The Occupation Today and Palestinian Fear of Israelis

8 min readMar 25, 2024

The Accusation Israel Engages In Collective Punishment

Are you familiar with the concept of “perfidy” in the rules of war? It is when a party to war exploits ( or “hacks” ) the rules of war or international law so that another party to the war has no choice but to break the rules to defeat them. An example of perfidy would be, say, sending a teenage girl into the enemy’s territory dressed as a civilian, apparently on a civilian errand, to drop a bomb in a trash can or to stab an old lady. That is perfidy because it takes a combatant and presents them as someone deserving of civilian protections when they are not really deserving of them, then exploits those protections to deliver harm to the enemy. It forces the enemy to perform war crimes because now, in fear of perfidy, the enemy is going to be pressured to protect itself by denying civilian protections to people who really are civilians.

Perfidy is a war crime. It forces the other party into war crimes too because there is no effective way to counter such perfidy without at least sometimes treating real civilians as if they are combatants. Palestinians collectively, in both the West Bank and Gaza, have actively chosen guerilla warfare against Israel and have waged it in such a way as to be guilty of perfidy on a mass scale.

The Palestinian’s entire war against Israel is predicated on perpetrating a giant war crime. Even their chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”, is an incitement to genocide which is also a war crime.

They have been doing this, unreformed, for generations.

Go deeper: The wiki on perfidy

Go deeper on how Palestinians use perfidy:

Use of Red Crescent, Red Cross

Use of hospitals

Use of schools

Use of children as soldiers

Use of civilians as bombers

Use of children as suicide bombers

On June 8th, 2024 in the town of Nuseirat, Gaza, Israeli operatives rescued four hostages held in two different locations. Both locations were civilian locations and on June 17th we learned about one of them in detail from the Wall Street Journal. Here is a bit we were told about the captor,

He worked mornings at a public clinic in the Gaza Strip refugee camp of Nuseirat and afternoons at his own small private clinic, where residents turned to him for procedures such as circumcisions. He also was an imam at a local mosque, where he was known for his beautiful voice when reciting the Quran.
But for the past several months, when he finished his duties each day, he would return home to the apartment he shared with his son, his daughter-in-law and their children — and the three Israeli hostages they were hiding there for Hamas.
[ … ]
Abdullah Al-Jamal’s recent articles for the Palestine Chronicle reported on civilian deaths in the invasion of Gaza, accusing Israel of massacres and genocide.
One article published on June 3, just a few days before he died, talked about Gaza families that had taken in people displaced by the war. It carried the headline, “My House Will Always Be Open.”

This man and his family were combatants in every respect, and so here we have an example of perfidy in every aspect. The captor was also living a “normal” life as a doctor and a religious figure, he used his private home as the prison, he involved his wife, children and grandchildren in this combat operation, and he involved his neighbors. Hamas has hundreds of miles of tunnels and facilities where the hostages could have been kept, so this was a conscious choice to engage in perfidy.

When the Israeli rescuers were trying to leave with the hostages, Hamas’ operatives decided to start a firefight, rather than spare the population in the area by simply letting the hostages be rescued. In the ensuing firefight, the captor was killed along with members of his family. Somewhere between 100 and 200 other people are reported to have been killed. Likely, many of them are “civilians” in the same way the captor and his family was, and the Hamas health ministry will report their deaths as civilian deaths of women and children.

This illustrates well why perfidy is a war crime and also how perfidy can create war crimes in the attempt to fight it. All Palestinian guerilla groups and their allies outside of Palestine engage in an aggressive smear campaign to exploit Israel’s responses to the perfidy, hoping winning a reputational war in the international sphere will allow them to weaken and ultimately destroy Israel in the domestic space.

Go deeper: The Wall Street Journal article on the captor and his family

Palestinians are not hostages of Hamas or the PA

The perfidy is in fact a collective guilt. To see this, please review this latest survey ( of many, going back decades ) of Palestinians themselves showing massive support ( more than 70% ) for armed resistance. Arab sources frame this support as a response to Israeli occupation while Israelis frame the occupation as a response to Palestinian support for violence. I have discussed Palestinian violence against Israel in previous chapters, and I will address it more in chapter twenty, discussing the Second Intifada.

A spring 2024 poll of the Palestinian people by the independent PCPSR illustrates how they are supportive of and collaborate with the crimes of perfidy committed on their behalf and reward the perpetrators socially and politically.

For the purposes of discussion here, the most important thing to know about the goal of Palestinian violence against Israel is that it has always been in pursuit of the goal of destroying Israel proper, not “resistance” against Israeli occupation of the West Bank or of Gaza. This is why the same sort of violence existed from 1929–1967, when Israel did not control those areas, and throughout the 1970’s when settlements and Israel’s military presence were very light.

When Palestinians express their support for armed resistance, it is not for uniformed militaries meeting the IDF on a field of battle. It is for guerilla warfare, in a form which is perfidy and a war crime under international law.

For further evidence of the collective nature of this act, please see the survey below for Palestinian support for Hamas over Fatah. Click on the link below and you will be taken to p 14 for the survey questions and answers: the survey page

You will see in a hypothetical election the Hamas leader trounces the Fatah leader, but loses to the leader of the intifadas. Yes, Palestinians do not “support” Hamas or Fatah when asked straight up, but that is because of the parties’ corruption, not because they want to wage guerilla war against Israel. In fact, these survey results show the more dedicated a political leader is to prosecuting a guerilla war against Israel, the more support that leader has from the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people want a political leadership which will perpetrate violence and war crimes, just not against them.

The biggest lie in the international response to October 7th is the depiction of Gazans as hostage to a terror organization called Hamas. Hamas is rather an expression of their nationalist dream, organically expressing their rage at Israelis, just criticized by Palestinians because they are corrupted by a petty self-interest which hurts the Gazans too.

Saying Israel should fight Hamas but not the Palestinians of Gaza is like saying the allies should have fought the Nazis but not the Germans. It makes no sense.

A battlefield, not an occupation

Here are the four rules for someone to be a lawful combatant in a war,

i) commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates, ii) has a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance, iii) carries arms openly, and iv) conducts operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war

This is the description of a person in a regular army and it privileges them to be covered by the Geneva convention.

Only lawful combatants are entitled to the protections of the Geneva convention. There is such a thing as an ‘unprivileged combatant’. An unprivileged combatant is anyone who intends to participate in hostility but does not meet the definition of a lawful combatant. That is pretty much all Palestinians who participate or intend to participate in their guerilla war.

Now, the key question for Israel is, “Who are the unprivileged combatants?” Anyone suspected of being an unprivileged combatant is supposed to be treated like a prisoner of war, by international convention.

Who are the unprivileged combatants in the West Bank and Gaza? The Palestinians have used teenage boys and girls, adult men and women and the elderly to carry out operations. They could be anyone. Because of the way that the Palestinians have chosen to conduct their war, to Israelis, effectively, all West Bank or Gazan Palestinians at the age of teenager or above are suspected unprivileged combatants. Consequently, effectively all Palestinians in the West Bank are being treated like POWs, which is the proper standard for treatment of suspected unprivileged combatants.

You can rage if you want that such a blanket suspicion is “unjust” or “oppression” or a “humiliation” or a “collective punishment”. But how else could the Israelis prosecute their side of the war? That’s a serious question, not a rhetorical one.

The Palestinian population is massively in favor of perfidy and incitement to genocide, both of which are war crimes, and they are pursuing their war crimes in the guise of unprivileged combatants, using teenaged boys and girls, adult men and women and elderly people. Furthermore, they have spent decades acting out on these attitudes whenever they’ve had an opening, which is important to what I say in subsequent chapters about the settlements and about Palestinian allies in the West pleading about Palestinian fear of the IDF and of settlers.

Go deeper: The wiki on the Laws of War

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