its apartheid settler occupation of Judea and Samaria.” (Here by “occupation” I mean both Israeli control of the conquered provinces in the West Bank and the renegade encroachment on Palestinian land by (mostly) Jewish settlers. And note that the way I worded it begs the question in assuming that the occupation is apartheid. But that’s the way Israel’s detractors often put it.)
To keep this short I won’t rebut it, just reiterate that I think the demand that Israel comply with the “must” is unsupportable…even if Israel would have to institute an apartheid system, or is already, to deal with the Muslims currently living there. (So just saying, “But that would be apartheid!” doesn’t count as a rebuttal.)
> Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel, while Arabs have lived there from time immemorial (This is embodied in the recent slogan, “Jesus was a Palestinian”).
In fairness, the equal and opposite claim is a popular myth among Israelis: that Palestinians are Arabs, that is not a real people, who only moved to Israel in the wake of Arab conquests. Thus they have no business living there, and neighboring Arab countries only reveal their inhumanity by refusing to take them all in after Israel has encouraged them to leave.
There is not only historical evidence, but also DNA evidence that disproves these claims. In short, Palestinians have plenty of Jewish ancestry (certainly more than the Ashkenazim), they merely mass-converted first to Christianity and then to Islam. Palestinians were also not Pan-Arabists when Israel was created. Their distinct identity is more a consequence of the Israel-Palestine conflict than a cause of it.
Thank you for this “list”. There’s more, but this is a useful starting point.
There’s a common thread that runs through all of “woke”; the denial of reality/science. To me, this translates to the denial of nature itself.
What interests me more is why so many people are susceptible to it; more interesting than why others are immune to it.
What proof is there to this point :
“A two-state “solution” will end Palestinian terrorism towards Israel as well as the antagonism between Palestinians and Israelis.”
I do wonder because I’ve raised that point in conversation, but am unsure as to how to back it up properly. The overall idea is that arabs would love to wipe the jews away, but I’m not sure just a song is enough to support that view, so what else could ?
I’m not sure I understand your question because I don’t know what “song” you are writing about. But overall idea that Arabs would love to wipe the Jews away is well supported by PLO’s Covenant, Hamas’s Charta, Palestinian Authority’s “pay-for slay” program and countless speeches by Palestinian politicians, preachers, historians, journalists etc.
I recently learned about Peter Zeihan on Sam Harris’s latest podcast, A Falling World. They touched on the topic of Israel and Palestine, and as often happens, left me with more questions than answers. It’s well worth the listen, even if it’s just the free portion of the discussion.