Violence Suppression, Not Racial Oppression

13 min readMar 25, 2024

The Accusation Palestinians Want Peace And Israelis Are The Obstacle

Currently, the Palestinian population in the West Bank is living with few rights and strict checks on their movements from town to town. It is a very sad situation, especially for the children born into it who had nothing to do with bringing it about. Often, activists in the media claim these restrictions are a form of apartheid, citing them as the cause of Palestinian violence and unrest and hatred of Israel. Is that true? How did we get here?

Well, the violence did not start because of checkpoints in the West Bank. The terroristic Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established in 1964, and Hamas’ charter ( Hamas is the actual government of Gaza with significant support in the West Bank ) and its violent methods are a continuation of the PLO’s, just more explicitly and radically Islamic. Hamas’ chief rival, The Palestinian Authority, is a direct descendant of the PLO, which lost the support of the Palestinian people when it tried to negotiate a peace with Israel. They’ve since held onto power through corruption and oppression of Palestinians, making them even less popular.

Go deeper: The Formation of the PLO Was A Soviet ideological tool against the US

The leader of the PLO was a man named Yasser Arafat, who eventually became the first political leader of the semi-autonomous West Bank in the 1990’s. We know about the origins of modern Palestinian nationalism and the origins of the Palestinian “narrative” thanks to post-Soviet reports from KGB handlers of Yasser Arafat. For example, here are some excerpts from a 2003 article in the WSJ which seems to have fallen down the memory hole, written by an ex-KGB agent, Mihai Pacepa, who was one of Yasser Arafat’s handlers,

Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world’s “kings, queens & despots,” with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.
I was given the KGB’s “personal file” on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.
The KGB’s disinformation department then went to work on Arafat’s four-page tract called “Falastinuna” (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students. The KGB was adept at magazine publication and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions.
Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists in our international front organizations. High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a “personal hero” for him — the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was “proud no end” to be walking in his footsteps.
Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American “imperial-Zionism” during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, “imperial-Zionism” was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.
The KGB file on Arafat also said that in the Arab world only people who were truly good at deception could achieve high status. We Romanians were directed to help Arafat improve “his extraordinary talent for deceiving.” The KGB chief of foreign intelligence, General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, ordered us to provide cover for Arafat’s terror operations, while at the same time building up his international image.
“Arafat is a brilliant stage manager,” his letter concluded, “and we should put him to good use.” In March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. “You simply have to keep on pretending that you’ll break with terrorism and that you’ll recognize Israel — over, and over, and over,” Ceausescu told him for the umpteenth time. Ceausescu was euphoric over the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the olive branch.

Go deeper: The WSJ account written by Pacepa,

Go deeper: An article about the same operation, but not behind a paywall.

The PLO began three years before the 1967 war, at a time when Israel had no control of the West Bank or Gaza, a time sixteen years before the small early settlements on the West Bank started to grow. As provocative as the settlements are, and as onerous as the checkpoints are, the current violence is a continuation of that PLO agenda. Saying otherwise is repeating propaganda. A supermajority of Palestinians support Hamas over any group which has advocated peaceful co-existence with Israelis.

Yes, Palestinians are angry about settlements. Settler violence is a real thing and some of it is unprovoked. But it isn’t the reason for Palestinian violence against Israelis or Israel. Saying Palestinian attitudes towards Israel are caused by settlements and checkpoints transparently gets the causality backwards, and are really substitute rhetoric for what the Palestinian fight is really about. The checkpoints and settlement regime exist to keep Palestinian violence in check, not the other way around.

How do we know? We know because the exact same sort of violence and expressions of Palestinian nationalism pre-dates these things by decades and, also, because, according to the UNODC ( UN Office of Drugs and Crime ), the level of murder in the West Bank and Gaza ( before the recent outbreak of war ), including murders by Israeli settlers and murders by Palestinians against Israeli settlers and murders among Palestinians themselves, was 1.4 per 100,000. That puts the rate of violent death among West Bank Palestinians right around the murder rate in Denmark.

The rate in Canada was 2.9, in the EU was 3.0 and in the United States was 6.8.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear activists comparing Israelis to Nazis while claiming burning families to a crisp and committing mass rapes is “justified resistance”. The violent incidents around the settlement areas are low level border skirmishes, not Nazi operations.

Go deeper: The Wiki on the Munich Massacre, pre-dating settlements

Today’s Palestinian attitudes and actions are the continuation of a nearly 100 year war, whose underlying resentments began with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which opened the area of Britain’s Palestine Mandate to Jewish immigration. There were only about 750,000 people living on land encompassing both modern Israel and Jordan, and which today supports nearly 30 million people. The declaration explicitly laid out that non-Jewish people already living there would have full religious and civil freedoms under a secular governance.

Very little of the land was owned by the people we today call “Palestinians”. At the time, they were simply Arabs who lived in Palestine, which had been governed for thousands of years by imperial powers. The Arabs in Palestine were poor and owned very little. After hundreds of years of Muslim Ottoman rule, about 80% of the land was owned by the occupying government ( Ottoman’s, then the British ) and more than 15% were owned by Arab landlords, many of whom lived in other regions, and who enslaved the peasant Arabs of Palestine as subsistence farmers living in grinding poverty.

Go Deeper: The Jewish Virtual Library on Palestine before Jewish immigration

Here are some quotes offered by the Jewish Virtual Library if you follow the link above, to give you a flavor of the character of the land before Jewish immigration:

Mark Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867, described it as: “…[a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds-a silent mournful expanse….A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action….We never saw a human being on the whole route….There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”
During the Annual General Meeting of the PEF in 1875, the Earl of Shaftesbury said of Palestine, “We have there a land teeming with fertility and rich in history, but almost without an inhabitant — a country without a people, and look! scattered over the world, a people without a country.”
As late as 1880, the American consul in Jerusalem reported the area was continuing its historic decline. “The population and wealth of Palestine has not increased during the last forty years,” he said.
The Report of the Palestine Royal Commission quotes an account of the Maritime Plain in 1913: The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts…no orange groves, orchards or vineyards were to be seen until one reached [the Jewish village of] Yabna [Yavne]….Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen…. The ploughs used were of wood…. The yields were very poor…. The sanitary conditions in the village were horrible. Schools did not exist…. The western part, towards the sea, was almost a desert…. The villages in this area were few and thinly populated. Many ruins of villages were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants.
Lewis French, the British Director of Development wrote of Palestine: We found it inhabited by fellahin who lived in mud hovels and suffered severely from the prevalent malaria….Large areas…were uncultivated….The fellahin, if not themselves cattle thieves, were always ready to harbor these and other criminals. The individual plots…changed hands annually. There was little public security, and the fellahin’s lot was an alternation of pillage and blackmail by their neighbors, the Bedouin.

Go deeper video: Mark Twain’s experiences in Palestine

Jews from all over the world donated money so the immigrants could legally buy land and live in their ancestral homeland. It wasn’t being “stolen”. Some — and only some — of the purchased land was bought from the absentee Arab landlords and, because the Jewish immigrants wanted to live on it themselves, they evicted the Palestinian tenant farmers. In retrospect, this was the “original sin” of the early Zionists but it was more desperation to save their own people than anything else.

One of the buyers was the Jewish National Fund, and the leader Yosef Weitz kept a diary in which he expressed profound conviction after the end of the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine, during which the Arabs of Palestine tried to kill all the Jewish immigrants or drive them away, that it would be impossible for the two people to ever live together. It was 1939, Europe was on the brink of flame and death, and Jewish people were desperate for a refuge. Writing amidst the blood and ashes of the Palestine revolt, it seemed to him clear either the western lands of Palestine could be made safe for Jewish people or for Arabs. It did not seem it could be both. This was the dilemma.

In 1937, the British Peel Commission, as part of a larger British effort to find a solution to hostilities, investigated Arab complaints about Jews illegally or unfairly obtaining land. After investigation it concluded,

Addressing the Arab charge that the ‘Jews have obtained too large a proportion of good land’ [it] cannot be maintained”, and the Commission noted that “Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased … The shortage of land is, we consider, due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population. Endeavors to control the alienation of land by Arabs to Jews have not been successful. In the hills there is no more room for further close settlement by Jews; in the plains it should only be allowed under certain restrictions.

This large “increase in Arab population” described by the Peel commission is rarely mentioned today. Make a note in your mind as you read the next paragraph.

The Arabs responded to incoming Jewish immigration by demanding the mandate be rescinded. The demand wasn’t because the land was already teeming with people. Based on a balanced analysis of the contentious topic by Paul Blair, up to two-hundred thousand Arabs may have emigrated to the land which became Israel between 1900 and 1940 and there was no protest. Today, descendants of those Arabs are considered “Palestinians” along with descendants of Arabs who were there before 1900. Yet, somehow Jews descended from those arriving during the same period are called “Zionist colonizers”.

Go deeper: Paul Blair’s careful analysis of the Arab immigration disputes

This is important. During the period between 1900 and 1948, there were large influxes of both Jews and Muslim Arabs into that land, which before had consisted of huge open spaces, small villages, and small cities. It is, in fact, anti-Semitic to object only to the Jewish immigration while backgrounding and ignoring aggressive Arab immigration.

The demand for Britain to rescind the mandate was because the Muslims hated the thought of living with “too many” Jews or under a Jewish-led government, and in particular could not stomach the idea of a large outsider Jewish population in what they considered Muslim land. Muslims believe Jews should live under Muslims as “dhimmi”, or “tolerated/protected people” who should pay a protection tax called a jizya ( until the time comes they are no longer tolerated or protected ). While many Muslims like to say this was a great life for the non-Muslim dhimmi, the Jews who had to live it didn’t agree and do not want to go back to that arrangement.

Having grown up in the American South, hearing Muslims speak about how peacefully they lived with Jewish people “before the Zionists showed up”, reminds me of racist southerners I grew up with, reminiscing wistfully about how segregation and slavery were not that bad, and how “the blacks” were happy then, and everyone got along before the outside trouble makers of the civil rights movement showed up and stirred the pot.

Truthfully, subjugated people learn to be meek, and the subjugated Jews of the Ottoman Muslim empire learned to keep their place. That is why they lived “peacefully”. The Zionists who came from Europe would not play by those same rules of subjugation. The Zionists caused trouble, which is why they could not be tolerated, and the liberated descendants of Jews who once lived under Muslim rule mostly would rather fight and possibly die than go back to it.

Go deeper: A primer on dhimmi

The Arab Muslims of Africa even today sometimes practice the same acts of subjugation and slavery against non-Muslims and non-Arab Muslims as they did then. It is not small scale, either, but large populations being subjugated or enslaved. Slavery has been de facto legalized and expanded by the Houthis in Yemen fairly recently. The link below contains a good, in-depth discussion of it. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian “liberation” groups speak of Jews and Jewish Israelis in the same ways Arabs massacring and enslaving other people speak of their targets.

Many of the manipulated young people in the “Free Palestine!” movement are marching in the streets and engaging in advocacy to make the Jews in Israel vulnerable to the same treatment, and they are doing it under the banner of human rights.

Go deeper: How Arab Muslims Are Exterminating Indigenous Africans In Sudan Right Now

Go deeper video: The Houthis of Yemen Are Expanding The Practice of Slavery

There are basically two narratives about why there is no Palestinian state. One narrative says it is because the Israelis are greedy monsters who want to kill or drive out all the Palestinians and take all the land. The other is a narrative saying that the Israelis are afraid of millions of Palestinians getting a state on its borders because they want to kill the Israelis, destroy the Jewish state and establish their state on the bones of Jewish people.

The first narrative has some truth to it, as Israel has a faction of fundamentalist religious nationalists who think like that. These people have done some awful things, sometimes with the help of Israel’s government. The second narrative has much more truth to it and is what actually drives Israel’s actions in the grand arc of this conflict. Read more chapters to learn the details.

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