The Pro-Palestinians have No Good Arguments
It is Politically Correct to say that the Israel-Palestinian dispute is complex and that both sides make valid points. It is not true. The "Pro-Palestinian" points are lies
Nachum Kaplan
With antisemitism at boiling points across the globe and the international community having temper tantrums against Israel, it is easy to forget that the Palestinians have no good points at all in their dispute with Israel. This essay from November 7, 2024, shows just how weak the “pro-Palestinian” arguments are, and that they are based on malicious lies.
Whenever there is a dispute, acknowledging both sides’ grievances, looking for common ground and searching for solutions is a natural and reasonable approach. However, it presupposes that both sides have some valid points.
This is often true, but not in the case in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, where greater knowledge invariably leads to a more pro-Israel position.
The inverse is also true. The most “pro-Palestinian” people are unfailingly the most ignorant of those pesky little things called facts. The Dunning-Kruger effect seems to be in full-swing as most “pro-Palestinian” supporters do not grasp the immensity of their ignorance.
Once you parse the facts from the lies, it is stunning how few good points the anti-Israel blockheads can muster.
It is not that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is not complex; it is fiendishly so. It is that the conflict, by Palestinian design, is not what the anti-Israel brigade believes it to be, or wants it to be.
The Palestinian narrative rests upon a foundational myth that Palestinians are from Palestine; then Jews came in from all over the world, occupied the land, forced them out, established the Jewish state, and have been dispossessing and persecuting the Palestinians ever since.
Yet, it is all untrue, meaning that most “pro-Palestinian” arguments are meritless.
Bad Argument #1: The Palestinians are indigenous to the land.
This is rubbish. The Arabs who today call themselves Palestinians are not from Palestine.
There is a clue in the name. Arabs are from Arabia, just as the Israelites were from Israel. Jews are from…wait for it…you will never guess…Judea.
Jews have lived in Israel, mostly without sovereignty, for at least 3,300 years, making them indigenous. Jews have lived continually in cities such as Hebron, Safed, Jerusalem, and Tiberius.
Arabs first came to Israel during the Islamic conquests in the 7th Century, so there are Arabs who lived there for a long time. They are mostly Bedouins, pastoral semi-nomads who have been working the same herding routes for generations.1
Palestine was sparsely populated during Ottoman rule, during the British Mandate, and right up until well after Israel’s independence in 1948. The British Census of 1932 put the population at 1.03 million (73% Muslim, 17% Jewish, and 9% Christian), versus about 14 million people in Israel and the Palestinian territories today.2
As the exiled Jews returned to rebuild their homeland, the economy boomed. Arab immigrants poured in from Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon, to seek their fortunes.3 This is why most Palestinians today have Egyptian family names.
Rarely mentioned is that while the Jews are unquestionably indigenous, the current populations of both Jews and Arabs in Israel came from elsewhere in relatively recent generations.
If aliens came to Earth tomorrow from a planet orbiting Alfa Centauri - presumably because some diversity hire input the wrong hyperspace coordinates and landed not just in the Milky Way, but in the Negev - they might well view the conflict as between two immigrant groups, with all the historical nuances as a footnote.
Bad Argument #2: The Jews dispossessed the Palestinians and drove them out.
This is nonsense. Transjordan (now Jordan) was carved out of the British Mandate in 1921 to create an Arab state in Palestine, with the rest to be a Jewish homeland as per the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the San Remo Conference in 1920.
Granting statehood is the opposite of dispossession. Jordan is a Palestinian state.
The newly created United Nations (UN) in 1947 further agreed to partition the remainder of Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and yet another Palestinian Arab state. The Jews accepted this, but the Arabs rejected it and chose the war they have been losing ever since.
Five Arab states then attacked Israel upon it declaring independence in 1948 and tried to kill the country at conception. If the Arab states had not done this, there would not have been a single Arab refugee.
In the war, some Palestinians fled the fighting and a few were dispossessed, as happens in war. The vast majority, however, left because Arab armies told them to do so, promising they could return once the Arab armies had massacred all the Jews.4
Israel won the war, gained and lost territory in the fighting, and those Palestinians who fled could not return as borders had changed. That is how the 700,000 Palestinian refugees were created, although these people mainly remained in what was Mandatory Palestine. There was no policy of dispossession or displacement.
Palestinian Arabs did not have to leave. Many chose to stay and they became Israeli citizens with full rights, which is why Arab-Israelis make up 20 percent of Israel’s population.
Take a stroll around Dubai since the Abraham Accords were signed in 2020 and you will fall over vacationing Israeli-Arabs having a great time.
There was another group of refugees from the War of Independence, which was the 850,00 Jews that Arab states dispossessed and expelled.56 This larger dispossession and ethnic cleansing is less known because it undermines the Palestinian victimhood narrative.
Israel viewed these two refugee groups as a population exchange, which was happening globally and often catastrophically as Europe’s empires unraveled and borders were redrawn.7
The Arabs rejected this view and countries such as Egypt and Jordan refused to grant Palestinian refugees citizenship and interned them in refugee camps where their descendants remain to this day.
Bad Argument #3: The Jews are occupying Palestine
Completely wrong. Go to the back of the class. This is related to the first bad argument. Jews are the indigenous people of Israel. The idea that you can occupy yourself makes no sense.
Those who argue that Israel’s very existence is an occupation of Arab lands are talking drivel. They are usually Islamist sociopaths with a religious desire to murder Jews and destroy Israel.
Holders of this disgusting view include the “moderate” Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the morons protesting on Western university campuses and their brain-dead lecturers.
Another reason Israel is not occupying Palestine is that there is not, and never was, any such country called Palestine to occupy.
Upon hearing this, most “pro-Palestinian” supporters put their fingers in their ears and yell lah-lah-lah until the conversation moves on. They are too limbically hijacked even to hear the facts, let alone engage with them.
The Arabs living in Palestine just viewed themselves as Arabs. This is why when Jordan illegally occupied and annexed Judea and Samaria in the 1948 war, and ethnically cleansed it of Jews, there were no calls from Arabs or the international community for a Palestinian state. Why would there be? There was no occupied or disputed territory, only a desire to eliminate Jews.
This game of pretending there was a country called Palestine and a people called the Palestinians only began when it became clear the Arabs could not defeat Israel militarily.
You can track this strategy change through the conflicts’ nomenclature. The conflicts in 1948, 1956, and 1967 were the first, second, and third Arab-Israeli Wars. After that it became the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
This lie of the Palestinians being a people who wanted a state was invented in the 1960s, with the Soviet Union as a prime driver.8 This was the birth of the modern strategy of trying to destroy Israel via a fictional Palestinian nationalist struggle.
Bad Argument #4: Israel is undertaking a land-grab in Judea and Samaria.
Incorrect. You need to renew your library card if the introduction of QR codes has not defeated you,. There is a political consensus that Judea and Samaria is illegally occupied, but for those few of us who still care about facts it is more correct to call the territory disputed.
The international media likes to categorize Jewish settlements as a land-grab because they are biased, lazy, ill-lettered, know-nothings - and that is on their better days when they are not hungover.
For those who care about facts, Israel began building settlements in Judea and Samaria after the Six-Day War in 1967 not as a land-grab (the region was meant to be part of Israel until the deceitful British started backpedaling on their Mandate commitments), but as a security buffer against further Arab attacks.
To understand this reasoning, consider that Hamas could not have launched its October 7 pogrom if Israel had not dismantled its Gaza settlements. This is a standalone security point.
More recent Israeli policy towards Judea and Samaria goes back to the 1993 Oslo Accords that Israel signed in a moment of insanity when it believed it could trade land for peace with Islamists whose religious mission involves killing Jews.
The Accords divided Judea and Samaria into areas A, B, and C. The corrupt and conniving Palestinian Authority (PA) administers densely populated Area A, which makes up 18 percent of the territory. The PA administers Area B, but shares security responsibilities with Israel. It accounts for 21 percent of the area. Most Palestinians live in areas A and B.
Israel administers Area C, which is 61 percent of Judea and Samaria. It is rugged, hilly, sparsely populated, undeveloped, and home to the “controversial” Jewish settlements on which the media likes to misreport. Building on empty land is not dispossession.
While there are a few extremist and violent Jewish settlers who cause problems, that is because Israel is too lenient and, at times, willfully negligent in its policing of them. The violence is also often a backlash to Palestinian attacks. The settlements are not some great game-changing point. They are not even interesting.
It is also specious to claim it is land-grab because the Palestinians want this land for a future state. That is patent gobbledygook. As everyone who has made even the most trivial effort to understand the dispute knows, the Palestinians do not want a state alongside Israel, they want one in place of it.
Bad Argument #5: Israel is persecuting Palestinians through an apartheid system
Utter gibberish. This is a favorite claim among those who are not afraid to embarrass themselves in public. Israeli-Arabs are full citizens with more rights than anyone else in the Arab world.
Admittedly, that is a low bar as most Arab states - including the Palestinian territories - are dictatorships that practice apartheid against the female half of their populations.
Some say Israel is apartheid-like because the Palestinians in disputed territories cannot vote. Yet, this is not Israel’s doing. Under the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians are meant to have self-determination by voting in Palestinian elections.
They cannot do so because Palestinian dictator Mahmoud Abbas refuses to hold them as knows he would lose (to Hamas).9 He is almost 20 years into his four-year term.
Another alleged basis of the apartheid claim is that there are many security checks and barriers imposed on Palestinians that are hugely inconvenient and humiliating. Yet, it is disingenuous and ahistorical not to acknowledge they were a security response to the Second Intifada in which Palestinians killed more than a thousand Israelis in hundreds of Islam-inspired terror attacks, including suicide bombings.
Complaining about this is like blowing up airplanes for years and then saying that airport security is unfair.
There is also the self-damning matter of Palestinian self-segregation. The PA does not allow Jews into its territories, and then accuses Israel of apartheid without a hint of irony. There are parts of cities such as Hebron where its Jewish residents cannot go. Naturally, the media does not report this or call it apartheid.
So, the next time you find yourself discussing Middle East politics with a “pro-Palestinian” supporter, remind them that not only are they wrong, but that they do not even have any good points.
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