9 Myths about Israel/Palestine

(in no particular order)

Mar 14, 2024

Myth #1: Israel and Palestine are in “conflict” with each other

To frame a political struggle as a “conflict” connotes a struggle between two parties of comparable if not equal power. It is wholly inadequate as a framing of the relation between Israel and the Palestinians. On one side, there is Israel: an expansionist superpower boasting the fourth-strongest military on earth and supported by the entire political West. Since 1947, this support has given Israel the military and political capability needed to pursue two of its founding goals: seizing as much Palestinian land as possible while ridding it of as many Palestinian people as possible. On the other side, there are the Palestinians: an Indigenous population with no army, no air force, sovereignty, and virtually no international allies struggling to remain on their land in the face of a 76-year colonial onslaught. It would be absurd to frame Native Genocide on Turtle Island as a “conflict” between European powers and Indigenous nations, or to describe the struggle against Jim Crow as a “Black-White conflict.” It is equally misleading to frame the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in these terms.

Myth #2: Hamas “started” a war on October 7

Israel’s war with the Palestinians did not begin last October. It began in 1947, when Zionist militias first began massacring Palestinian communities and depopulating Palestinian villages to pave the way for an exclusivist Jewish ethnostate. From its founding to the present, Israel has existed in a continual state of war against the Indigenous people whose lands it steals and occupies, whose history it erases, whose homes it demolishes, whose children it murders, and whose communities it drives into permanent exile. The Palestinian surprise attack of October 7 did not initiate war; it was one grisly episode among countless others in a decades-long war in which Israel, not the Palestinians, has always been the foundational aggressor and the political power-holder.

Myth #3: A “two-state solution” is the only way forward

Israel was founded upon the violent conquest of nearly 80% of historic Palestine, accompanied by the forced expulsion of more than 50% of its Indigenous population. Aside from being politically unrealistic, calls for a “two-state solution” problematically attempt to normalize rather than rectify these foundational acts of violence. Even if Israel were to permit Palestinians to exercise some limited form of sovereignty in the remaining 20% of their historic homeland, this would do nothing to address the plight of the millions of Palestinian refugees who have for generations been denied their legal and moral right to return to lands inside the “Jewish State.” Nor would a two-state settlement address the escalating regime of apartheid imposed by Israel on its own Palestinian “minority” (i.e., those Palestinians who managed to remain inside the territories conquered by Israel during its founding). The root cause of violence in Israel/Palestine is, and will always be, the colonial ideology of Zionism, which declares that Jewish people possess rights to life, dignity, and self-determination in historic Palestine that all other peoples lack – Indigenous Palestinians especially. Two states or not, there will never be peace in the land until this racist and ethnosupremacist ideology is dismantled once and for all, from the river to the sea.

Myth #4: Israel/Palestine is a “complex” issue

The world is home to a number of genuinely complex conflicts. Israel/Palestine isn’t one of them. On one side, there is Israel: an expansionist ethnostate intent on colonizing as much Palestinian land as possible while ridding it of as many non-Jews (i.e., Palestinians) as possible. On the other side, there are the Palestinians: an Indigenous people struggling for life, dignity, and self-determination in the face of a century-long colonial assault. What Israel does to Palestinians closely parallels what Australia, the United States, and other settler-colonial states have done (and continue to do) to Indigenous peoples elsewhere. What Palestinians do by way of resistance closely parallels what Indigenous nations, Algerians, Vietnamese, and other colonized peoples have done in combating their own oppression. There’s nothing “complex” about colonialism, apartheid, or genocide – unless, of course, you regard Palestinians as less human, less valuable, or less deserving of basic dignity than their Israeli oppressors.

Myth #5: Hamas uses Palestinians as “human shields”

For all its parroting in mainstream US media coverage, there is no credible evidence that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields. This allegation has been thoroughly and repeatedly investigated by human rights organizations and international commissions, all yielding the same conclusion: Hamas has no track record of using Palestinians as shields, though Israel has done so repeatedly. That this allegation has managed to “stick” for so long in public discourse despite being repeatedly debunked is a reflection of how desperate Israel and its US supporters are to explain the horrific number of children Israel kills annually, particularly during its assaults on Gaza. Israel kills more children per capita than nearly any country on earth, and killed more children in the last five months alone than were killed in all the world’s war zones combined over the last three years. Rather than take responsibility for these appalling facts, Israel blames Palestinians themselves for the murderous violence it inflicts on their sons and daughters.

Myth #6: Israel is “singled out” for criticism

While Zionists protest that Israel is unfairly “singled out” for criticism, in fact the opposite is true. Israel has been in flagrant violation of international law since 1948, but has never faced serious legal, political, or international consequences for its behavior. Why? Because the US and other Western powers have, as a matter of policy, vetoed every actionable UN resolution that would deliver material justice for the Palestinians or accountability for Israel. When other “rogue states” invade and occupy others’ lands, they are immediately hit with punishing sanctions regimes, diplomatic censure, and threats of international intervention. Israel, by contrast, has faced virtually no political consequences for its 56-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, its regime of apartheid across the whole of historic Palestine, or its long history of invading and stealing land from its neighbors. As US citizens, we bear a special responsibility for opposing and calling out Israel’s crimes – not because they are qualitatively different from the crimes of other racist and expansionist states, but because Israel’s crimes are directly and materially enabled by our government, our tax dollars, and our institutions.

Myth #7: Israel is a democracy

About 14 million people live under Israeli rule today – roughly 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians. For more than 5 million of those Palestinians, Israeli rule takes the form of illegal military occupation. Possessing no political, legal, or national rights, Palestinians living under occupation in the 1967 territories have precisely zero say over the government that steals their land, confines them to ghettos, and controls every aspect of their lives. The remaining 1.6 million Palestinians live as third-class citizens of Israel, where more than 65 laws prevent them from purchasing land, expressing their national identity, and exercising other basic rights allotted to their Jewish “co-citizens.” Throughout the entirety of historic Palestine – as Palestinians have attested for decades and Western human rights organizations have belatedly confirmed – Israel operates a regime of apartheid anchored in the principle of Jewish supremacy. This regime is no more “democratic” than was Jim Crow or apartheid South Africa.

Myth #8: “From the river to the sea” is a call for genocide

Over the course of the last century, Palestinians have repeatedly proposed living in a single democratic state in which Muslims, Jews, Christians, and other groups would share equal citizenship. Despite being obviously humane, these proposals run counter to the core ideological tenet of Zionism: the idea that only Jews are entitled to self-determination in the land of Palestine, all other populations constituting “demographic threats” to the ethnic purity of the so-called Jewish State. “From the river to the sea” is a call to end this racist privileging of one ethnic group over all others: a call for no more ethnostates, no more ethnic cleansing, no more apartheid, and no more land theft anywhere in historic Palestine. That Zionists insist on interpreting calls for a free Palestine as calls for anti-Jewish genocide is a classic instance of colonial projection: unable to imagine Jewish Israelis living in Palestine except as colonial overlords, Zionists assume that Palestinians will never live alongside Jews without inverting this oppressive structure. In reality, Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived as neighbors in Palestine for many centuries before Israel’s founding. It is the colonial ideology of Zionism that disrupted this social fabric, and it is Zionism that must be dismantled for this fabric to be restored.

Myth #9: “Self-defense isn’t genocide”

There are two problems with this line of post-October 7 Zionist propaganda. First, putting aside the fact that Israel cannot legally be in a position of self-defense toward lands it violently occupies, scarcely any Israeli civilians have been killed since October 7. As Israeli officials have repeatedly made clear, the intent of Israel’s genocidal campaign is not to defend Israelis from ongoing Hamas attacks, but rather to make Gaza “unlivable” until the whole of its population has been either exterminated or permanently expelled to the Egyptian desert. Second, the Armenian and Libyan genocides, among many others, were likewise perpetrated in the name of self-defense and “counter-terrorism.” Systematically starving, massacring, and striving to expel an Indigenous population is genocide in its most straightforward form, no matter what grievances are used to justify it.

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