The Israel-Hamas War: 5 Ridiculous Myths that Need Killing
Different than most articles about the Israel-Hamas war, this one draws on actual lived experience. On both sides!
My (Relevant) Background
Born in Israel, I spent 27 of my first 30 years there and served in the Israel Defense Force (IDF, Tsahal in Hebrew), in the early 1980s, including (thankfully brief) stints in Gaza and the West Bank.
In terms of Israeli politics, I’m left-of-center (though today I’d probably be considered far left since Israeli society, driven by decades of Palestinian terror attacks, has become far more hawkish).
Having lived over 30 years in the US, I’m not as personally affected by events on the ground, allowing me a somewhat less directly emotional viewpoint.
Still, being an Israeli-born Jewish person with family in Israel, I’ll freely admit that I’m biased to a certain extent.
That’s why I also include here the words and ideas of the so-called “Green Prince,” Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef.
5 Myths That Need Killing
Reading both individual opinions here on Medium and (to me) clearly antisemitically biased media reports, here are the top 5 myths that need to die.
- Israel is a colonial entity in the Middle East that requires “decolonization.”
- Israel is an “Apartheid” state.
- Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.
- The Hamas attacks are a legitimate form of “resistance.”
- Fighting Hamas, and as a result killing 15,000 (and counting) innocent civilians will just create more extreme violence, so Israel must cease fire and negotiate peace.
If you believe any of these and consider yourself anything other than an antisemite and/or “useful idiot” supporting terror, I dare you to read the following.
Warning: I don’t pull any punches, so you may find your dainty feelings hurt, if not crushed.
Added Comment on the Above
Someone wrote me a private note regarding my writing “… you may find your dainty feelings hurt, if not crushed.” In the note, he asks, “Why would you write such a thing? Is that how you like to be spoken to?”
This is a legitimate question, and since it’s possible some (many?) others similarly wonder, I decided to add my reply here…
When I decided to write this article, it was because I’m fed up and beyond irritated by far too many people proclaiming their ignorant opinions masquerading as essays. These people may or may not be antisemites.
But even if they aren’t (some are what I’d term as self-hating Jews), they appear to me as being “Progressive” left-leaning bleeding hearts who confuse having read a few pieces of Palestinian propaganda with having an actual basis for informed opinions.
These folks have for a variety of reasons pre-judged Israel as an evil entity that deserves destruction.
So, when these people feel oh-so-virtuous for calling for the destruction of my homeland and genocide against my people, I’m more than happy to crush their feelings with the weight of actual facts.
And as a straight-talking sabra (from “tsabar,” the Hebrew word for native-born Israeli Jew and also the word for cactus, since, like the plant, we’re considered prickly and tough on the outside but sweet on the inside), I won’t bother trying to protect the feelings of anyone in that group.
And if you want some more questions answered, here you go:
Busting Myth #1: Israel Is a Colonial Entity in the Middle East that Requires “Decolonization”
First, let’s define some terms.
From the Oxford Dictionary: Colonialism, noun, “The policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.”
From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: Decolonize, transitive verb, “To free (a people or area) from colonial status, to relinquish control of (a subjugated people or area).”
From these definitions, if you believe Israel is a colonial entity that needs to be decolonized, you are asserting that:
- The Jewish people came from somewhere other than the area “between the (Jordan) river and the (Mediterranean) sea.”
- There was another country already there, “Palestine,” that the Jews illegally settled in and took over.
- Palestine needs to be freed from Israel, “from the river to the sea,” which de facto means either kicking out, killing, or subjecting the Jews there to the Palestinians (who will likely end up kicking them out and/or killing them).
Even a cursory review of mainstream history and a plethora of archeological findings demonstrate that the Jewish people have been in what is modern-day Israel for over 3000 years, and the reason so many had to come from Europe and Arab countries is that most of the Jews were forcibly evicted by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Ancient Romans, Ancient Greeks, Byzantines, Crusaders, and that’s just from what’s now called Israel.
Thus, saying the Jews are foreign interlopers in the Middle East flies in the face of historical and archeological fact.
Regarding a pre-existing “Palestine,” there has never been a Palestinian state. The territory between the river and the sea was conquered by multiple ancient empires.
Aside from the ancient Jewish states of Judea and Israel and the modern Jewish state of Israel, there has never been an independent country there in nearly three millennia.
In 1948, the Jews accepted a far-from-ideal “partition plan” proposed by the United Nations.
The Arabs rejected it and promptly invaded the fledgling country. As the following map shows, the Jewish portion had two “choke points” that made it difficult to avoid being cut into three separate parts. The Jewish part of Jerusalem was surrounded by Arab territory, allowing the Jordanians and local residents to blockade the Jews there, which they did as soon as the armies of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt began their attack.
My dad commanded one of the improvised, “up-armored” trucks used to bring supplies in to the besieged Jewish part of Jerusalem.
By the end of Israel’s “war of independence,” the 1949 armistice lines made the Jewish state’s borders more contiguous and somewhat more defensible.
Setting aside a brief military operation in 1956, when Israel fought on the side of the British and French in the Sinai, withdrawing at the end of hostilities, these were the borders of Israel until June of 1967.
During these years, Syria routinely fired from the Golan Heights at Israeli farmers in the Galilee, and Jordanian snipers would fire from East Jerusalem at Jewish civilians in West Jerusalem.
In 1967, the Arab countries decided on another war.
They blockaded Israeli shipping through the Red Sea, which served as the casus belli for Israel’s flash attack destroying the Jordanian, Syrian, and Egyptian air forces on the ground at the start of the “Six-Day War.”
With air superiority assured, Israel won the Sinai peninsula up to the Egyptian Suez Canal, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank (a.k.a. Judea and Samaria), and the Golan Heights.
As part of the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, Israel withdrew from the Sinai. The 1994 peace treaty with Jordan saw the Jordanians disavowing any claim to the West Bank.
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) wasn’t set up in response to the 1967 “occupation” by Israel of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It was set up in 1964, to “free Palestine” from the Jews, which meant all of the land claimed by the Palestinians.
If you chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” you are calling for the destruction of the state of Israel, the genocide of the Jews there, or at the very least an ethnic cleansing of Jews from our ancient homeland.
In short, you are an antisemite and/or a “useful idiot” for terrorists who follow these genocidal calls.
Why Most of the History of the Middle East Is Irrelevant (IMO)
You would think that, given the above proof of Jews’ millennia-long ties to the land in question, and the fact that the Palestinian “historical claim” is at most that of centuries-long squatters in another people’s homeland, I’d latch on to this as historical proof that the Palestinians have no legal claim any of the land from the river to the sea.
I don’t.
I think the above history is mostly irrelevant and moot when considering what the end goal must be.
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, there are 5.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank (3.25 million) and Gaza Strip (2.23 million), with another 1.7 million in Israel (which they quaintly denote as “1948 territory”).
Taking them at their word, that’s 7.2 million Palestinians living between the river and the sea.
Israel’s population in 2023 is 9.8 million, of which 7.2 million are Jews and 2.1 million are Palestinians (the remaining 0.5 million are of other minorities).
Using the more likely accurate estimate of 2.1 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, the number of Palestinians between the river and the sea increases to 7.6 million.
The bottom line is that, between the river and the sea, there are 7.2 million Jews and 7.6 million Palestinians.
Whether you (or I) like it or not, short of true genocide and/or ethnic cleansing, neither group is going anywhere.
Thus, there is only one solution that doesn’t require:
- War crimes on a massive scale, killing and/or driving off millions of Jews or millions of Palestinians;
- A non-democratic, truly apartheid Israel, where Palestinians no longer have the right to vote; or
- An Israel that’s de facto Palestine, where the Palestinian majority changes it from the sole Jewish country in the world to one where Jews are at best an uneasy minority.
This solution is one with two states, Israel and Palestine, living peacefully side by side.
In the long term, that must be our goal.
In the short term, it’s one that’s become hard to imagine given Palestinian terror on one side and an intractable right-wing messianic government in Israel on the other.
Sigh.
Nobody said any of this would be easy or simple.
Busting Myth #2: Israel Is an “Apartheid” State
Once again, let’s start with a definition.
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, apartheid is racial segregation, with the specific example of the “former policy of segregation and political, social, and economic discrimination against the non-white majority in the Republic of South Africa.”
In apartheid South Africa, blacks did not have the right to vote or be elected.
In Israel, the 2.1 million Palestinian citizens:
- Have the right to vote.
- Serve in Israel’s legislature, the Knesset.
- Served as ministers in the Israeli government, starting in 2007.
- Served and continue to serve as judges, including in Israel’s Supreme Court.
If that’s apartheid, why do nearly all Israeli Arabs say they’d rather remain Israeli citizens than become citizens of Palestine?
Busting Myth #3: Israel Is Committing Genocide Against the Palestinians
The IDF is arguably one of the strongest and most modern military forces in the world, with an annual budget of $20 billion.
If the government of Israel gave the order to exterminate the Palestinians, the IDF would decline to follow such a “clearly illegal order.” According to IDF military justice, following such an order would open any soldier doing so to legal sanctions.
If, despite its illegality, the IDF did follow such an order, do you have any doubt that Israel could wipe out Palestinians by the hundreds of thousands and millions with Hamas powerless to stop it?
It is exactly because Hamas knows how careful Israel is to avoid hitting civilians as much as possible that they use their civilians as human shields; place their ammunition dumps, launch sites, and tunnel entrances inside and/or next to mosques, hospitals, schools, and even UN facilities; and use ambulances to transport fighters.
Busting Myth #4: The Hamas Attacks Are a Legitimate Form of “Resistance”
Israel isn’t perfect.
Over decades of its struggle to survive in a hostile neighborhood comprising five direct Arab neighbors with a total population of over 178 million, and many more next to those, Israel has occasionally done things I do not agree with or condone.
However…
The terrorists’ own cameras captured such horrific acts as rape, torture, burning unarmed civilians alive, cutting fetuses out of pregnant women, tearing children apart from their parents, and murdering parents in front of their kids and children in front of their parents.
If you hold any of these savage, inhuman acts as legitimate acts of resistance, you’ve lost any right to call yourself human.
You’ve placed yourself firmly on the side of pure evil.
Busting Myth #5: Fighting Hamas, and as a Result Killing 15,000 and Counting Innocent Civilians Will Just Create More Extreme Violence, so Israel Must Cease Fire and Negotiate Peace
It’s painful to witness the suffering of so many innocents, on both sides.
It’s even more painful when you’re left feeling powerless to stop it (though, as you’ll see below, the claim of 15,000 dead civilians is suspect because it comes from Hamas, a terrorist organization with a track record of lying and using unrelated footage, e.g., from the Syrian civil war, to blame Israel).
One of the most powerful statements of Israel’s pain was Golda Meir’s haunting saying to the Arab world, “We can forgive you for killing our children. But we will never forgive you for forcing our children to kill yours.”
As I say above, successive Israeli governments have done things I vehemently disagreed with.
The current bunch in power far more so than any in history.
Having said that, the current calls for a “cease-fire” are a dog whistle call for the ultimate destruction of Israel.
Here is why.
All cease-fires with Hamas have led to their rearming with ever greater destructive power that they then used to target Israeli cities and towns, firing from within, under, or next to civilian facilities such as schools, mosques, hospitals, and UN locations.
In fact, there was a cease-fire in place on Oct 6, which didn’t deter Hamas from launching the horrific inhuman attack of Oct 7.
A cease-fire makes sense if it’s in your own best interest militarily, or, better, if it allows negotiation pursuing a lasting peace.
Neither is the case now.
Hamas has repeatedly and clearly stated over and over that not only would they, but that they will stage such attacks a second, third, fourth, and more times until Israel is destroyed.
Their very charter clearly states this is their goal.
When your enemy makes such genocidal statements, the only rational response is to believe them, and, believing them, do anything necessary to permanently remove their ability to do so.
That’s the reason Israel is forced to continue attacking Hamas (and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) until they lose their ability to attack and rearm for ever-more-genocidal attacks against Israeli civilians.
The true tragedy here is that these terrorist organizations are knowingly and cynically using Palestinian civilians as human shields, stating openly that they’re willing to sacrifice 100,000 or more of their brothers and sisters as “martyrs” to the cause of destroying Israel.
As incredibly painful as it is, this is exactly why Israel cannot agree to a cease-fire short of the complete eradication of Hamas as a functioning group in Gaza.
What Does the Other Side Say, When They Say the Truth?
On November 29, 2023, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef spoke in front of students at the University of Michigan.
The video isn’t short, but if you want to hear the truth from the proverbial horse’s mouth, listen at least to the first third, in which Yousef calls Hamas savages and explains why Israel cannot make peace with them.
A Comment Worthy of Response
One reader, Ken Burch, responded to my earlier version of this, saying the following (edited for brevity).
While I disagree with much of what he says, he at least doesn’t come across as an antisemitic fool, making his comment worthy of response, so here goes…
“I support Israel’s right to exist in peace and safety on the pre-1967 lines… [in] the areas that are legitimately Israeli territory, and with a viable, prosperous Palestinian state in peace and safety next to it, made up of the West Bank and Gaza.”
I’m glad to hear you accept Israel’s right to exist in safety. Israel has made repeated attempts to negotiate (mostly) in good faith, including offering this very thing to Yasser Aradfat in 2000.
Arafat declined the offer and kicked off the so-called second intifada, in which over 1000 Israeli citizens were murdered.
If we can ever get to the point where the Palestinians broadly reject the maximalist aim of destroying Israel and accept a peaceful Palestine in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, one hopes peace will ensue.
“That Golda Meir quote was and is insulting, damaging, toxic bullshit… Nobody ever FORCED the IDF to kill their kids and Palestinians… value the lives of their children as much as anyone else does.”
When you inculcate your kids with hatred, dressing three-year-olds in military-style garb with assault rifles, teach them to hate and kill Jews, deny the Holocaust and the Jews’ historic connection to the land, you end up with teens attacking Israelis using knives, Molotov cocktails, and guns.
So, yes, Palestinians have far too often forced Israelis to kill children.
Parents of Palestinian “martyrs,” children or adults, often hand out candy and celebrate their kids dying in “martyrdom operations” (a.k.a. terror attacks) as long as they manage to kill Israeli civilians.
They even shamelessly say on TV they’re glad their kids did it!
Worse, the Palestinian Authority uses European support money to pay monthly stipends to the families of terrorists who die while carrying out their terror attacks!
So, no, that quote is far from “toxic bullshit.”
It is a horrific truth.
“It’s impossible to end this conflict by making anyone sign a surrender treaty and forcing them to play the role of the leader of the vanquished side… The only way forward is to work for a face-saving compromise that humiliates no one.”
On this, we agree.
However, when Israel offered exactly such a solution at Camp David in 2000 (see above), rather than sign a peace deal, the Palestinians kicked off an orgy of terror against Israeli civilians.
One of my aunts was murdered by a suicide bomber who boarded her bus in Tel Aviv before blowing himself up.
I can only hope that the Palestinians manage to prove false the following widely accepted (in Israel) maxim, that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
“Acknowledge that Palestinians are driven by the conditions the Occupation and the long-standing Gaza Siege have imposed on them, not antisemitism. Admit they have legitimate grievances about the way the IDF has treated them and address those grievances.”
There is no doubt in my mind that Israelis have carried out crimes against Palestinians. I personally witnessed a settler firing unprovoked into a Palestinian refugee camp on the West Bank.
I did my best to have him caught and arrested, but unfortunately he managed to get away.
Thankfully, he missed and didn’t kill or hurt anyone (aside from the obvious emotional impact he caused).
There are wide swaths of the Israeli public who would be very willing to acknowledge wrongdoing by Israel, assuming similar acknowledgment by the Palestinians, and assuming it comes as part of a “truth and reconciliation” action leading to a just and lasting peace.
“Improve their material condition as much as possible. Start by rebuilding the NGO-built solar energy systems the IDF unjustifiable destroyed and returning the olive and lemon trees stolen by the West Bank settlers to their original owners, and fully compensate the Palestinian farmers whose farmlands were expropriated to build the Wall, and offer compensation at fair market values to everyone whose homes were taken in 1948, and deport the West Bank settlers… and apologize for holding all Palestinians collectively responsible for the actions of the armed factions. Release all Palestinian children from Israeli military jails.”
Israel has tried many times to make life easier and more economically advantageous for Palestinian civilians.
Unfortunately, short of making peace, which they’ve declined on multiple occasion, Israel can’t grant them all the rights that should be theirs without placing the safety of Israeli civilians at risk.
“Israeli security wouldn’t suffer for any of that, and the attitudes of ordinary Palestinians towards Israel will change dramatically for the better. Keep treating them as if they are nothing but bloodthirsty, hate-fueled berserkers who have to prove their decency to their oppressors, and nothing can ever change.”
History puts the lie to your assertion. Israel’s security has suffered many times, and Palestinian views and attitudes continue to be fueled by hatred inculcated almost from birth.
Thus, if there is to be peace, the Palestinians do need to prove to Israel that they’re ready to behave like civilized human beings before Israel can begin to break down physical barriers placed around them to protect Israeli lives.
Saying the above pains me.
I would much rather be able to believe that the Palestinians will prevent their crazies from hurting unarmed Israelis.
However, while I wholeheartedly believe the Palestinians must in the end have an independent state living peacefully next to Israel, I’d be unwilling to risk Israel’s existence and the lives of its citizens until the Palestinians show that they can be trusted to honor such a deal.
I’m sure that no Israeli government will ever be willing to take such a risk without compelling evidence that the Palestinians can be trusted.
The Bottom Line
The situation in the Middle East is complex and deadly.
While the outlines of the only practical solutions are clear, the path from here to there is anything but. Both sides are convinced of their being right, of their historic justice, and that the other side is guilty of innumerable crimes against them.
This is the horrendous reality that led us to so many innocent lives being lost on both sides.
If you believe in G-d, pray the two sides can find it in their hearts to work for a just and lasting peace that honors life, both Israeli and Palestinian.