How Arabs Erase The Jews ( And Prevent Peace )

43 min readMay 25, 2024

The Origins Of Accusations, Reconsidered

This chapter is about the incredible dedication Palestinians show to narrative, and the careful, decades long construction of a specific kind of narrative, a nuanced, well-structured narrative specifically designed around erasing what they perceive to be the legitimizing narrative of the Jewish people.

When an anti-Zionist tells a story, it is almost always a story of what the Israelis or Zionists did. That is the frame, which is crafted to prevent an audience from seeing anything beyond the frame. In reality, the real story is almost always about a dilemma the Israelis or Zionists were maneuvered into. If you make the action sound horrible enough in the telling, you can erase the dilemma that would illuminate the real tragedy.

This is a sling, the kind used by Palestinian teenagers and children to “throw stones” at Israelis or at the windshields of Israeli cars driving down highways and roads.

It takes hundreds of hours of practice to master a sling like this, and in the hands of a skilled sling thrower, a stone hurled from this can kill a man. It is an extremely lethal weapon. It is also incredibly easy to conceal, much more so than a gun. A teenager throwing a stone with his hand at one moment may throw the next stone using this, or the boy next to him may. As a long distance weapon, it is not that different from a gun, except perhaps being quieter, easier to hide, having shorter range and taking longer to reload.

If words fail to get the threat across, you can scan the Go deeper link below for a short video demonstrating the accuracy and power of this weapon. It is not hard to imagine the danger to a human on the receiving end of the shots you will see. Many westerners picture Palestinian rock throwing as a young boy standing right in front of a soldier and throwing a small stone from a few feet away, thanks to propaganda videos Palestinians release. More typically, these are ambush attacks where the soldier is not sure where the assailant is, how many there are, or whether they have slings or not. It is not a situation where a soldier is likely to forgive and forget or give a second chance if he or she can help it.

Go deeper video: Demonstration of the power of a shepherd’s sling

If the verbal description and the video demonstration do not adequately get the point across, perhaps this snippet of a headline from the Times of Israel, published on May 12, 2020, will,

This is how the article describes the incident,

As the troops were making their way out of the village on foot following the arrests, a small group of roughly 10 Palestinian youths began throwing rocks at them.
Zilberman said the rock that killed Ben-Ygal appeared to have been thrown from the roof of one of the homes on the outskirts of the village, which has often seen clashes between residents and IDF troops.
“The rock hit the soldier directly in the head. The soldier was wearing a helmet. But it hit him at an angle,” he said.

No human rights NGO will ever describe teenagers throwing rocks as a “lethal ambush attempt”, but here it is. When you read reports of rock throwing by Palestinian “children”, you should read it as “bullets shot by underage combatants”. When you read about Molotov cocktails thrown or “fireworks fired”, you should read it as “bombs thrown” and “rockets fired”, and so forth. The IDF is working as soldiers in a combat zone trying to sort combatants from non-combatants, due to perfidy employed by the enemy. It is not doing police work.

Also, as discussed in the chapter Refugee Immigration, not Settler Colonialism, stone throwing has an historic symbolic value in the region, indicating caste superiority of the stone thrower over the victim.

If a Palestinian boy or group of boys were shot by IDF troops for firing guns at them or at cars, people would not mock the IDF for brutality. Shoot at a boy for stone throwing? The whole world will hear about the brutality of the occupation.

That is dedication to narrative.

And if the incident escalates, a teenager dies in front of cameras, and a sympathetic human rights group issues a report on “unlawful killing” of “children”? Gold.

Yes, some of the Palestinian’s young boys or girls will be dead but think of the story. International organizations will generate bad publicity about Israel, laundering Palestinian perfidy using their credibility; totally worth it.

That would really be dedication to narrative.

In August of 2023, Human Rights Watch issued a report on what they describe as a “spike” in the IDF killing children “unlawfully” which described incidents such as this,

In the other cases investigated, the security forces killed boys after they had joined other youths confronting Israeli forces with stones, Molotov cocktails, or fireworks. While these projectiles can seriously injure or kill, in these cases, Israeli forces fired repeatedly at chest-level, hitting multiple children, and killed children in situations where they do not appear to have been posing a threat of grievous injury or death, which is the standard for the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers under international norms. That would make these killings unlawful.
Mohammed al-Sleem, 17, was shot in the back while running from Israeli soldiers after a group of friends he was with threw rocks, and allegedly Molotov cocktails, at military vehicles that had entered a village near his hometown of Azzun in the northern West Bank. Three other children were shot and wounded with automatic gunfire while running away.
An Israeli officer shot Wadea Abu Ramuz, 17, from behind while he was with a group of youths throwing rocks and launching fireworks at Border Police vehicles in East Jerusalem at around 10 p.m. on January 25, 2023, two witnesses said. Another boy in the group was shot and wounded. Security forces shackled Wadea to his hospital bed, beat and prevented his relatives from visiting him, withheld his body for months after he died, and required his family to bury him quietly at night.

The Palestinians can reliably count on the report not framing all this as a spike in lethal attempts on soldiers’ lives. They can also rely on the HRW ( or any similar group ) applying a standard of police work to the IDF, rather than the standard of a combat zone in a conflict. As explained in the earlier chapters, The Occupation Today and Palestinian Fear of Israelis and Fishing the World’s Memory Hole: The Second Intifada, the Israelis are engaged in an ongoing battle in the West Bank. It is a war operation in which the Israeli military is trying to sort the unprivileged combatants from the non-combatants, to deal with Palestinian perfidy in carrying out their part of the war, a war crime which erodes the protections of civilians.

In many of these cases, the IDF soldiers were operating near Palestinian “refugee” camps, which are the centers of operations for guerilla groups. They were on a battlefield in a conflict zone. On a battlefield, under the laws of war, running away after shooting at the enemy provides no protection from being shot in return. These young men had revealed themselves as combatants and were treated like combatants. What happened was only “illegal” in the sense that Palestinians should not be using children as combatants, but they do.

Why? It is great for narrative. Palestinians know they can rely on cooperative media and NGOs to treat the incident as police brutality rather than war making, and to describe the young men brandishing lethal weapons as being fleeing children instead of underaged combatants.

At the sacrifice of their children, Palestinians succeed in turning a reality in which Palestinians have committed the war crime of using young teenagers as combatants into a gripping narrative in which Israeli soldiers have brutally and unlawfully killed children by shooting them in the backs.

As I describe in the earlier chapter, What Is Israel? Why So Much Violence?, it is as if these groups came in at the end of a very long fight against an armed assailant, saw the instigator of the conflict on the ground, struggling to get up, and simply assumed the man on top keeps him down because he is a bully.

It is all part of the narrative.

Narratives of Erasure

To lay groundwork for talking about international concern for the Palestinian’s plight, let me represent what I feel is really the crux of the disagreements between those very sympathetic to the Palestinian plight and those less sympathetic.

Those very sympathetic to the Palestinian’s predicament tend to think the Palestinian people are engaged in an insurgency against a cruel occupier, with the goal of throwing off the yoke of the occupation so they can live freely in a land they have always owned. In their minds, the sympathizers may understand ( correctly ) that Palestinians think the scope of the “occupation” is all of the land west of the river Jordan inclusive of Israel, or they may think ( incorrectly ) that Palestinians just want to live within the pre-1967 borders without interference by Israel. But this is basically what they think.

In this narrative, Palestinian behavior is all sympathetically understandable, even if violent, because it is all an insurgency against occupation, and at worst we are just arguing about the scope of the occupation: Should Israel as a Jewish state be destroyed/dissolved or not? Once Palestinians are free of the occupation, everyone in the area can work together on a fresh start to find a more just way to live. It will be bumpy but the region can at least move forward from the place it has been “stuck”.

This first, sympathetic way of thinking sounds very nice and comfortable to Western ears, especially Western liberal ears, because it fits models we are familiar with and are taught in school, and it fits our preconception that all human beings are basically good, basically the same, and basically want the same things in terms of freedom, economic security, peace and justice. It also fits our preconception that problems are solvable, and this situation is just another problematic situation to which we can find a just solution.

Those less sympathetic — pretty much all Israelis and their supporters — think the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are engaged in a war of aggression, which hasn’t gone well for them so far. As part of their losses, they have lost some land and a large portion of them are basically prisoners on a battlefield. The root cause of the war is on their end: they do not want to share land with people they view as outsiders, especially not those who are not Muslims, and super especially not with outsider Jews.

Their cause is generations old, pre-dating 1967 and any sort of occupation by nearly 50 years. It is driven by honor, shame and religion, and is not primarily a response to current situations involving specific material deprivation or deprivation of rights. Their national dream is essentially genocidal in character: to kill Jews, drive them away and subjugate the small remainder, so they can rule the land where the Jews currently have sovereignty. By achieving this, they strive to achieve a great simultaneous redemptive act of return of land to themselves, to Arabs and to Islam, which will justify all their suffering.

For those not so sympathetic to Palestinians, none of this is OK. To allow any of it would provide an opening to people dreaming of succeeding at a massive slaughter like we’ve seen in Rwanda or Sudan, followed by turning the whole area into another failed state like Libya, a religious tyranny like Afghanistan, or a murderous, warlord-driven dictatorship like Syria.

The second, unsympathetic group of people has a lot of historical evidence to back them up, not to mention the Palestinian’s own published plans as recently as 2021,

Go deeper: Hamas’s 2021 “Promise of the Hereafter Conference” announces intent to slaughter, enslave and drive away the Jewish people from Israel

Hamas’s well-described plans, stated in their own words behind the Go Deeper link above, are horrific. It shows the single-minded fixation described in an earlier chapter of this book, For Hamas, The Suffering Is The Point. Worse, everyone paying attention knows that Hamas’s war on Israel has tremendous support within the Palestinian communities of Gaza and the West Bank. In fact the Hamas agenda has supermajority support, judging by the polling of Palestinians since the October 7th massacre. It is not as if other Palestinians would stand in their way and many would volunteer to help.

There is no evidence the true grievances are about economic conditions. When the Zionist immigrants began arriving in the beginning, the Palestinians were mostly poor. The area as a whole was beset by malaria, high infant mortality, and high death rates, and many or most of the people lived as subsistence farmers in a feudal system where they were quasi-enslaved to other Muslims, mostly in absentia landlords living in better places like Damascus.

The arrival of the Jewish immigrants improved their material conditions. Yet, economic improvements and improvements in health and mortality rates had no impact on the violence and rejectionist behavior from 1920–1967, behavior which was very similar to what it is today. Economic advantages persist into today. Before the October 7th massacre, the economic wages in the West Bank were higher than in neighboring countries Jordan or Lebanon, despite the burden the Israeli occupation places on the West Bank economy.

Over the years, the Palestinians have stated their grievances and goals very plainly many times, and this less sympathetic understanding reflects hearing those voices. Indeed, this second, unsympathetic understanding comes very much from listening to them and just taking them seriously in what they say.

In these circumstances, segregating Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza from Israelis is an imperative for security, and the prisoner of war security apparatus Israel has built in the West Bank is a way to accomplish this task.

The first, sympathetic narrative is not just false or incomplete. It is designed to erase the second, more historically accurate narrative, which it does by appealing to sympathies in the minds of Western liberal audiences and in the minds of leftist audiences in former colonial lands. It takes framing already present in those audience’s minds and, applying it to a superficially similar situation, effectively disappears the more uncomfortable truths.

An Example of Erasure, and How It Reduces the Chances of Peace

Before diving deeply into the real specifics of these narratives of erasure, I want to make sure we all see how much is at stake. Erasure is not just a tragedy for truth but also for peace, and it undermines the possibility of action on legitimate grievances. To be concrete, I can provide examples of aspects of the occupation of the West Bank which strike me as punitive and not really necessary for security. All of these issues are prima facie negligent, cruel or criminal behaviors by Israel or Israelis, which occur within the occupied territories.

1) Some of the restrictions on Palestinian businesses, entrepreneurship, imports and exports, which seem unrelated to curtailing the population’s ability to make war.

2) Restrictions related to unequal access to water or diversion of water resources.

3) Abuses of administrative detention ( arrest without charges ), at checkpoints and elsewhere.

4) Any instances where the IDF “turns a blind eye” to harassment, crimes or acts of aggression by settlers against Palestinians.

5) Raids of Palestinian homes on flimsy evidence or intelligence.

6) Abuse of prisoners and abusive prison conditions.

7) Violence by the IDF against non-threatening Palestinians, journalists, etc.

I don’t know how widespread these abuses are, but I personally believe all these things are at least sometimes occurring as part of the occupation, and their role in securing Israelis is dubious at best. Whatever research I have been able to do makes these behaviors in most instances appear prima facie punitive in nature and so wrong or criminal.

I care about this sort of thing. Many Israelis could be made to care too. I could easily be recruited to a reform movement on how the occupation is administered and monitored and how Israel holds accountable IDF soldiers deployed in those territories.

Sadly, these issues do not get raised to feed a reform movement. They instead feed a delegitimization movement. The rhetoric around the occupation is such that it treats the Jewish lives the occupation protects as if the Jewish lives have no importance, and as if the elimination of the Jewish state itself would be a good thing. The complaints tend to go from cruelty within the occupation ( which happens ), to accusing the occupation of being illegitimate or badly motivated ( it is not ), to claiming the Israeli state itself is monstrously evil ( it is not ), to then rejecting the very idea of Zionism as fascist and racist ( slander ), even though Zionism is just the idea that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state for the indigenous Hebrew people.

The direction of rhetorical complaint goes from “abuses need to stop” to “erase the state”. This sort of escalation makes it impossible to join voices and, as stated above, it diverts light away from such abuses and tilts it towards defending against the larger ideological attack. It makes otherwise concerned people feel they need to choose between protecting Jewish Israelis and protecting Palestinians.

Here is an analogy. In America, we have a huge prison population. Many exposés exist describing tremendous amounts of bias, abuse and neglect in our prison system and in our legal system more broadly. I and many others support prison reform movements and legal reform movements, and we think the efforts to expose these sometimes awful and cruel abuses are a service to the betterment of our country.

Imagine if the prison and legal reform movements tied their findings of abuse into a movement to abolish prisons and the criminal justice system, and then tied that into a movement to delegitimize America as a nation, and then turned that into a movement to dissolve America as a political union and expose it to attack by its enemies. Support for reform would dissolve. We saw a small taste of this when the Black Lives Matter movement a few years ago went from a tidal wave of support to a trickle after some activists adopted, “Defund the Police” as a motto.

That ideological nesting would make it hard to support prison reform. Yet, a nesting similar to that is what the anti-Zionists present when they critique Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. They erase what is a valid purpose rooted in a real history of conflict, and do it in service of erasing Israel’s essentially moral nature, which in turn is used to erase the idea of a Jewish state itself.

And that’s how a Zionist like me or any Israeli ends up seeming to “not give a damn” about Palestinians. All the moral energy gets siphoned into fending off these larger ideological attacks aimed at erasure. Without these attacks, it would be easier to address policy failures and on-the-ground abuses which could be reformed, to make life more bearable on the battlefield where Palestinians live.

The Palestinian Meta-Narrative Designed to Erase the Jews

In a 1928 paper, physicist Paul Dirac posited the existence of an anti-electron. This was the first example of antimatter, a collection of particles with properties exactly like those found in matter, except oppositely charged. When matter and antimatter collide, they annihilate one another.

Sometime in the 1950’s and going into the 1960’s, looking at the Jewish ability to ally with partners in Europe ( America was not yet a friend to Israel ), the Arabs of Palestine and their Soviet benefactors decided the secret to the Jew’s success was their story. This story consisted of some powerful themes, which provided the Jewish state with certain sorts of credibility in the eyes of the world: moral, historical and legal.

I provided a high-level summary of an important part of this story in an earlier chapter, History and Ideology, and the History of Ideology, Matter.

Thus began what may be history’s most dedicated attempt by one people, today’s Palestinians, to build up their own mythology as a counter narrative to another people’s history. When mature, they envisioned this narrative could act like antimatter does to matter, annihilating the other people’s narrative by reproducing its thematic beats with precisely selected counter beats.

Go deeper: Professor Rashid Khalidi’s sympathetic explanation of the need for a Palestinian counter-narrative

While Palestinian fedayeen warriors were calling for physical genocide against the Jewish people on the land, the authors of the emerging national identity of Palestinians would also attempt to commit genocide on the image of those people inside the historical narrative itself. They hoped achieving annihilation of the Jews in the story-telling sphere would further their goal of annihilation of Israel in the physical sphere.

Here are the beats Palestinians have been playing in the antimatter-like narrative they are constructing.

Palestine, not Israel

Israel and Judea are the ancient names of the Israeli lands. It was the Romans who first gave the name we translate today as “Palestine” to a defined political unit of land, around 130 CE, to punish the Jewish people for revolting against Roman rule. The name refers to the Philistines, Peleshet, who had been the Jewish people’s historic enemy, living on a small strip of land along the Mediterranean coast. These people had nothing to do with today’s Palestinians. Historians believe them to have been a sea faring people from Greece, probably Crete. By naming the whole of Israel and Judea after its enemies, Rome intended to insult the Jews and erase the tie between the Jewish nation and their land.

In Palestinian pseudo-history, this has not been enough. They also want “Palestine” to be as ancient as the Jewish people themselves, to create a parallel. To do this, you will sometimes hear advocates for Palestine refer to Greek works in the BCE era using the word Palaistinê as proof the area was actually called Palestine deep into ancient history. This, too, is a kind of erasure. That word was not what the inhabitants of the land called it. To them, it was Israel and Judea. Palaistinê was used by Greeks and those influenced by them ( like the Romans ), probably as a kind of insulting pun.

Why? The word “Israel” in Hebrew means “to wrestle with God”. The word Palaistinê in Greek means “to wrestle” and also sounds very similar to the word Peleshet, which was the name of the Philistines, Israel’s ancient enemies. For an ancient Greek person, the similarity of these names presented the opportunity for a clever little pun, providing a funny linguistic trick to simultaneously refer to Jews, their enemies, and the fact they were in combat with each other ( “wrestling” ), all while using what is an almost literal translation of the Hebrew word Israel ( “to wrestle with God” ), into a somewhat similar Greek ( “to wrestle” ).

I think it is easy to see why this would be very funny to an ancient Greek, but it would not have been considered so funny to the Jewish people of the time. To them, the land was Israel and Judea. The Philistines were enemies whose name and conflict should not be part of the name for their beloved land. The Greek’s pun would be considered a kind of mocking. That much is simple. No inhabitants of the land, no one who cared about it, called it Palaistinê.

Go deeper: The clever Greek pun which may have given us the name “Palestine”

Why does this matter? The name “Palestine” survived through the ages, falling into much disuse but always known and occasionally used. It generally was just a broad gesture by outsiders to a vague geographic region, like calling a part of America “the Midwest”. Its actual historical significance is small, but its cultural significance as an ancient insult to the Jews meant to tie the land to the name of their enemies is large.

For more than a thousand years, the term “Palestine” did not refer to any well-defined political entity until it was revived by Winston Churchill in 1921. His concern was to save Britain money by shrinking “Palestine” to just the land west of the Jordan river, and preventing Jewish migration to the east. It existed again only for 27 years. By pretending this is an ancient and valid name, the world forces Jews to regularly use a term which was meant as an insult and an erasure. But also, insidiously, by using a name coined by outsiders to evoke the names of Jewish enemies, it inverts truth. It reinforces the false myth of an ancient people who are “Palestinians” native to the land, while suggesting it is actually the Jewish people who are outsiders on the land.

The perniciousness of this is creeping through Western scholarship. More and more, you see scholars writing about ancient history referring to that area as “Palestine” instead of its proper name of Israel and Judea, as if a mocking joke by the ancient Greeks carries more weight as a place name than the proper name used by its people.

In fact, if you click here, you can listen to a serious, scholarly, enjoyable presentation on the Bronze Age. Also, you will hear it casually refer to Israel and Judea as “Palestine”, despite being about a time in history when even the Greeks were not doing that, and being produced during the present day, when Palestine no longer exists. Israel and Judea existed during the Bronze Age, populated by the Hebrew people, and Israel exists today, still populated by the Hebrew people, but apparently that is not something which needs to be acknowledged.

As a result, the Hebrew people get erased in the history of their own land. It does not appear to be consciously malicious. It appears to be a casual adoption, implicitly or explicitly, of a politics which discretely erases the historical Hebrews from their own homeland in favor of their enemies, exactly as the Romans intended.

Colonial Settlers, not Refugees

Jewish people historically were a people conquered, displaced and dispersed by foreign invaders, with no home of their own. It is a powerful part of the Jewish history, and the Palestinians need to erase this beat with a counter beat of their own. In that counter beat, the Jews are white European invaders, who have colonized their land, who stole it, and who ran them off out of racist greed.

The Arabs of Palestine must be cast as refugees from Palestine even though, after 1948, the people who became Palestinians still lived in Palestine. Even more puzzling, they had a Palestinian state of their own, right next to the Jewish one and much larger. If you did not know that, you missed the earlier, very important chapter explaining the Secret Story of the First Palestinian State.

As hard as it is to believe, the Palestinians became the first people in history who were internationally designated as stateless refugees, while in reality living in a state of their own, on their ancestral land, just a few miles down the road from where they started. Because they had to be. The narrative required it. If you did not know that, you missed the earlier chapter, An Intentionally Maintained Forward Army, Not “Refugees”.

And the Jewish people? The Jewish people became the most evil people imaginable, … white people. Europeans. Settlers. Agents of Colonial Power. The Jewish Zionists would not, could not be who history knows them to be: immigrants seeking refuge, as discussed in the earlier chapter, Refugee Immigration, Not Settler Colonialism. All of this is contrary to Hitler’s view of them as a “mongrel race”; contrary to the geographical fact that large numbers of brown skinned Jewish people lived in the Middle East and Africa; contrary to the historical record of Eastern European Jews being poor Semites fleeing persecution in Europe.

For the Palestinians to have been dispossessed, like the Jews were, the land the Zionists lived on must have been stolen. We must erase that the Zionists purchased the land they developed, and they rehabilitated it. They used currency that was known and valid, from money which had been donated to them by other Jews in America and Europe, in an area where money and currency had existed for thousands of years, getting title to the land from Arab owners who often sold it to them at exorbitant prices to exploit their desperation.

The Zionists used courts and property systems long established. They were after all immigrating to a part of the Ottoman empire ( or, later, the British empire ), old European empires quite used to the ideas of property and money, dealing with the people of a well-developed civilization according to the rules of that civilization, and doing it in a civilized way. Many owners of the purchased lands got rich by overcharging the desperate Jews, happy to make the sale because so much of what the Zionists bought was poor land and unproductive.

That history must be erased. In the new history, the Arabs of Palestine are simultaneously a poor, defenseless, unsophisticated, indigenous people subject to the powers of European whim and wealth, unable to cope with what is happening to them, like the indigenous peoples of Australia or America; and, also, they were the beating heart of a great and ancient civilization, stewards of a thriving culture which was disrupted and stolen by the European Jews. They get to have it both ways.

The result? The world’s Jews, in reality a Semitic people conquered and dispersed to the ends of the earth, desperate refugees, the refuse of the earth, get erased in the telling of history, replaced by a new people. This version of Zionists are an amalgam of the worst nightmares of Arabs and of European anti-Semites: European colonialists, cunning and evil, invading a Semitic people’s land carrying endless wealth at their disposal, and who happen to speak Yiddish and tend to have Middle Eastern noses and dark curly hair.

And there you have it. Picked up by Western sympathizers, Palestinians get their counter beat, erasing the historical Jewish experience of being a conquered people returning to their home after long wandering.

The Nakba, not the Holocaust

In the imaginations of the Arabs of Palestine, the fundamental reason Israel exists is the Jewish people exploited the Holocaust. It is so unfair. Why do they get to have the big tragedy?

In the Arab narrative, by using the world’s guilt about the Holocaust, the Jewish people convinced the world to give them the state of Israel and therefore “stole” Palestine from them. My sense from reading Palestinian writings is this is the beat of Jewish history they hate the most and wish to wash away with passion. They blame it for all the power they perceive in Zionism and for their losses.

Go deeper video: Holocaust expert Professor Jan Grobowski discusses the movement to both dilute and universalize the evil of the Holocaust

This Palestinian perspective of course erases the essential truth that Israel was a Jewish project and a Jewish accomplishment, not a European one. It erases many details, such as Zionism started in the 1800’s, not 1945; that the Jewish people had to fight the British to get the British out of Palestine; and the Jewish people established the state of Israel by good, old-fashioned warfare, in which no fewer than five Arab states came to aid the Arabs of Palestine and no one came to aid the Jews. Even the United States had Israel under an arms embargo in 1948.

But, erasure is erasure. The Palestinians need a counter beat in their narrative. What could compare to the Holocaust? More Jews were systematically rounded up and killed in the Holocaust than there were Palestinians in 1948, many times over.

For them, in the new history, it was the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe. This Nakba nominally refers to the displacement of Arabs during the 1948 war. In scholarly literature, it sometimes refers to Israel’s refusal to let the displaced Arabs return ( fearing they would turn Israel into a failed state ). In Arab hearts, it refers to the birth of a Jewish state. In reality, it is used to stand in for all their suffering, caused by their choice to make endless war.

It does not matter that more than a million Arabs lived west of the Jordan river in 1948, and out of all of those people, the number of non-combatants killed in Israel’s 1948 War for Independence numbers in the hundreds, by historical standards a measly percentage for a civil war.

It does not matter that the 15,000 or so armed Arab combatants who were killed in 1948 also started the war.

It does not matter that Arabs laid siege to Jerusalem and tried to starve the Jewish population of the city.

It does not matter that even after the displacements associated with the fighting, those Arabs were still living in Palestine, and even living on the best real estate.

It does not matter that their Arab allies played tit-for-tat, producing a Jewish Nakba, displacing more Jews in Arab lands than the 1948 war displaced Arabs from Israel. If you were not aware of this, you should read the earlier chapter, The Jewish Nakba, A Third Wave of Immigration.

None of the highly relevant points in the earlier chapter Putting Palestine and the Palestinian Nakba Into Perspective matter.

The narrative matters so much, all this must be set aside to try to argue 1948 was actually a genocide, an attempt at narrative you can read about in the earlier chapter Genocide or Just War?.

What does matter? Erasure is what matters. For that, the pain of the 1948 displacement, a temporary material setback, fairly minor in the annals of history, cushioned by enormous amounts of international aid, transitioning quickly and seamlessly into the establishment of a Palestinian state, experienced in usually worse ways around the world by hundreds of millions of others who have recovered far more gracefully, is not nearly enough to erase the Holocaust. As a Jewish writer once said, “So little atrocity, and so much Nakba?” It has to be supplemented with more pain.

Palestinians and their writers accomplish this task by choosing endless, generational war, and supplementing it with all the suffering which occurs because of their choice. Every loss of life or of home due to their war-making becomes part of it. Every tear, every child lost to subsequent battle or martyr operations, is part of their grief. Every humiliation at a checkpoint designed to protect Israelis from martyr operations is heaped into the pile of pain which is the Nakba. Every actual abuse delivered by the malicious IDF soldier or a zealot settler is another bone on the pile.

For the Palestinians, the pain of the Nakba is a mountain that grows with each fruitless day of what they see as their struggle. It allows them to romanticize their endurance and it ennobles their aggression by its essential ties to the existence of Israel itself.

Unlike the Holocaust, the Nakba can be reversed. It is the consequence of aggression and loss by aggressors, and losses can be avenged. In its physical and moral magnitude, it pales in comparison to the Holocaust, which was visited on the innocent. But unlike the Holocaust, it can be present in their lives, while the Holocaust fades with each survivor’s death. The growing pain of the Nakba can be live streamed, for as long as the Palestinians still fight to reverse Israel’s existence. That is the advantage a metaphysical catastrophe of identity has over an historical one. The Nakba is being made more real every day while the Holocaust is being recovered from a little more by each generation.

And so it goes, the playing of a counter beat to the Holocaust. In reality, the Palestinians have produced a faint theme compared to the Jewish original, one characterized mostly by their own folly, but their tragedy is played loudly in the present, and is made for the digital age, overpowering and erasing a Jewish past of black and white photographs, which echoes more and more distantly.

Palestinian people, not Hebrew people

In an earlier chapter, The Hebrew People, Not The Jewish Religion, I described a tiny bit of what it took for the many different tribes living in the land of Canaan 3,500 years ago to become the Hebrew people. The truth is, it was not an event but a long process, with many periods of tension and backtracking. Upon success, several things had to happen.

The differing tribes had to accept a basis for their unity, in which they would be willing to hold their Hebrew identity on a par with or above their clan or tribe identities. They also needed a shared language, religion, culture, heritage, literature, holidays, rituals, understanding of history, method of governance, and so forth which differentiated them from their neighbors and were tied to the land. Through these accomplishments — simultaneous unity and differentiation — over a long period, they transitioned from being many people living with and near one another on the land, to being a people living on their land.

The founding myth of the Hebrew people is that they are one family, descended from Abraham, tied together under one God by a binding covenant for all time. Derived from this, Jewish people anywhere in the world share many of the same tribal stories, the same liturgical religious language, the same core values, the same sacred lunar calendar, the same rituals, the same views on family and work and education, the same mystical alphabet, the same loyalties to tradition, etc., all having originated from the same physical land and place, and differentiating them from any other people on earth. It is by establishing this unity and differentiation, and maintaining it for thousands of years, in good times and bad, that the Jewish people became a people, indigenous to the land of Israel.

We know the Jewish people’s process of becoming a nation and a people was completed at the latest by 1200 BCE, 3200 years ago. Most likely, it was completed hundreds of years before. The oldest known reference to Israel outside of Israel exists on the Merneptah stele, an Egyptian hieroglyphic tablet from 1200 BCE, recording Egyptian military victories:

The princes are prostrate, saying ‘Peace!’
Not one raises his head among the Nine Bows.
Desolation is for Tjehenu;
Hatti is pacified;
Plundered is the Canaan with every evil;
Carried off is Asqaluni;
Seized upon is Gezer;
Yanoam is made non-existent;
Israel is laid waste — its seed is no more;
Kharru has become a widow because of Egypt.
All lands together are pacified.
Everyone who was restless has been bound.

Above, “Canaan” refers to the land, followed by a list of defeated people within or near the land. “Israel” refers to the people living in the land. Obviously, with hindsight, we know the Egyptian description of that victory is a bit overstated.

By achieving this sort of enduring differentiated unity, tracing back to the formation of a people on the land they came from, the existence of the Hebrew people makes it impossible to separate anti-Zionism from antisemitism. I wrote more about this earlier in the chapter, The Incoherence of, “I Am Not Antisemitic. I Am Just Against Zionism.”

This long evolved and well-preserved differentiated unity is why Israel was able to achieve stable nationhood after 1948. Unlike other abandoned colonial states, it did not need an authoritarian strong man to hold it together. This differentiated unity underwriting its peoplehood is why it succeeded with tough measures like banning Yiddish and other languages native to the immigrants, in favor of Hebrew, as one means for achieving national unity. Poland may have hated Germany, but the Polish Jews could join hands with the German Jews and agree on Hebrew.

We know that a population is not a people. Many “artificial countries” created by European powers drawing lines on maps in the 20th century failed because the population in-between those lines was not a people. No one can define exactly what makes peoplehood, in the sense of a nation or a true ethnic group. There’s a sense in which any group of people can declare themselves to be “a people” if they want to, and others should respect this. However, to live and work and govern together in the way a natural people does, these conditions of achieving a sense of unity above clan and tribe, and differentiation from neighbors through things like language, religion, literature, historical myths, traditions, form of government and so forth, are the usual route.

As the era of empires ended during the first half of the 20th century, and the era of nation states replaced it, the Jewish people’s history of being a people has been received as a profound argument for the legitimacy of re-establishing a Jewish state inside the ancient lands of Israel and Judea. It establishes an historical claim which is deep and ancient and pre-dates any modern politics.

Early in the Zionist movement, even the Arabs of Palestine recognized the validity of the Jewish connection to the land. In 1899, the Arab mayor of Jerusalem, Yusef Diya al-Khalidi, said, “Who can challenge the rights of the Jews in Palestine? Good Lord, historically it is really your country.”

The group of Jerusalem elites who organized Arab resistance to Jewish immigration into Palestine called itself the “Arab Higher Committee”, not the “Palestinian Higher Committee”.

Writing about the Soviet “Operation SIG”, established to create an anti-Israel ideology, Eli Cohen and Elizabeth Boyd note,

In the early 1900s, before Israel’s establishment, the term “Palestinian” primarily referred to the local Jews and their institutions. For example, the Palestine Post newspaper (founded in 1932), books on Palestinian folk songs and folk tales, and the Palestinian Philharmonic (founded in 1936) all related to the Jewish people living there and to their institutions. The Arabs living there identified themselves as people of Greater Syria or Transjordan. (Modern Syria leadership still aspires to control not only Lebanon but also Israel and Jordan.) While some Arab families (like the Jews) had lived the pre-British Mandate Palestine for generations, most were immigrants from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, many forcibly relocated by their Islamic Ottoman rulers, some as punishment (Blumi 2013).

Go deeper: The Soviet “Operation SIG” which created the PLO and Anti-Israel Ideology

As late as 1948, at the Jericho Conference where thousands of assembled Palestinian leaders met to ask for the joining of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Jordan, the United States State Department in its internal communications referred to them as the “Palestine Arabs”, which is basically how everyone else referred to them as well,

1. Palestine Arabs desire unity between Transjordan and Arab Palestine and therefore make known their wish that Arab Palestine be annexed immediately to Transjordan. They also recognize Abdullah as their King and request him proclaim himself King of new territory.
2. Palestine Arabs express gratitude to Arab states for their efforts in behalf of liberation of Palestine (Nuweihid indicated object of this was hint to Arab states that their job was done).
3. Expression of thanks to Arab states for their generous assistance and support to Palestine Arab refugees.
4. Resolve that purport of first resolution be conveyed to King at once.

But soon after Israel was formally established in 1948, the Arabs of Palestine began to realize the peoplehood of Jews was an important element of the international support for a Jewish state.

The Arabs who would become Palestinians needed a counter beat to Jewish peoplehood. They realized they would have an easier time claiming international legitimacy for their cause, and to make specific territorial claims, if the Arabs of Palestine were not just Arabs who lived in Palestine, a short-lived British territory west of the Jordan.

They could not simply be many clans and tribes, identifying first with their clan and tribe, and then in a larger sense with the Arabs east of the river or in Syria or Lebanon, with whom they shared the same language, religion, dress, customs, and mythic histories. They must be, instead, the Palestinian people: a unique people living precisely on the lands between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, where Israel happens to exist today.

Thus out of this political necessity, the idea of the Palestinian people was born sometime in the 1950’s, accelerated into declared reality and self-awareness through the 1960’s and 1970’s under the tutelage of the Soviet Union ( which saw an opportunity to support yet another “national liberation” movement which could challenge the United States’ influence ), and hardened in the 1980’s and beyond. The very first time the term “Palestinian People” in the modern sense appeared in print was in a 1964 pre-print of the Palestine Liberation Organization ( PLO ) charter, drafted in Moscow for the PLO by the Soviet propaganda machine.

The need for this political intent is documented. In 1956, Ahmad Shukeiri, a founder of the PLO, echoed this in his testimony before the UN Security Council in his capacity as Ambassador of the Arab League,

Such a creature as Palestine does not exist at all. This land is nothing but the southern portion of Greater Syria. It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.

If you recall from an earlier chapter, The Secret Story of the First Palestinian State, Zuheir Mohsen, an executive member of the PLO , is quoted from his biography saying,

The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

Further proof of this was the original 1964 PLO charter itself, which renounced any claims to the West Bank, Gaza, or even East Jerusalem, claiming as the right of the Palestinian people only the lands where Israel exists,

Article 24. This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or the Himmah Area. Its activities will be on the national popular level in the liberational, organizational, political and financial fields.
Article 25. The Organization is encharged with the movement of the Palestinian people in its struggle to liberate its homeland in all liberational, organizational, political, and financial matters, and in all other needs of the Palestine Question in the Arab and international spheres.

Cohen and Boyd quote Palestinian Minister Fathi Hammad saying as late as 2012,

Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians, and the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Damietta, from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians. We are Arabs. We are Muslims.

They go on to note,

Creating a national identity of Palestinian Arabs as a pre-existing people required inventing a post truth history. Nazmi Al-Ju’beh, associate professor of history and archaeology at Birzeit University, acknowledged this in 2008 when he wrote that Arab Palestinian identity was invented solely to destroy Israel. He writes, “There is no way to understand this identity apart from the conflict” (Al-Ju’beh, 2008). Khalidi (1997) writes similarly. The oldest academic journal to claim Arab Palestinians as a people, the Journal of Palestine Studies, was created in 1972, five years after Operation SIG began. The importance of this is that, once an academic journal publishes a paper, the contents of the paper take on a reputation as credible and its papers are repeated as real by reporters, politicians, and textbook writings. This process creates “fake history” (De Baets, 2019).

In 1968, after Jordan lost the 1967 war, the West Bank and Jerusalem, the PLO re-issued a new charter reflecting the change in hands, which is historically something of a “coming out” document for Palestinian national identity. It makes the existence of Palestinian identity as a counter beat to Hebrew national identity extremely explicit and specific,

Article 19: The partition of Palestine in 1947, and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and its natural right in their homeland, and were inconsistent with the principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations, particularly the right to self-determination.
Article 20: The Balfour Declaration, the Palestine Mandate, and everything that has been based on them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of their own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.
Article 21: The Arab Palestinian people, expressing themselves by armed Palestinian revolution, reject all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine and reject all proposals aimed at the liquidation of the Palestinian cause, or at its internationalization.

And in this same document, the concept of the “Arabs of Palestine”, a group of clans and tribes living in the area but without an identity as a single national people, was fully dissolved to be replaced by “Palestinians”,

Article 4: The Palestinian identity is a genuine, essential, and inherent characteristic; it is transmitted from fathers to children. The Zionist occupation and the dispersal of the Palestinian Arab people, through the disasters which befell them, do not make them lose their Palestinian identity and their membership in the Palestinian community, nor do they negate them.
Article 5: The Palestinians are those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father- whether in Palestine or outside it- is also a Palestinian.
Article 6: The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion are considered Palestinians.

This declaration is the difference between having a group of people who think of themselves as “the white people who live in the Americas” or a group of people who think of themselves as “Americans”. The PLO had to consider some Jews to be Palestinians, a necessity implied by the fact they denied that the Jewish people were a people at all.

Like Hamas some 20 years later, the PLO put the negation of the Jewish people and the destruction of Israel at the very core of its version of Palestinian political identity. The Palestinians are a counter-narrative to the Jewish people. They are a beat inserted into history intended to cancel out the beat of history representing the Hebrew people.

I am not saying here that Palestinians are not a people. If they want to be a people, they can be. No one has a right to say they are not. I am saying they are a new people, the emergence of their national identity is still early in its process, and the question of how they unify and differentiate themselves as a people is very, very problematic.

Do they teach their children the Palestinian language? No, there is no such language. Do they teach their children the Palestinian religion? No, there is no distinctive Palestinian religion. Do they teach their children how to make the hummus and falafel found only in the old British territory between the river and the sea? No, those recipes exist elsewhere too. Do they teach their children their national literature, going back centuries? No, this literature does not exist. Do they teach their children of the times past when they had national sovereignty in the land of Palestine as a people? No, such a time does not exist. Do they teach their children the names of the Palestinian forebears going back to ancient times and the mythic histories of those patriarch’s virtues? No, there are no such myths. Do they teach them the treasured Palestinian political values and systems of government which they created to build and protect their civilization? No, there are no such values and systems.

The Palestinians as a people do not have the sorts of touchstones normally associated with peoplehood. They need to be made.

What do they have instead, around which they can weave such things to make an identity? Grievance and the Nakba. Their heroes do not date back to before their fight against the Zionists.

This is the crux: The differentiating and unifying core of Palestinian identity is the narrative of Zionist invasion, the Nakba and the “struggle” to destroy Zionism and Israel. Their unifying and differentiating identity is intrinsically a negative, implying the need to address a national humiliation, demonize a certain people and destroy a certain nation in an epic redemptive feat of murder, martyrdom and re-taking. The central apocryphal prophecy of their national identity is, “We will kill the Jews and take back what is ours.”

Here are some examples of how this works. Instead of telling themselves about how the Zionists and the Arabs worked together to save the land from malaria by helping them drain the swamps, as described in the earlier chapter, How the Zionists Saved ( Not Conquered ) Palestine, Palestinians have created a negative myth about how the Zionists ruined their ancient pastoral lives by stealing the waters where they used to take their cattle to drink.

Instead of talking about how Arab land owners got rich off of overcharging Zionists for bad land, ultimately freeing many impoverished Arabs from generations of serfdom in a feudal system of subsistence farming, they instead tell themselves stories about how rich, colonist Jews stole land their families had farmed for generations. And so it goes, a litany of grievances based on partial truths and outright falsities, needed to build the national identity.

The false re-telling of Palestinian history infects the body politic of the world and international law. I write about this in detail in the earlier chapter The Illegal Occupation Which Wasn’t, and So Had To Be.

To such a national identity, the destruction of Israel is metaphysical. Without that Nakba-driven grievance, there is nothing in their identity which differentiates and unifies them as a people from the Arabs in Jordan, Syria or Lebanon.

In its initial construction, Palestinian identity requires Jewish erasure. It is a huge obstacle to peace. Israelis find it incredibly difficult to even conceive how there can be compromise or peace with a people who have defined their peoplehood by building a dream of erasure into the essential conditions which differentiate and unify them as a people.

Palestinians are the Jews

As already discussed, “Palestinian” is defined as anyone living in the British territory of Palestine during the British Mandate period. Or, according to the UN agency UNRWA, which manages “Palestinian refugees”, a Palestinian is anyone who was living in the mandate between 1946–1948 or their descendants. This could include as many as 200,000 people who moved to the land well after 1920, just like many Jewish Zionists did.

Within this diverse group, there are Palestinian families who have lived there essentially forever. The latest movement within the Palestinian narrative is to put these families front and center through genetic testing, to claim that Palestinians are the real Jews. The idea is they are Jews who never left the land and converted from Judaism to Islam. Of course there is a complementary note in this beat, which is the claim that all the Zionist refugees who moved to Israel after 1900 are actually false Jews who converted at some point from something else to Judaism, with no historical connection to the original Jews or the land of Israel. The idea being: the “real Jews” stayed, became Muslims, and now are Palestinians.

This is just a racist way to use a blood purity test to erase Israeli Jews as Jews, trying to push forward the PLO / Soviet line above asserting Jewishness is a religion but not a people or ethnicity. So, basically, it is not enough to erase Jews physically through war and terrorism; it is not enough to erase the tragedy of the Holocaust; it is not enough to erase the Hebrew identity. To further the colonist narrative of foreign takeover, putting a spin on it using modern genetics, the current narrative move is to try to erase Israeli Jews as Jews. I won’t give it the respect of a full discussion, other than to say genetic testing shows Jews and old family Palestinians are the most closely related people in the region by genes, to each other, both being descended from ancient people of the Levant.

Trying to create a narrative in which Jews are not really Jews but Palestinians are Jews is truly dedication to narrative.

Palestinian Moral Legitimacy, Not Jewish Moral Legitimacy

The final narrative erasure is to create a counter beat to Jewish morality, as a means to erase Jews morally on top of all the other erasures just discussed. The strategy for doing this is to work at two levels. On the meta-level, Israelis must be accused of doing or being all the reprehensible things which, as a matter of historical fact, others have been to them. This requires Gaza to be a concentration camp; for Israel to be committing genocide against Palestinians; for Jewish settlers to have engaged in pogroms against Palestinians; for the Nakba to have been an ethnic cleansing; for the IDF to be fascists; for Zionists to be Nazis; for Israel to be a racist “ethnostate”; Palestinians must be in “diaspora”; and so forth.

This is all the language of Jewish historical suffering. By using this language, anti-Zionists evoke in their listeners a wall of moral condemnation built into the ordinary understanding of the words, which does not actually fit the situations they use the language to describe. They benefit immensely from this undertow. They benefit because the very effort to explain why the words do not fit, though absolutely true, sounds intellectualized and has a hard time getting past the conjured moral outrage. They benefit because they wrestle it away from the Jewish people to whom it originally applied, erasing their suffering and wounding them spiritually. They also benefit because latent or overt anti-Semitism in their audience gets pardoned, as each such listener can start to feel guilt over past deeds in the Christian world being washed away. The anti-Semitic listener can start to feel: They deserved it. For an anti-Semite, it washes away past sins like a baptism.

It is a morally hideous tactic but it works.

The second benefit the anti-Zionist obtains is they can bring a bill of particulars regarding Israeli or IDF behavior, and by describing it in a dramatic or horrible way, or showing an image of violence or injury, they can play into the confirmation bias already present, due to framing created by those false labels.

The almost universal cure-all to this erasure is to find how the story is rarely what Israel or Israelis did, as the anti-Zionists want to tell it, and almost always the dilemma Israel was maneuvered into.

Did Israel expel some Arabs from villages during its civil war? Well, Palestinian paramilitary groups had been fighting Israelis in a civil war for months, using those villages as recruiting grounds and base camps. The Israelis, who had to prepare for the invasion by the Arab League, faced a dilemma of being forced to fight constant and deadly rearguard actions against Palestinians just as five Arab armies from external nations were bearing down on them or of expelling Arabs from certain villages and towns.

Did Israel refuse to let Palestinians return when the war was over? Neither the Arab nations nor the Arabs of Palestine were willing to make peace and accept the existence of a Jewish state. The population which was either expelled or left is where the Nazi-inspired fedayeen paramilitary troops fighting the Israelis came from, so Israel faced a dilemma of letting the displaced Palestinians return and becoming a failed state or not letting them return and facing international condemnation.

Does Israel maintain a military occupation of the West Bank? The West Bank has for 75 years been a launching pad for fedayeen guerilla operations, state war, individual acts of terrorism and martyr operations against Israeli Jews. As I wrote about in earlier chapters, The Occupation Today and Palestinian Fear of Israelis and Fishing the World’s Memory Hole: The Second Intifada, Israel is faced with the dilemma of allowing itself to be bombed and terrorized into submission or treating everybody in the West Bank like a suspected unprivileged combatant ( which means, like a prisoner of war ).

Did IDF soldiers shoot an unarmed teenager approaching soldiers at a checkpoint? Well, teenagers have been blowing themselves up at checkpoints and knifing soldiers, and this one would not obey orders or procedures. The checkpoint guards were in a dilemma of shooting or of letting him continue to approach and risk getting blown up.

Does Israel behave towards West Bank and Gazan Palestinians like they are in a war and those places are combat zones? Israel is in a dilemma in which it can engage as if it is in a warlike conflict where its soldiers are constantly trying to figure out who the combatants are or they can engage like they are fighting an insurgency using police actions. Or, to boil it down, Israel can protect its own people and soldiers or it can endure the condemnation of leftists and human rights groups who inappropriately judge their soldiers by the standards of police behavior.

And so it goes. This is a tough cure to deliver because it has the feeling of “Yes, but … “. By forcing this conversation, the Palestinian narrative seeks to erase Israel and ( by implication ) Jews morally, by false and unfair framing and by an out-of-context bill of particulars.

Facing 104 years and counting of violence, Israelis also face this sort of narrative erasure, which is intended to strike at their social and spiritual beings the same way terrorism strikes at their physical being. Thus, fatalism sets in along with anger and distrust.

This is a problem for peace. You can make peace more easily with someone who wants to kill you than with someone who wants to erase you. The desire to kill may indicate a dispute about the material world where there is a possibility for compromise. But the desire to erase, … it indicates a hatred so deep and a design so cruel, it does not feel it can ever be placated. No one can compromise when the grievance they face is their very existence.

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This essay is part of a larger resource for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.

All Chapters:

0. Foreword to Zionism and Anti-Zionism

1. The Gish Gallop of Anti-Zionism

2. Genocide or Just War?

3. For Hamas, The Suffering Is The Point

4. What Is Israel? Why So Much Violence?

5. The Hebrew People, Not the Jewish Religion

6. Chosen For Their Insignificance, Not Their Superiority

7. The Incoherence of, “I am not anti-Semitic. I am just against Zionism.”

8. Refugee Immigration, Not Settler Colonialism

9. Zionism, Arab Feudalism, and the Tragedy of the Serfs

10. How the Zionists Saved ( Not Conquered ) Palestine