PART TWO

WHAT PALESTINIANS BELIEVE

Are modern Israelis colonisers of the land?

You will often read that Israelis are from Europe or America, and that they don’t belong in ‘Palestine’. Well, let’s first of all look at whether Jews, from anywhere, belong in Israel. You can see immediately that the problem people have when they say Europeans and Americans don’t belong in Palestine is that they are saying there is no such country as Israel. That, of course, is their problem, not ours. If they cannot accept there is a country called Israel, there is nothing to discuss, is there?

So, moving on, do people from Europe and America belong in Israel? Naturally, any country is at liberty to welcome people from anywhere to become citizens. I live in the United Kingdom, and every single day people migrate to the UK, sometimes from countries where people say no-one should migrate to Israel, which is odd but there you are. People migrate.

The problem anti-Zionists have with people migrating to Israel is twofold. First, they don’t believe there is a country called Israel (you might notice on social media they type ‘Israel’ like that, in quotes, to avoid naming the country. If they were Jewish, they would probably spit three times after typing the word, to ward off evil spirits.) Secondly, they don’t like Jews. Well, they might not mind Jews too much, but they mind them in what they consider to be Arab lands (which in a nutshell defines the entire conflict, but more of that elsewhere).

I must mention here their fixation on Jews coming to Israel from Europe and America (which they often call ‘Brooklyn’). This leaves two groups of Jews they never think about, either through ignorance (which is certainly true) or because they don’t want to admit this is fallacious. Actually it’s probably both.

I don’t need to tell you that Palestinians are obsessed with what they call the ‘nakba’ (which I shall probably go into elsewhere), by which they reckon that 750,000 ‘Palestinians’ (by which they mean Arab Palestinians) were forced out of their homes and off their land, in 1948, to dwell evermore in exile, clutching the rusting keys to their properties, dreaming of something they call the ‘return’. Never mind that for now. My point here is that they will NEVER admit that there was a parallel nakba, when perhaps 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries around the same time.

So, were the Jewish wanderers colonisers of the land? Well, first of all you can’t be a coloniser of your own land, and here I have to remind you Israel was a sovereign state at this time, entitled to allow anyone it wanted to to come and live there. And secondly, unlike the Palestinian ‘refugees’ (who were denied statehood in Palestine and remain stateless 75 years later), the Jewish refugees were taken in and given statehood.

And finally I want to come to the Jewish Israelis the Palestinians really really hate to talk about. These are the Israelis descended from the Jewish Palestinians of the Mandate who became Israelis on 15th May 1948 (the very date the Arab Palestinians became ‘the Palestinians’). The Jewish Palestinians who became Israelis in 1948 have been airbrushed from the Palestinian victimhood narrative.

This seems like a good place to mention an expression Palestinians hate. They say Jews claim that Palestine was ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’. I have to say, as an author I would have been chuffed to come up with that. It says so much. Here, though, I must confess it was not coined by Israelis or even Jews, it was coined by the British Lord Shaftesbury in 1884. Bless him.

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People who hate Israel never talk about the Arab Israelis

The other group of people who have been airbrushed from the Palestinian victimhood narrative are the Arab and other non-Jewish Israelis. The victimhood narrative is predicated on the enemy of the Palestinians being Jews, not Israelis, because to admit that two million Israelis are not Jews but are largely content to be Israelis rather than Palestinians would pull the rug out from under the narrative. The narrative says Arabs have been dispossessed by the Jews and are victims of Jewish oppression. Two million citizens of Israel is a lot of people to try to hide, but the anti-Zionists manage to do that. I would not go as far as to call Arab Israelis Zionists, but there is an argument that this is actually what they are. Forgetting for the moment that Zionism is about the Jewish National Home, it is also simply about the State of Israel, so why should any and all citizens of the state not be Zionists? If you are ever in a debate with anti-Zionists, don’t forget to bring up this point. It will bamboozle them (which is always fun), which you will know because they will start shouting at you or laughing at you to hide their embarrassment at being so ignorant, or they will walk off in a huff.

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People who hate Israel claim Israelis hate the Palestinians.

This is classic victimhood-claiming. I am not Israeli, but bear with me while I make some fairly reasonable assertions.

People understandably hate those who hate them, and there is little doubt Palestinians hate Israelis. They have been trying to destroy the State of Israel for 75 years, so I don’t think that is an unreasonable statement. However, perhaps ‘hate’ is not really a useful word in this context. My guess is Israelis fear Palestinians rather than hate them. They might not actually have thought about the difference but I reckon if they were asked that is what they would say. My guess is that the average Israeli, Jewish Israeli anyway, just wants the Palestinians to leave Israel alone. My personal view, as a British Jew, is that I don’t hate anyone for their race and I just want people not to hate me for mine. In short, I want non-Jews to leave us alone.

I am pretty sure the overwhelming desire of Israelis is that they want the Palestinians to leave them alone. Sadly, though, the Palestinians don’t share that feeling. Palestinian propaganda is based on the assertion that ‘the Jews’ hate the Palestinians, and so the Palestinians must defend themselves from the Jews. The problem with this is that it just isn’t true, any of it.

Look, let’s use Nazi Germany as an analogy. The National Socialists publicly proclaimed that German Jews hated Germany and so Germany was right to wage war against them. It wasn’t true, of course, it was nothing more than a casus belli, an excuse. German Jews didn’t hate German non-Jews, and they just wanted German non-Jews to leave them alone. The non-Jews said oh yes you do, and we’re going to kill you because of it. Well, how do you defend yourself against the accusation that you are doing something you are not doing?

So is the Palestinians’ claim that Israelis hate them based on anything Israel has done to them? Are they saying Israel has abused and persecuted them so Israelis must hate them? Yes, of course they are. The problem with this is that Israel has done no such thing. Israelis didn’t start any wars against the Palestinians; it was the other way round. So the conclusion here is that when Palestinians say Israel persecutes them what they mean is Israel won’t let them win any wars. Every time the Palestinians attack Israel, either in conjunction with Arab states or as terrorists infiltrating Israel, Israel fights back, and this, the Palestinians say, is persecution.