Palestine: a Comprehensive Document for Palestinian Liberation

By MrKazuma on Discord

Other materials and resources

Myth-busters:

Explaining Settler Colonialism (Writing in Progress)

Indigeneity (Writing in Progress)

People, in colloquial terms, tend not to think about how the term “indigenous” is used. It’s not really something they have to think about, and that is partly due to the success of settler colonialist projects. To most people, it just means “original people”, or “people who were here before”. But this is an oversimplification at best, and horribly wrong at worst.

The core of indigeneity is that of a relationship between a colonizer and a colonized. In common parlance, even though most people do not understand why, we do not usually call French people “indigenous” to France, or even entertain the notion. Nor do we do so with the Chinese, Libyans and so on. But just 80 years back, Libyans would have been considered indigenous people, because they were being colonized by settler colonists from Italy. Indigeneity is therefore not a permanent, unchanging trait, but a transient phenomenon, imposed on a group of people by another group of people, which is colonizing them. It is therefore the result of a relationship between groups, not something which just applies after a certain group has lived in a certain area for long enough. Another example of this is Algerians. Algerians, 60 years ago, would have been called indigenous people. In retrospect, when looking back, they are indeed written about as such, because they were a group targetted for subjugation by a settler colonial group (the French colonists, the Pied Noirs). But today, no one calls them indigenous, precisely because they are no longer under settler colonial rule.

This is also why, despite the Maori having arrived in New Zealand just 300 years before the Europeans did — a relatively short time period — they are still indigenous people, because their society is one which is being marginalized and ultimately targeted for elimination. If the Europeans had not attempted to destroy their society, they would not be indigenous. To really drive home how important this is to indigeneity, I will use an example many would consider unorthodox, but which really shouldn’t be. Imagine if France took over Britain, killed a large part of its inhabitants, expelled the rest to Coventry, now a reservation, and then started sending settlers over to Britain to replace the British society with their own. The British would then be colonized. Indeed, everyone in Britain who was not part of the colonizing society would be indigenous in that case. Would Brits of Indian ancestry not be indigenous, or would even someone who just arrived from another country as a recent migrant not be indigenous? Yes, they would be indigenous, because they are part of the society which the colonizing society wishes to replace on the land of Britain.

And this is an important part of settler colonialism; it is something which is intimately tied to control of land, and ripping away the ties of the indigenous society from the land. That is why settler colonial projects, from the US, to South Africa, to the Zionists in Palestine, have always used control of land to economically push the natives out. It is why reservations exist today. It has had disastrous cultural consequences as well. In the US, as a result of the trail of tears, native food traditions were largely lost and replaced with a tradition based on surviving the conditions imposed on the natives by the colonizer, because the herbs and animals which the natives would traditionally eat were no longer available.

What Does It Mean To Be Indigenous?

Israelis Are Not 'Indigenous' (and other ridiculous pro-Israel arguments)

Zionism is a settler colonial project

The ideology itself

Openly settler colonial

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/30707675.pdf

“Indeed throughout his writings and speeches, Herzl did not tire of presenting the Zionist idea as a quintessentially colonial one, that is, one that held implied gains for Europe, and indeed the whole of the ‘civilised’ world: ‘The world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness’ (Judenstaat, 89). In a speech he delivered in London in 1899, he reiterates the colonial trope of the civilising mission and attaches it to the specific interests of imperial Britain:

“We want to carry culture to the East. And once again, Europe will in turn profit from this work of ours. We will create new trade routes − and none will be more interested in this than England with its Asiatic possessions. The shortest route to India lies through Palestine.4”

The Zionist movement, so Herzl continues in his speech, will be driven by the new spirit of progress and industry, of which he places Britain at the forefront:

“What could I, poor barbarian from the Continent, tell the inhabitants of England about these things [progress and industry]. They are our superiors in all technical achievements, just as their great politicans were the first to see the necessity for colonial expansion. That is why the flag of Greater-Britain waves over every sea.5”

Herzl ends with a direct appeal to his British audience on the basis of a shared colonialist-progressivist perspective:

“And so I should think that here in England, the Zionist idea, which is a colonial one, should be easily and quickly understood in England, and this in its most modern form [emphasis added].”

https://www.academia.edu/35394648/A_Century_of_Settler_Colonialism_in_Palestine_Zionisms_Entangled_Project

In the words of the foremost leader of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, the Jewish state ought to be “a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2013/04/the-ben-gurion-letter/

“We must expel Arabs and take their place.” - Ben Gurion, leader of the zionist movement in 1948 and Israel’s first prime minister

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/may/12/israel1

"We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return ... The old will die and the young will forget," said David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, in 1949.

https://yplus.ps/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Kayyali-Abdul-Wahab-Zionism-and-Imperialism-The-Historical-Origins.pdf

The colonization process revealed an even more telling feature of the nature of Zionism. The names and purposes of the early colonization instruments read as follows: "The Jewish Colonial Trust" (1898), the "Colonization Commission" (1898), the "Palestine Land Development Company." From the start the Zionist colonists sought to acquire lands in strategic locations, evict the Arab peasants and boycott Arab labour, all of which were requirements closely related with the essence of Zionism, the creation of a Jewish nation on "purely" Jewish land, as Jewish as England was English to use the famous Zionist expression.34 The same notion was clearly implied by Palmerston's concept of a Jewish buffer state in Palestine. Here again these Zionist "traditions" owe their origins to Herzl and his racist-colonial mind: "The voluntary expropriation will be accomplished through our secret agents.. we shall then sell only to Jews, and all real estate will be traded only among Jews. "35
What about the fate of the natives? "We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country ... The property owners will come to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly

https://www.972mag.com/mapping-the-palestinian-villages-erased-and-replaced-with-jewish-towns/

Early zionist settlements were called “moshavas” (Hebrew for “colonies”)

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/zionism-is-not-colonialism-just-jewish-self-determination/

Yet in the early days, the Zionist movement was astonishingly honest about its existence as a form of colonialism. For example, Herzl, one of the founders of political Zionism wrote in 1902 to infamous colonizer Cecil Rhodes, arguing that Britain recognized the importance of “colonial expansion”:

“You are being invited to help make history,” he wrote, “It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor ; not Englishmen, but Jews . How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.”

Nordau, Herzl’s right hand man, even rightfully called Zionist settlements in Palestine “colonies”:

“Zionism rejects on principle all colonization on a small scale, and the idea of “sneaking” into Palestine. The Zionists have therefore devoted themselves preeminently to a zealous and tireless advocacy of the uniting of the already existing Jewish colonies in Palestine with those who until now have given them their aid and who of late have inclined towards the withdrawal of their support from them.”

Menachem Usishkin, chairman of the Jewish National Fund, was known for his calls to rid Palestine of its natives:

“What we can demand today is that all Transjordan be included in the Land of Israel. . . on condition that Transjordan would be either be made available for Jewish colonization or for the resettlement of those [Palestinian] Arabs, whose lands [in Palestine] we would purchase. Against this, the most conscientious person could not argue . . . For the [Palestinian] Arabs of the Galilee, Transjordan is a province . . . this will be for the resettlement of Palestine’s Arabs. This the land problem. . . . Now the [Palestinian] Arabs do not want us because we want to be the rulers. I will fight for this. I will make sure that we will be the landlords of this land . . . . because this country belongs to us not to them . . . “

Revisionist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his infamous Iron Wall wrote that:

“A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the future. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some rich man or benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else-or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not difficult, not dangerous, but IMPOSSIBLE!… Zionism is a colonization adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important… to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonizing.”

https://decolonizepalestine.com/intro/palestine-throughout-history/

Modern day Zionists might recoil at Zionism being called a colonial ideology, yet in the early days, the Zionist movement was astonishingly honest about its existence as a form of colonialism. For example, Herzl wrote in 1902 to infamous colonizer Cecil Rhodes, arguing that Britain recognized the importance of “colonial expansion”:

“You are being invited to help make history,” he wrote, “It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor ; not Englishmen, but Jews . How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.”

Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his infamous Iron Wall (1923) stated that:

“A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the future. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some rich man or benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else-or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not difficult, not dangerous, but IMPOSSIBLE!… Zionism is a colonization adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important… to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonizing.”

https://imeu.org/article/plan-dalet

"Transfer" in Zionist Thinking

From the earliest days of modern political Zionism, its advocates grappled with the problem of creating a Jewish majority state in a part of the world where Palestinian Arabs were the overwhelming majority of the population. For many, the solution became known as "transfer," a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
As far back as 1895, the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote: "We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."
By August 1937, "transfer" was a major subject of discussion at the Twentieth Zionist Congress in Zurich, Switzerland. Alluding to the systematic dispossession of Palestinian peasants (fellahin) that Zionist organizations had been engaged in for years, David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel's first prime minister in 1948, stated:

"You are no doubt aware of the [Jewish National Fund's] activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin." He concluded: "Jewish power [in Palestine], which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale."

In June 1938, Ben-Gurion told a meeting of the Jewish Agency: "I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it."
In December 1940, Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund's Lands Department, which was tasked with acquiring land for the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, wrote in his diary:
There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [bedouin] tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution.
In his memoirs, which were censored by the Israeli military but leaked to The New York Times in 1979, the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin recalled a conversation he had in July 1948 with Ben-Gurion, when Rabin was an officer in the Israeli army, regarding the fate of more than 50,000 Palestinian residents of the cities of Lydda and Ramleh. Rabin wrote:

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. [Yigal] Allon repeated his question, 'What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Rabin added, "I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out."

https://imeu.org/article/faq-on-the-nakba-the-nakba-and-palestinian-refugees-today

Moshe Sharett, Israel's second Prime Minister (1953-1955):

"We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it" (from Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 91)
On partition: "The [Palestinian] Arab reaction would be negative because they would lose everything and gain almost nothing ...They would lose the richest part of Palestine; they would lose major Arab assets, the orange plantations, the commercial and industrial centers and the most important sources of revenue for their government which would become impoverished; they would lose most of the coastal area, which would also be a loss to the hinterland Arab states...It would mean that they would be driven back to the desert." (from Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, p.59)
"With regard to the refugees, we are determined to be adamant while the war lasts. Once the return tide starts, it will be impossible to stem it, and it will prove our undoing. As for the future, we are equally determined to explore all possibilities of getting rid, once and for all, of the huge [Palestinian] Arab minority [referring to the Palestinian Israeli citizens of Israel] which originally threatened us. What can be achieved in this period of storm and stress [referring to the 1948 war] will be quite unattainable once conditions get stabilized. (from Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, p. 105)

Yosef Weitz, director, Jewish National Fund Land Settlement Committee (1932-1948):

"...the transfer of [Palestinian] Arab population from the area of the Jewish state does not serve only one aim--to diminish the Arab population. It also serves a second, no less important, aim which is to advocate land presently held and cultivated by the [Palestinian] Arabs and thus to release it for Jewish inhabitants." (from Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 94-95)
"It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples...If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us...The only solution is a Land of Israel...without Arabs...There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Palestinian Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one tribe." (from Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 27)
"Once again I come face to face with the land settlement difficulties that emanate from the existence of two people in close proximity...only population transfer and evacuating this country so it would become exclusively for us is the solution. " (from Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 132)

Moshe Dayan, chief of staff, Israel Defense Forces and Minister of Defense during the 1967 war:

"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either...There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab Population." (from Ha'aretz, April 4, 1969)
"We shoot at those from among the 200,000 hungry Arabs who cross the line [to graze their flocks]...Arabs cross to collect the grain that they left in the abandoned villages and we set mines for them and they go back without an arm or a leg...[It may be that this] cannot pass review, but I know no other method of guarding the borders." (from Righteous Victims, p. 275)
At the funeral of an Israeli farmer killed by a Palestinian in April 1956: "Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers. What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived...We should demand his blood not from the Arabs of Gaza but from ourselves...Let us make our reckoning today. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house." (from Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 101)

Yigal Allon, commander, Palmach (elite force of Zionist militia Haganah) (1945-1948), Lieutenant General, Israeli army (1948-1949):

"The confidence of thousands of Arabs of the Hula [Valley] was shaken...We had only five days left...until 15 May [1948]. We regarded it as imperative to cleanse the interior of the Galilee and create Jewish territorial continuity in the whole of the Upper Galilee...I gathered the Jewish mukhtars [Kibbutz chiefs], who had ties with the different Arab villages, and I asked them to whisper in the ears of several Arabs that a giant Jewish reinforcement had reached the Galilee and were about to clean out the villages of Hula, [and] to advise them as friends, to flee while they could. And rumour spread throughout Hula that the time had come to flee. The flight encompassed tens of thousands. The stratagem fully achieved its objective." (from The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 122)

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/5/23/the-nakba-did-not-start-or-end-in-1948

Weizmann, who later became Israel’s first president, was realising his dream of making Palestine “as Jewish as England is English”.

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/had-palestinians-accepted-the-1947-partition-plan-they-would-have-had-a-state-by-now/

When partition is brought up in the historical sense, it is not surprising that most tend to think of the 1947 UNGA resolution. However, this was not the first partition scheme to be presented. In 1919, for example, the World Zionist Organization put forward a ‘partition’ plan, which included all of historical Palestine, parts of Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan. At the time, the Jewish population of this proposed state would not have even reached 2-3% of the total population.

Source for this map

Naturally, such a proposal did not see the light of day, but it is an indication of the entitlement of the Zionist movement in wanting to establish an ethnic state in an area where they were so utterly outnumbered. To put this into context, even after waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, and a much smaller area allocated to the Jewish state in the 1947 partition plan, the proposed Jewish state would not have had a Jewish majority without additional immigration and settlement. As even on the eve of the Nakba, the Jewish population in mandatory Palestine was less than a third.
If we consider that most of this population arrived during the 4th and 5th Aliyot (Between 1924-1939), then the majority of those demanding partition of the land had barely been living there for 20 years at the most. To make matters worse, the UN partition plan allotted approximately 56% of the land of mandatory Palestine to the Jewish state.
Why, then, were Palestinians expected to agree to give away most of their land to a minority of recently arrived settlers? Why is the rejection of such a ridiculously unjust proposal framed as irrational or hateful?
Jabotinsky understood clearly what establishing Israel meant for the natives; he did not mince words, in his 1923 essay The Iron Wall he wrote that:

‘Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised’.

What was being asked of Palestinians was nothing short of rubber-stamping their own colonization with approval. Nobody should be expected to agree to that.

Contemporary - nothing has changed

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/israel-not-an-apartheid-state/

Indeed, the green line has long been invisible to Israelis, and Israel treats the settlements as parts of its own state. Why should we pretend otherwise? Why pretend that we’re talking about two governing bodies when the Palestinian Authority is a glorified bantustan administrator with no say about anything?
This is by design, not by chance. Israel has been very conscious with how it approached its colonization project in the West Bank, in 1972 Ariel Sharon proclaimed that:

“We’ll make a pastrami sandwich out of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in twenty five years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

Statements by Israeli prime ministers and other senior officials highlight the extent to which the intent to maintain demographic control has guided policymaking. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a March 10, 2019, post on the social media platform Instagram, stated, “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” but rather “the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.”[87] In December 2003, in between terms as prime minister, Netanyahu said at a conference that "if there is a demographic problem, and there is, it is with the Israeli Arabs who will remain Israeli citizens," noting the need to balance policies that strive to integrate “Israel’s Arabs” with ensuring they do not reach 35-40 percent of the population.[88] He warned that “if their numbers will reach 35-40 percent of the country, then the Jewish state will be annulled.”[89] He also stated that the separation barrier, ostensibly erected to enhance Israel’s security, would also help to prevent a “demographic spillover” of Palestinians from the West Bank.[90]
Demographic-driven policymaking extends beyond Prime Minister Netanyahu. Even Israeli leaders who supported Israel’s withdrawal from a greater portion of the West Bank than others did often make demographics—the need for Israel to preserve a Jewish majority—one of their central arguments. Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert, said in 2003, three years before he became prime minister, that “the demographic issue” would “dictate the solution we must adopt” and that the “formula for the parameters of a unilateral solution are: to maximize the number of Jews; to minimize the number of Palestinians.”[91] His predecessor, Ariel Sharon, as prime minister, said in a 2002 Knesset debate that while Palestinian citizens had “rights in the land,” “all rights over the land of Israel are Jewish rights.”[92] His predecessor Ehud Barak, when he was prime minister, equated a “Muslim majority” with “destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.”[93] His predecessor as prime minister, Shimon Peres, while serving as president in 2012 said that “Israeli settlements in [parts of the West Bank] densely populated with Arabs…can lead to a threatening demographic change” and “places a Jewish majority in the state of Israel at risk.”[94] His predecessor as prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, said that “the red line for Arabs is 20% of the population, that must not be gone over,” explaining that “I want to preserve the Jewish character of the state of Israel.”[95]
The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order)—2003, which prohibits Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza with few exceptions from obtaining citizenship or permanent residency in Israel and East Jerusalem further reflects a desire to maintain demographic control.[99] Ariel Sharon, commenting in 2005 when he was prime minister on the renewal of the temporary law, said, “There’s no need to hide behind security arguments. There’s a need for the existence of a Jewish state.”[100] He later added that authorities had “a correct and important intention of Israel being a Jewish state with a massive Jewish majority” and that “we must do everything so that this state remains a Jewish state in the future.”[101] Giora Eiland, national security advisor at the time, who served on a committee in 2005 examining immigration policies, conceded that “the Citizenship Law is the way to overcome the demographic demon.”[102] Then-finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it more directly during discussions over renewing the law: “Instead of making it easier for Palestinians who want to get citizenship, we should make the process much more difficult, in order to guarantee Israel’s security and a Jewish majority in Israel.”[103] Eli Yishai, while serving as minister of interior affairs, said in 2012 that approving a larger number of family unification applications from the West Bank would constitute “national suicide.”[104]

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/7/26/israels-nation-state-law-parallels-the-nazi-nuremberg-laws

Israel is the only country in the world that does not have official borders, since it is simply a settler colony that wishes to expand:

“Interestingly, however, this new law does not define state borders and Israel remains the only country in the world without declared borders. This is not surprising, as Israel is a continuously expanding settler-colonial state, even though their admission to the United Nations in 1948 was based on their claim to the areas within the 1948 armistice line only, which does not include Jerusalem or any other part of the West Bank.

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/israel-has-always-sought-peace/

Oslo Accords:

During the Oslo Accords, the amount of Israeli settlement construction skyrocketed. This was embodied by Ariel Sharon’s quote over Israeli radio in 1998: “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many [Palestinian] hilltops as they can to enlarge the [Jewish] settlements because everything we take now will stay ours… Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

Speaking of East Jerusalem:

“Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993, said in a January 1982 meeting of the Jerusalem municipality that “I am looking after the Jewish majority… that is why we are here, to take care of that” and in a June 1984 meeting that “like all of us here, it seems to me, I am worried about the balance of power and Arab growth within and around Jerusalem,” according to minutes of the meetings reviewed by B’Tselem.[178]”

Speaking of the withdrawal from Gaza:

Israeli officials at the time acknowledged the demographic objectives behind the move. On August 15, 2005, the day the Israeli government set as a deadline for settlers to voluntarily leave Gaza, Prime Minister Sharon said in an evening address to Israelis, “Gaza cannot be held onto forever. Over one million Palestinians live there, and they double their numbers with every generation.”[213] The same month, then-Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres said, “We are disengaging from Gaza because of demography.”[214]
Authorities, in fact, explicitly said that they wanted to redirect the resources that went into the settler community in Gaza to strengthening Jewish Israeli control over parts of Israel and the West Bank. The early 2000s push, for example, to Judaize the Galilee and the Negev came as Israeli authorities were putting in motion their plans to withdraw from Gaza. Haaretz quoted an advisor to Prime Minister Sharon at the time as saying that Sharon “reached the conclusion that following the enormous investment in settling the territories, it is now necessary to settle the Galilee and the Negev.”[215]

On Judaizing the Galilee:

In December 2007, Minister for the Development of the Negev and Galilee Jacob Edery, reflecting on new demographic data, said, “We have to do everything we can to boost Jewish population in the Galilee.”[151]
The plan to Judaize the Galilee, a region largely slated to fall within the “Arab State” in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, dates back to the 1950s when it emerged as part of a strategy to consolidate Israeli control of the area.[156] A senior Israeli official at the time wrote that the Palestinian presence in these areas threatened Israeli control, worrying that Palestinians would “invade all areas we neglect, strike footholds and establish new roots.”[157] Ben Gurion told the Knesset that Israel’s imposition of military rule over most Palestinians in Israel at the time aimed “to protect the right to Jewish settlement in all parts of the state.”[158] The plan to Judaize the Galilee focused initially on creating and sustaining Jewish communities such as Nazareth Illit (Hebrew for ‘Upper Nazareth’) in 1957, while limiting the growth of nearby Palestinian communities.[159]
In July 2009, Israel’s Housing Minister Ariel Atias warned against “the spread” of Palestinian communities, warning that, “if we go on like we have until now, we will lose the Galilee.”[166] Later that year, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said “we are losing the Negev and the Galilee,” noting that “in many places there is no contiguous Jewish presence” and that “the focus for today is to Judaize the Negev and the Galilee.”[167]

Demographic goals in leaked memos:

The Israeli newspaper Al HaMishmar in 1976 published a leaked government document drafted by Yisrael Koenig, then northern district commissioner of the Interior Ministry.[160] The memo, entitled “Top Secret: Memorandum-Proposal Handling the Arabs of Israel,” lays out the demographic situation in the area, showing that Jews maintain a slight demographic majority but will be overtaken in a few years if birthrates continue at current rates. It then recommends that authorities “expand and deepen Jewish settlement in areas where the contiguity of the Arab population is prominent, and where they number considerably more than the Jewish population; [and] examine the possibility of diluting existing Arab population concentrations.” While officials condemned the plan and said it had not been acted on,[161] Koenig remained in his role for more than a decade after the memo’s publication, a leaked 1995 map by a regional planning committee echoed similar objectives, and elements of the strategy bear resemblance to policies that have been carried out since.[162]

“They are gnawing at the country’s land reserves” - Sharon:

“In the Negev, we face a serious problem: About 900,000 dunams of government land are not in our hands, but in the hands of the Bedouin population. I, as a resident of the Negev, see this problem every day. It is, essentially, a demographic phenomenon… Out of weakness, perhaps also lack of awareness about the issue, we, as a country, are doing nothing to confront this situation… The Bedouin are grabbing new territory. They are gnawing away at the country’s land reserves, and no one is doing anything significant about it.[165]”

https://thelefternwall.com/2014/10/01/5-quotes-about-united-jerusalem-that-will-help-you-understand-the-recent-takeover-in-silwan/

ELAD, the managers of the “City of David” tourist park/settlement, made their goals quite clear: “Our aim is to Judaize East Jerusalem.”
Attorney Avi Segal, the same fellow who represented Arieh King’s Israel Lands Fund in their campaign to evict the Shamasneh family from their home in Sheikh Jarrah. The same Arieh King, who, as an elected member of the Jerusalem City Council, distributed a flier throughout East Jerusalem declaring: ”WE [JEWS] DEMAND THAT YOU [PALESTINIANS] LEAVE THE LAND OF ISRAEL. WE SAY THIS FROM A RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVE, IN ORDER TO ENSURE PEACE IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL.”
But nothing is devoid of context. Let’s start with the concept of “United Jerusalem.” Following yesterday’s takeover, MK Moti Yogev of the Jewish Home party proclaimed:
”THIS IS ANOTHER IMPORTANT STEP IN THE STRENGTHENING OF JEWISH SETTLEMENT IN EASt JERUSALEM, STRENGTHENING THE UNITED JERUSALEM AS ISRAEL’S CAPITAL.”
The aforementioned architect of the borders of “United Jerusalem,” General Rehavam Ze’evi (nicknamed Gandhi, oh galling irony). Best known for his advocacy of “voluntary” transfer of the Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank to Ze’evi’s proposed “State of Ishmael,” which would have its capital in Nablus, Ze’evi did not speak only in hypotheticals: “IN NORTHERN JERUSALEM THE BORDER HAS BEEN MOVED SO THAT THE QALANDIYAH AIRPORT ‏(HENCEFORTH TO BE CALLED JERUSALEM NORTH‏) WILL REMAIN IN ISRAEL’S HANDS. THE JORDAN RIFT VALLEY HAS BEEN LEFT OUTSIDE THE STATE OF ISHMAEL, WITH THE BORDER TO PASS 500 METERS WEST OF THE LONGITUDINAL ROAD, WITH TWO EXCEPTIONS: 1. JERICHO AND ITS ADJOINING REFUGEE CAMPS, SO THAT NO FURTHER POPULATION WILL BE ABSORBED INTO ISRAEL; 2. THE ENTRY TO WADI FARA, WHERE THERE IS ALSO A CONCENTRATION OF REFUGEES ‏(A BYPASS CONNECTING ROAD CAN BE BUILT IN THIS SECTION‏). THE LATRUN ENCLAVE WILL BE ANNEXED TO ISRAEL. THERE ARE ONLY FOUR ARAB VILLAGES IN THAT AREA.”” (HAARETZ).
Or, if that language is too technical, Ze’evi did not shy away from creative ways of describing “Them” and what should be “done with them”: ”WE SHOULD GET RID OF THE ONES WHO ARE NOT ISRAELI CITIZENS THE SAME WAY YOU GET RID OF LICE. WE HAVE TO STOP THIS CANCER FROM SPREADING WITHIN US.”

https://www.facebook.com/VICENewsTonight/videos/inside-the-battle-for-jerusalem/528386831504333/

At 12:55, you see Arieh King, Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, explicitly calling for ethnic cleansing and a “Jewish Shaikh Jarrah”.

https://visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/intent-to-dominate

There is no “leftist”/”liberal” zionism

https://yplus.ps/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Pappe-Ilan-The-Ethnic-Cleansing-of-Palestine.pdf

“Liberal”/”Left” zionism is not leftist, is still zionism, and is therefore settler colonialism:

“Recent scholarship also tends to question the more Marxist flavour that the official Israeli historiography has claimed for the early colonization of Palestine by portraying Zionism as a positive endeavour to carry the socialist and Marxist revolutions beyond their less successful attempts in Russia.9 The more critical view depicts this aspiration as doubtful at best and as manipulative at worst. Indeed, much like today’s more liberal-minded Israeli Jews who are ready to drop the principles of democracy when faced with the prospect of a demographic majority of non-Jews in the country, so, it seems, did the socialist Zionists quickly substitute their more universal dreams with the powerful allure of nationalism. And when the main objective became making Palestine exclusively Jewish rather than socialist, it was significantly the Labour movement within Zionism that instituted and implemented the ethnic cleansing of the local population.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/gunning-to-lead-meretz-yair-golan-looks-to-refocus-the-left-around-a-single-flag/

Even “left-wing” Israelis (here, someone gunning for the top position in Israel’s most “left-leaning” mainstream party, the Meretz party), are ethno-nationalists, and the only reason they oppose settlements is because it means annexation and bringing in millions more Palestinians officially into the settler state. They want to maintain a Jewish ethnic majority just as much as the other zionists do, and indeed this is a necessary condition of being a zionist:

The first and most important issue is the Palestinians. The left’s stance is that we need to separate from the Palestinians. There are those that say [the first issue should be] the end of the occupation, there are those that say peace. I say that before all that, we need to separate from the Palestinians. Nothing good can come of this insufferable conflict between two enemy populations. We have to take our fate into our own hands, not wait for anyone and advance steps toward separating from the Palestinians.
What’s happening on the ground is that we’re building toward annexation. The annexation of millions of Palestinians inside of the State of Israel is the end of the Zionist dream… There won’t be a Jewish state without a Jewish demographic majority.

https://decolonizepalestine.com/rainbow-washing/redwashing/

‘Socialist’ Zionism was once the most significant iteration of Zionism, building off of the historical popularity of socialism among oppressed Jewish Europeans. However, vast numbers of them were deeply opposed to Zionism. In 1905, the anti-Zionist Bund, the revolutionary organization of Jewish workers, condemned Zionism both for its “solution” to antisemitism and for its colonization of Arabs and actively worked to drive out Zionists from their unions. In 1910, socialist Karl Kautsky wrote:

“It is labor that gives people a right to the land in which it lives, thus Judaism can advance no claim on Palestine. On the basis of the right of labor and of democratic self determination, today Palestine does not belong to the Jews of Vienna, London, or New York, who claim it for Judaism, but to the Arabs of the same country, the great majority of the population.”

Nevertheless, ‘Socialist’ Zionists trudged on with attempting to combine liberatory socialism with reactionary ethnonationalism only to ultimately choose the latter. Hess, who was once an associate of Marx and Engels, would go on to write that if the choice must be made between Jewish Emancipation and Jewish Nationalism, then the former must be done away with, leading Marx and Engels to denounce him as “a proponent of bourgeois society.” Borochov founded the Workers of Zion (Po’ale Zion), which actually played a reactionary role in the Russian labor movement, arguing against any and all united action with non-Jewish workers, a mentality which will be explored in further detail regarding the engineered stratification of Jewish and Palestinian labor in Palestine. Ben-Gurion, who founded MAPAI (Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel, today’s Labor Party), pushed ideas of exclusive Jewish labor on lands owned by the Jewish Nationalist Fund, declaring in 1922 that “The only big concern which dominates our thinking and activity is the conquest of the land and building it through mass immigration (aliya). All the rest is only phraseology.”
The Labor Zionist movement did not raise any principled argument against private property, nor did it challenge the capitalist system. Its demand from the emerging bourgeoisie was for private capital to fulfill its role in developing the land and absorbing immigrants, and for Labor Zionism’s total monopoly over the local economy, its modes of production, and market share to expand the Zionist nationalist project. Overall, Ben-Gurion and his Labor Zionist ilk frequently and explicitly argued for the elevation of ethnic and nationalist interests over class solidarity, reinforcing social hierarchies, ethnic hegemony, and religious oppression.
As Ghassan Kanafani, one of the foremost Palestinian Marxists, wrote on the 1936 Palestine Revolt, the actually progressive labour movement between Jews and Arabs “..suffered crushing blows…the Zionist movement, which was rapidly becoming fascist in character and resorting to armed terrorism sought to isolate and destroy the Communist Party, most of whose leaders were Jews.” Indeed, the Labor Zionists would go on to unite with the Revisionists in 1945 to turn on their British benefactors and wage war on Palestinians.
And so, Zionists of multiple tendencies worked to destroy the Palestinian economy, drive Palestinians out of the labor market, and attempted to erase the very memory they’d ever been there, much of which they were able to do with the support of the British. This meant carrying out a war on a number of fronts, reflected in the three slogans of the pioneer Zionists: “conquest of land,” “conquest of labor,” and “produce of the land”.

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/netanyahu-is-the-problem/

Naturally, a colonial society will also produce a colonial “left”, and even a colonial “peace” movement. This was exemplified by Yitzhak Rabin, who many Israelis consider to be a dove and peace-maker. The issue, of course, is that Rabin was a notorious war criminal responsible for many atrocities against Palestinians. One of them was the policy of breaking the bones of any Palestinian arrested during the first Intifada, and another was signing the order for the ethnic cleansing of Lydda and starting the infamous Lydda death march.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes in Lydda, and forced to march to Ramallah in a single file. No water or aid was given, and hundreds died on the way. Chilling testimonies from the survivors evoke genocidal massacres committed by imperialist forces all over the globe:

“While marching in the blazing heat, he [Shammut] spotted some water. He rushed to fill a pot he was carrying. He later recalled: “At that moment, a jeep pulled up with three people. One of them, a Zionist officer, got out. He pulled a gun and put it to my head and ordered me to put the water down.” The Arab teenager had no choice but to obey. Ismail would never forget the thirst of the thousands of people who trudged on, not knowing where they were going. He saw people chewing grass in the hope of obtaining a bit of moisture. Others drank their children’s urine. By the roadside pregnant women were prematurely delivering babies, their labour brought on by the strain of their ordeal. None of these infants survived. Since no one had any opportunity to bury the dead, they were covered with grass and abandoned. Eventually Ismail managed to get some water out of sight of the Israeli soldiers. Although the water was dirty and obviously polluted he drank some while soaking his clothes in the reddish liquid. As Ismail attempted to return to his family, people followed him hoping to get a few drops of the precious fluid. One woman sucked at his moist shirt.”

Even this supposed “dove” never agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state, but a “state-minus” with no real sovereignty [you can read more about this here]. Ultimately, the debate on the “peace” process in Israeli society was not a disagreement over the subjugation of Palestinians, but over what form it would take. Even this was considered a step too far, and Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli, with his supporters often referred to as “leftist traitors”.

The Kibbutzim are not socialist nor good — they are settler colonial entities

https://jacobin.com/2016/10/kibbutz-labor-zionism-bernie-sanders-ben-gurion/

Kibbutzim were built by Jewish newcomers on confiscated Arab lands. The first kibbutz — built in northern Palestine in 1909 and named Degania, Mother of the Kibbutzim — put this vision into practice, with predictable results.
From the early stages of the Jewish yishuv in Palestine, the leaders of Labor Zionism and the kibbutz movement sought to prevent Palestinian-Jewish fraternity. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and widely hailed as the country’s founding, in 1907, one year after his arrival in Palestine from the Russian Empire, began calling for the formation of an exclusively Jewish labor force on lands owned by the Jewish National Fund.
Ben-Gurion’s ideas eventually hardened into two highly nationalistic doctrines: Hebrew Labor and Hebrew Conquest of Labor. Together, they provided the intellectual justification for replacing Arab workers with Jewish ones in Jewish communal settlements, built on annexed Arab lands.
In 1919, Ben-Gurion and his comrades founded Ahdut Haavoda (Union of Labor), a labor federation that opposed membership in the Communist International and aligned itself with the Zionist Organization. By the 1920s, Ben-Gurion was pushing for the realization, by force, of his Hebrew Labor doctrine across the entire Jewish economy in Mandate Palestine.
Ben-Gurion he called for complete segregation between Palestine’s Jewish and Arab communities: “Jews and Arabs,” he wrote in 1920, “should live and work in separate settlements and economies.” In 1924, in an address before the joint railway workers’ union council, he pronounced himself in favor of dividing unions along ethnic lines in mixed workplaces like the Palestine Railways.
In fact, Ben-Gurion repeatedly disputed the more romanticized views of the kibbutz. In a 1956 pamphlet, he conceded that the kibbutz movement was not predicated on socialist ideals as widely believed, but was “a means to protect Jewish labor.” Hebrew Labor, Ben-Gurion explained, didn’t grow out of class struggle, but ethnic separatism; adherents of Labor Zionism should elevate ethnic and national interests over class solidarity.
Socialist Zionism thus entailed the total racialization of the class struggle and the reconfiguration of labor along strictly demarcated ethnic lines. For Labor Zionists, Arab labor was nothing but a primitive mode of production unfit for the proletarian revolution. Only Hebrew Labor could power the Socialist Zionist project.
To foster its national and state-building enterprise in Palestine, Labor Zionists worked to organize Jewish settlers into a Jewish-only working class. Even here, though, the ultimate goal was not the liberation of the Jewish proletariat, but Labor Zionism’s total monopoly over the local economy, its modes of production, and market share. The Jewish kibbutz, meanwhile, was branded as the prototype of the future Jewish state. “Our state is neither capitalist nor socialist,” Ben-Gurion noted in 1951. It was, simply, a Jewish state.
In Mandate Palestine, Socialist Zionism made more enemies than comrades — not surprisingly, its Jewish-only policy both alienated and antagonized the native Arab population. By 1935, only 5 percent of the Arab workforce had worked in the Jewish sector (mainly in agriculture), with virtually none on kibbutz-owned land.
Over the next half-decade, the dispossessed rebelled. A five-month general strike in 1936 — triggered by the near monopoly of Labor Zionism and its Hebrew Labor policy — was quickly followed by a three-year national uprising led by thousands of impoverished workers, marginalized laborers, and landless peasants. British Mandatory forces, with the help of Zionist paramilitary forces, responded by crushing the uprising — a decisive victory for Labor Zionism, and a decisive blow to socialism in Palestine.

https://decolonizepalestine.com/rainbow-washing/redwashing/

“Conquest of the land” and “produce of the land” was strived for through the founding of kibbutzim. Historically, this facet of Zionist colonialism was perceived as having embodied the ostensibly socialist ideology of the Zionist labor institutions, with lands placed under the ownership of the nation for Jews to settle and cultivate. But this model was not derived from any affinity to socialist values; much of the literature on kibbutzim which uncritically depicts them as socialist projects ignores that there is no contradiction between state ownership of land and agricultural capitalism, and that that which requires analysis is the mode through which kibbutzim exploited the land and for what purpose.
In fact, the purpose of kibbutzim was set, not by their members, but by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), whose capital advancements in the form of land and other means of production came with economic and political stipulations, which included boycotting Palestinian workers. The JNF even went so far as to impose a penalty on any Jewish owner who would hire a Palestinian, all with the blessings of the British. Kibbutzim’s value was not their “socialist traits” but the geo-political and military services which they provided to the Zionist colonial project. Kibbutzim went on to drive Palestinians off their lands and harvest their crops, with this appropriation of Palestinian property, a form of primitive accumulation occurred that allowed Zionist economic development and paved the way for the events of 1948.
Decades on, non-Jews are still largely not allowed to be members of kibbutzim, unless to be exploited in menial jobs such as garbage disposal; a revealing example of this is when kibbutzim members found that cotton picking is cheaper when done by underpaid Palestinian women rather than by a modern combine. The women who do this work were called the “Fatima Combine” so much so that this expression has become part of colloquial Hebrew. A Druze who became a member of the kibbutz Sde-Boker, the kibbutz where Ben-Gurion ended his life, was able to do so only after joining the Israeli army and per the following conditions: Not to attempt to marry a Jewish girl before converting to Judaism, to observe the Jewish holidays, not to be conspicuous in observing Druze ceremonies, and several others of a similar nature. This Druze member accepted these humiliating conditions.
Regarding kibbutzim’s militant nature, the result of the conditions through which kibbutzim were created is shown in the numbers of kibbutzim members who have taken part in Israeli military offenses. In 1982, when Beirut, the Palestinian refugee camps, and so many other localities in Lebanon were being mercilessly destroyed, kibbutzniks were 25 percent of the air force pilots and 30 percent of the army officer corps. What made the kibbutz so valuable was that it was “first and foremost, a militaristic institution, a place where the young are being educated to be unthinking soldiers and tough army officers. Everything else is subordinated to.” That multiple Western socialists visited kibbutzim over the years and took part in redwashing their exclusionary, militaristic nature and regarded kibbutzim as progressive while dismissing Palestinian villages as primitive is more indicative of the orientalism of these Western socialists than anything regarding the kibbutzim themselves. Predictably, these Western socialists who tout kibbutzim as a progressive model took for granted the old Zionist line that there was no Palestinian working-class movement. As David Horowitz, Jewish Agency representative and first Governor of the Bank of Israel, claimed when he first settled in Palestine:

“The fabric of social life in Palestine is not that of a modern industrial nation but rather that of an Oriental, backward, feudal society. These social conditions rob the fellah (Palestinian farmer) of the benefits that should have accrued to him through Jewish colonization.”

This talking point of course belied the complex nature of Palestinian collective landholding practices, oversimplifying the nature of land deeds as a means of arguing that Palestinians did not deserve the land in the first place, only Jews did.

Israel is just like South Africa

Primer: Just like Israel is today, 30 years ago, South Africa was a settler colonial apartheid state, benefitting the minority white population over the black and colored populations. Just like with zionism and Israel, white settler colonialism in South Africa involved laws limiting Black ownership of land, theft of existing land, etc.

Similarity in ideology

Cooperation with South Africa

https://books.google.dk/books?id=5CVeyhyEJ_4C&pg=PA236&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

(page 236)
An editorial in Die Burger, then the mouthpiece of the South African NP, declared:
"Israel and South Africa... are engaged in a struggle for existence... The anti-Western powers have driven Israel and South Africa into a community of interests which had better be utilized than denied." (pages 46-47)
“We view Israel's position and problems with understanding and sympathy. Like us they have to deal with terrorist infiltration across the border; and like us they have enemies bent on their destruction." - Prime Minister Vorster of South Africa in 1971 (page 65)

https://books.google.com/books?id=J8RFAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Israel+and+South+Africa+have+one+thing+above+all+else+in+common:+they+are+both+situated+in+a+predominantly+hostile+world+inhabited+by+dark+peoples.%22

"Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples." – Official yearbook of the South African government, 1978 (page 59)

https://www.jpost.com/international/late-sa-president-pw-botha-felt-israel-had-betrayed-him

By 1987, Israel found itself the only developed nation in the world that still maintained strong relations with South Africa. What made them finally implement sanctions (called “measures” by Israel) was pressure from the US and Europe:

“In 1987 Israel found itself alone among the nations in still maintaining strong, even strategic relations with apartheid South Africa. A year earlier, the European nations had bandied together to impose sanctions on Pretoria, and had managed to draw the United States into making the same move. Feeling increasingly isolated by its ties to South Africa, and under a "pariah state" threat of its own, the Foreign Ministry established, in late 1986, a committee to review its policy towards its longtime ally.”

South Africa was extremely surprised by the Israeli decision to impose sanctions:

“Israel's decision in September of 1987 to join the rest of the world in imposing sanctions on South Africa left the apartheid regime totally dumbstruck, so much so that its leader at the time, president P.W. Botha (long known as the "Great Crocodile"), sent a secret letter to prime minister Yitzhak Shamir accusing him of stabbing him in the back. "How could you do this to us, after so many years of friendship and alliance?" Botha railed. Botha, who died Tuesday night aged 90, was a staunch friend of Israel and the architect of the Pretoria-Jerusalem alliance during the dark years of apartheid.”

https://sci-hub.wf/https://doi.org/10.1093%2Foxfordjournals.afraf.a097506

1,500 South African Jews had participated in the 1967 Yom Kippur War
White South Africans declared Israel their favorite foreign country in a 1981 opinion poll

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/antizionism-is-antisemitism/

A further point of content, is that there is no reason that the self-determination of the Jewish people can only be realized through an ethnocracy, sustained purely by the fact that the original inhabitants of land are in refugee camps all over the world. Israelis have long been brought up on the idea that Israel is the only thing keeping them safe, and that there can be no possible alternative other than the state as it currently stands. They are taught that any challenge to this system is tantamount to calling for the mass ethnic cleansing or genocide of Jewish Israelis between the river and the sea, or even worse, the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole.
These anxieties are hardly unique to Jewish Israelis, settlers in many different colonies throughout history have echoed these same sentiments. If we were to take a look at the narrative surrounding anti-Apartheid South Africa activism and boycotts, we would find eerily similar projections and arguments.
For example, in an article for the Globe and Mail under the title “The good side of white South Africa” Kenneth Walker argued that ending the Apartheid system and giving everyone an equal vote would be a “a recipe for slaughter in South Africa”. Others, such as Shingler, echoed similar claims, saying that anti-racist activists were actually not interested in ending Apartheid as a policy, but in South Africa as a society. Others came out to claim these activists were actually motivated by “anti-white racism”, fueled by “Black imperialism”. Political comics displayed a giant soviet bear, bearing down on South Africa declaring “We shall drive South Africa into the Sea!”
Sound familiar?
As Fred Moten once said:

“Settlers always think they’re defending themselves. That’s why they build forts on other people’s land. And then they freak out over the fact that they are surrounded. And they’re still surrounded.“

Underlying the logic of both of these assumptions are racist prejudices that the colonized are barbaric, bloodthirsty and ruthless. It is a deeply dehumanizing logic, steeped in every colonial and Orientalist trope. The idea that a free, decolonized Palestine would inevitably lead to genocide comes from this same logic. As a matter of fact, for all the claims of the Palestinians wanting to push Israelis into the sea, only the opposite has occurred in reality [You can read more about this here].

https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/301/89/IMG/NR030189.pdf?OpenElement

UN resolution condemning South African-Israeli relations

Israel Helps Genocide Indigenous Groups In Other Places

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/6/5/israels-latin-american-trail-of-terror

https://merip.org/1986/05/israel-and-guatemala/

Nuclear cooperation

https://books.google.com/books?id=qZgBYgfJvc8C

Richard Rhodes concludes the incident was an Israeli nuclear test, conducted in cooperation with South Africa, and that the United States administration deliberately obscured this fact in order to avoid complicating relations with Israel.

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB190/03.pdf

U.S. Intelligence believed that Israel participated in South African nuclear research projects and supplied advanced non-nuclear weapons technology to South Africa during the 1970s, while South Africa was developing its own atomic bombs.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/23/israel-south-africa-nuclear-weapons

“Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state's possession of nuclear weapons.
The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret.
The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of "ambiguity" in neither confirming nor denying their existence.
The Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa's post-apartheid government declassifying the documents at Polakow-Suransky's request and the revelations will be an embarrassment, particularly as this week's nuclear non-proliferation talks in New York focus on the Middle East.
They will also undermine Israel's attempts to suggest that, if it has nuclear weapons, it is a "responsible" power that would not misuse them, whereas countries such as Iran cannot be trusted.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20131211005029/http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/military/proliferation/countries/s-africa.html

In 2000, Dieter Gerhardt, Soviet spy and former commander in the South African Navy, stated that Israel agreed in 1974 to arm eight Jericho II missiles with "special warheads" for South Africa

Afrikaners becoming Israeli settlers after the end of apartheid

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-south-africa-home-white-colonialists

“It is unclear, however, how many white Afrikaner Pentecostal Protestant converts to Judaism are among them. But a recent report in the Haaretz newspaper claimed that such converts had been arriving in Israel in increasing numbers since the end of apartheid in South Africa in the mid-1990s.
"From a former Pentecostal pastor to entire families, a growing number of Afrikaners are converting to Orthodox Judaism and swapping South Africa for Israel," wrote Haaretz's Judy Maltz, "and, in many cases, West Bank settlements.”
They are said to already number several hundred immigrants. Haaretz added that "like many Orthodox Jews, they also tend to be quite right-wing in their politics. It is no coincidence then, that many have ended up living in West Bank settlements. Indeed, one of their main strongholds - aside from Ra’anana, which is popular among South African immigrants in general, and more recently the rural community of Yavne’el in northern Israel - is the settlement of Susya in the South Hebron Hills."”

Current South African stance

https://web.archive.org/web/20180516033417/http://anc.org.za/content/anc-condemns-israeli-massacre-innocent-palestinians

Position of the ANC

“The African National Congress itself and its leadership, once a target of a Nazi-like Apartheid regime, will never tolerate any system that treats and regards other human beings as insignificant. No amount of pontification by Israel or its government propaganda or its citizens, can be able to camouflage their participation in a systematic oppression of the Palestinian people.
All South Africans must rise up and treat Israel like the pariah that it is. In our struggle against the apartheid regime, governments did not give us support initially, but the people did. Some around the world shunned South Africa and its supporters. Just as progressive Dutch and British people, on their own volition, rejected White South Africa, so too must South Africans of Jewish faith and culture also stand up and reject Israeli oppression of Palestinians.
As South Africans, we can and should know better. The ANC calls on all South Africans to demonstrate to the world that we regard the Israeli government and its armed forces as an outcast and blight on humanity. The ANC will over the next few days seek to meet with the local Palestinian solidarity organisations, so that as South Africans, we express our collective support for the liberation of Palestine. We would like to express to the Palestinian people that their suffering willl not be in vain, and our freedom and liberation will never be complete until they are free.”

https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/sa-maintains-diplomatic-ties-with-israel-while-still-supporting-palestinians-dirco-20220127

"Our country draws a direct parallel between the former apartheid regime and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. Like the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), we consider Palestine, together with Western Sahara, as unfinished decolonisation struggles."

Zionism is anti-semitic

Primer: Zionism was the direct cause and instigator of the deaths of all other Jewish communities. Through the settler movement, it destroyed Yiddish and Ladino-speaking communities. Through the creation of Israel and the Nakba, and war between neighboring states and Israel, it also caused the death of almost all Jewish communities in the Arab world. None of these things would have happened if zionism didn’t exist. Zionism, through its creation of the Nakba and ethnic cleansing of 800k Palestinians, led to the destruction of Jewish communities in the Middle East, who, fearing for themselves, fled. It thus blended them together into one settler culture. Zionism has erased untold amounts of authentic Jewish culture and heritage througout its existance, in addition to its erasure of Palestinian culture and heritage. In this section of the doc, I will show that there is even credible evidence that Israel may have intentionally tried to create terror in order to get Iraqi Jews to move emigrate to Israel.

https://bookshome.net/book/22091265/7deb5c

Ben-Yehuda, the main driving force behind the reconstruction of Hebrew as a spoken language (a Hebrew which is very very far from the Liturgical Hebrew used to write holy texts and spoken by Rabbis), wanted to create a Jewish nationalism without religion. To do this, he wished to recreate Hebrew as a living language:

But the situation was more complex. Joseph Gedaliah Klausner, another influential Zionist and a celebrated scholar of Jewish religion, history, and literature who also made aliyah from Lithuania, once remarked on this captivating aspect of Ben-Yehuda’s personality: his impostorship. Klausner stated that when Ben-Yehuda and Dvora arrived in Jerusalem, so as “to ingratiate himself with the Orthodox Jews who knew written Hebrew and could, therefore, readily speak the language, Ben-Yehuda at first adopted their customs.” To achieve his objective, Ben-Yehuda returned to the ways of his childhood, which he had repudiated as a student of the gymnasium. “He grew a beard and earlocks, and prevailed upon his wife to wear a sheytl [wig].” But, according to Klausner, the strategy backfired. “The Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem soon sensed that for Ben-Yehuda Hebrew was not a holy tongue, but a secular, national tongue, and that his purpose for introducing spoken Hebrew was solely nationalist and political. They began to suspect him, and Ben-Yehuda became an extremist in his antireligious attitude. He registered as a national Jew ‘without religion.’” That opposition from the Orthodox would color his entire career; actually, it would outlast him. To this day there are segments of the ultra-Orthodox world that see him as the enemy. They are appalled by his dishonesty. Did he really pretend to be one of them in order to advance his mission?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228662285_Language_in_Nationalism_Modern_Hebrew_in_the_Zionist_Project

Zionist settlers hated the Yiddish language, and saw it as a sign of “a meek Jew” and the “perversion” of the diaspora Jew:

“Yiddish, the language of ‘the meek Jew’, earned contempt, if not outright hatred. The conventional wisdom of the Jewish Enlightenment held ‘that Yiddish was a perverted language, reﬂecting the perversion of the soul of the Diaspora Jew. The revulsion from it, is a recoil from Diaspora existence, from the Yiddish language – the mother tongue, intimate and hated at the same time, from the parental home of the shtetl, corroded by idleness and Jewish trading, and from the irrational and primitive behaviour of the Hasidim’ (Harshav 1993: 157). ‘For most, the struggle against Yiddish was rooted in a hatred of anything that was connected with the galut, considered to be marked by self-deprecation and cringing submission to non-Jews, a culture that was thoroughly second- rate, lacking in any estimable qualities, counterfeit and meretricious’. The initial Israeli reaction to the Nazi genocide of Jews was also shaped by this image. The millions of victims were considered cowardly, ‘inferior human beings that went like lambs to the slaughter’ (Porat 1990: 239). This was another example of the Jewish self-hate proper to Zionist ideology.”

This culminates in discrimination:

“Old patterns die hard. In post-Soviet Russia, the Jewish Agency for Israel, which subsidises cultural and educational activities in that part of the world, refused to provide funds for Yiddish (as distinguished from Hebrew) schools, this despite the interest still shown in it by Russian Jews, and for a youth organisation that was forced to disband, because of its lack of a proper ‘Zionist spirit’. The feud, then, still seems to go on – even if one of the contestants has virtually laid down its arms. ‘It is a pathetic and shameful story’. The victory of Hebrew over Yiddish was not the triumph of one language over another, but rather of an ideology that rejected exile and sought to create a New Hebrew Man.”

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/op-ed-contributors/when-zionism-feared-yiddish-351939

Article written by an anti-semitic zionist psycho who, while acknowledging the discrimination against Yiddish across zionism’s history, thinks it was necessary to “save the zionist movement”:

“The story Katz tells about Yiddish in prestate Palestine and in Israel does not end there. Groups arose in the 1920s in Tel Aviv that were committed to repressing any attempts by olim from the Pale of Settlement to speak in Yiddish or conduct any activities in the language. The Battalion of the Defenders of the Language used “hooligan tactics” to interrupt lectures in Yiddish and to close down the offices of Yiddish publications. Even the great Hebrew poet of the Zionist renaissance, Chaim Nahman Bialik, could not escape the wrath of Hebrew zealots who excoriated him for speaking in his mother tongue to fellow Jews from the “old country.”
After statehood was declared, the Israeli government tried to muzzle Yiddish newspapers.
The Hebrew University in Jerusalem had no chair in Yiddish literature for its first 25 years. This obsession with the first language of many of the immigrants reveals not only disdain but great fear. Zionists were afraid of the “momme lashen.””

David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, had this to say when hearing the story of a holocaust survivor telling her story in Yiddish. He was a self-hating Jew:

“David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, became visibly upset as the survivor told her tale. Eventually and abruptly, he stormed out of the reception, claiming – in Hebrew – “the language grates on my ears.””

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/cant-be-antisemitic-if-you-support-israel/

Finally, if all goes according to plan and these movements succeed in establishing their ethno-states, Israel would receive the Jewish population of these countries. In this way, these movements get to establish their racist entities, and Israel would benefit from the exodus of these Jewish communities to bolster its Jewish population. Unfortunately, the well-being or safety of these communities never enters into the equation. This is hardly a new position for the Zionist movement, as Ben Gurion in the 1930s famously said:

“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”

From a Zionist standpoint, this is clear to understand, as to Zionists only a Jewish state could ensure the long-term safety and prosperity of the Jewish people. Such thinking only reinforces the natural kinship between Zionism and other reactionary ethno-nationalist movements and parties.

https://books.google.dk/books?id=o-mbui7U_awC&printsec=frontcover&hl=da&source=gbs_book_other_versions#v=onepage&q&f=false

In response to the unwillingness of Iraqi Jews to emigrate to Israel and leave their own homes, in 1949, a zionist emissary (whose mission it was to convince Jews in Iraq to emigrate to Israel) proposed to the Mossad that they throw hand grenades into cafés used by Jews and write anti-semitic leaflets in order to intimidate them into emigrating to Israel and force them into becoming part of the zionist settler state:

"One of the Zionist emissaries Yudka Rabinowitz complained in April 1949 that "the complacency among the Jews of Berman is unbelievable" .. He therefore proposed to the Mossad 'throwing several hand-grenades for intimidation into cafes with a largely Jewish clientele, as well as leaflets threatening the Jews and demanding their expulsion from Berman. This is simple and easy to carry out because of the size of the place. In my opinion there is no better way of persuading the Jews of Berman to become Jews than such action.'"

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1391450188d7shawaf.pdf

Reviews the accounts of Shiblak and Gat. The author establishes, through this review, that the bombings clearly played a major part in the exodus of Jews from Iraq, in accordance with Shiblak, and contrary to Gat. Further while, as the author says, there is not conclusive evidence that Zionist actors caused bombings in Iraq that triggered at least a majort part of the exodus of Iraqi Jews, there are some strong pieces of evidence. One is the link given before this one. Others include:

In an interview conducted in 2006, Tajjar (Israeli spy) maintains that the Zionist emissaries did not receive instructions to conduct the bombings, but that he believes Yusuf Khabbaza [19] perpetrated the last one or two bombings of his own accord. According to Tajjar, this was hinted at by Yusuf Basri, arrested sometime after Tajjar was caught. Tajjar spoke with Basri before the latter was executed. [20] Significantly, Tajjar also cites a conversation with Khabbaza’s widow years later. ‘She said she’d asked him [if he had thrown the bombs] and he’d replied that if a bomb were thrown while we were in prison, it would have proved that it was not us who bombed the Masauda Shemtov.’ [21] The attack on the Mas’uda Shemtov synagogue [14 January 1951] was the second of the five, and resulted in the deaths of five Jews according to Gat, though Shiblak lists the casualties as two Muslims killed and several Jews injured. Tajjar continues: ‘She implied that he on his own initiative, without orders from Israel, did it in order to save us.’ [22] Tajjar himself also believes that Khabbaza, who remained at large after the others’ arrest, perpetrated the last one or two attacks as an attempt to convince the Iraqi authorities that the Zionist emissaries in their custody had not perpetrated the earlier (three) attacks. ‘He was an activist. He always wanted to do things. Thinking that it would help us, I believe that he did it.’ [23]

There is a problem with this, which the author points out, and which actually leads us to wonder why he would get this wrong. Tajjar claims that the last two bombings were done by his associates to deflect responsibility from the ones arrested (including himself). He messes up the timeline, however. This makes it seem like an adhoc excuse after the fact. The fact that Tajjar, one of the people, zionists, arrested, is even confessing to “one or two” of the 5 bombings, is extremely damning, and the author should have pointed this out: Given Tajjar’s role during this critical period and his knowledge of those involved in the Zionist underground, his claims deserve a measure of credibility. It should be noted, however, that if Khabbaza’s aim was truly to deflect accusations directed against imprisoned Zionist comrades, he would have perpetrated only the fifth bombing. Tajjar was arrested after the fourth bombing, which occurred on 10 May 1951. Gat cites 22 May as the date of Tajjar’s arrest, [24] while Tajjar refers to 25 May. [25] And it was only with the arrest of Tajjar, together with that of Mordechai Ben-Porat, that the Zionist ring began to collapse. This would mean that only the fifth and final bombing (5-6 June 1951), would have occurred during Tajjar’s incarceration.

The author here mentions three people; Shlomo Salih, Yusuf Basri, and Yusuf Khabbaza, who were charged in carrying out bombings. Specificallly, they were charged with the last 3 of the 5 bombings. 2 of them, Salih and Basri, were hanged. The 3rd, Khabbaza, remained at large. Khabbaza is the same person accused by Tajjar earlier of commiting the last two bombings. That is very, very suspect. The explanation that it would help absolve these arrested, and that this was why Khabbaza would’ve done the last two bombings, doesn’t make sense either; since Khabbaza was still at large, they would just suspect him.
…It is significant, however, that the British diplomatic officials in Iraq came to believe the Iraqi version of events; Shiblak quotes a memo in which it is stated that the Iraqi investigation ‘left no room for doubt who were behind the bombs’ (p. 153). Curiously, Gat does not refer to this quote, and attempts to argue that though the British believed that the trial was properly conducted and that there was circumstantial evidence pointing to Zionist responsibility, they did not explicitly state their agreement with the guilty verdict for those charged with throwing bombs. [40] Years later, former CIA operative Wilbur Crane Eveland, who was in Iraq at the time, referred in his book Ropes of Sand to ‘evidence’ brought to the US embassy by Iraqi authorities that proved Zionist culpability in the bombings, without elaborating (quoted in Shiblak, p. 154).
There have also been accounts, many by Iraqi Jews, of highly suspicious activities on the part of Zionists in Iraq. Flyers urging Jews to leave Iraq appeared in large numbers just after the attacks. Unusually, some had printed on them the exact time of day they were allegedly created; perhaps this was a deliberate means of parrying accusations of responsibility for a bombing which occurred later than the time indicated. [42] Marion Woolfson cites an interviewee, an Iraqi Jew in Israel named Eliahu Yusef, who claims that a poor Iraqi Jew was paid by Zionist emisarries to impersonate a Muslim and assault the rabbi of Zakho, after which all the Jews fled that town. [43] Naeim Giladi, an Iraqi Jewish member of the Zionist underground who, due to imprisonment and then escape from Iraq, no longer had any role when the bombings occurred, argues that they were the work of Zionist agents in his book Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews.
Perhaps the most damning statement to emerge from the swirl of controversy and rumour is, ‘This method of operation was not invented for Egypt. It was first tried in Iraq’ (p. 159), attributed to an unnamed Israeli Defence Minister in the aftermath of the Lavon affair. Shiblak cites Woolfson as his source, who in turn cites the 22 February 1978 edition of Jeune Afrique, the French-language newsweekly, as her source for this statement. [44] The identity of the minister is not provided.

There is also precedent for this, and it happened later, with the Lavon affair referred to just above:

In 1954, a few years after the exodus of Iraqi Jews, Israeli agents in Egypt together with local Egyptian Zionists engaged in several terrorist bombings of US and Western targets, including cinema theatres. This later became known as the ‘Lavon Affair,’ named after the Israeli Defence Minster who was framed for the bombings. Israel’s intention was to sully Egypt’s reputation and dissuade the West from cooperating with the new Free Officers’ regime. Years earlier, in 1940, the Haganah had blown up the Patria ship carrying Jewish refugees in order to prevent the Jews from being deported to Mauritius. [41]

https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=comments&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbmVWLXpRbzZ3Y01zQVJ5ZEUyeEdkU0Y0VHRVUXxBQ3Jtc0tuVTVHNWp6cWdoVlpKck9hZVYzaXR2ZHU2akppdk9lYzUzLTdvd3F5VUZ2OU5yYm1rc1FKazZMdl9QaWM1U2tOdTdmYWU1b2x2WnpISkRDRmwzUWpSTUpzM1lPblpCQjB1Mk02X2t4dWk2cWl4Q2JjUQ&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.middleeasteye.net%2Fbig-story%2Ftruth-behind-israeli-propaganda-expulsion-arab-jews&stzid=UgwnZ8njz-B6BMj9NTN4AaABAg.9nGMY42zPbY9nGMmkrozFn

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/avi-shlaim-proof-israel-zionist-involvement-iraq-jews-attacks

Zionism and the global far right (contemporary and historical)

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/cant-be-antisemitic-if-you-support-israel/

Zionist white supremacists today:

While Trump is perhaps one of the most well-known cases of an antisemite being embraced by defenders of Israel, he is far from the only one. Israel is a darling of the global far-right and white supremacists everywhere, despite the apparent contradiction of terms at first glance.
The love affair between Israel and far-right strongmen all across the globe has been widely documented. Viktor Orban, infamous Prime Minister of Hungary, is a prominent example of this. He promoted “anti-Semitic imagery of powerful Jewish financiers scheming to control the world” and spread conspiracy theories about George Soros wanting to “flood Europe with Muslims”. Orban also sought to honor Hungarian Nazi collaborator Miklos Horthy, who oversaw the killing of half a million Jews in Hungary. Yet he is a staunch supporter of Israel, which he invokes whenever anyone criticizes his bigotry.
Jair Bolsonaro also falls into this category; while he declares his love for Israel and waves its flag, his army honored a Nazi war criminal -decorated by Hitler himself- who had fled to Brazil. The AFD, Germany’s far-right populist party, also found support for Israel to be a convenient way to whitewash its antisemitism domestically.
But what is it that attracts these reactionary movements to Israel? Why do they profess love for Israel internationally while championing antisemitic and racist politics locally?
Far-right fascists love Israel for multiple reasons:

1) Israel serves as a model for the ethno-state that they seek to build. For the far-right, Zionism as an ideology and a movement is something to be emulated. White nationalist and neo-Nazi Richard Spencer proclaimed himself to be a “white Zionist”. He also went on to describe Israel as “the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state” — the “one that I turn to for guidance.” What is humorous here, is that this white nationalist possesses a more sober understanding of Zionism than most liberal Zionists do.
2) Israel and the far-right have in common their xenophobia, anti-migrant politics, and Islamophobia. They both see themselves as guardians of “Western civilization” and a bulwark against the East. Their political messaging is inundated with “war on terror” scaremongering, and a chilling obsession with demographics. Israel is more than happy to accommodate these groups, no matter how antisemitic they are, as long as they are supportive of Israeli policies. A prominent instance of such was a visit by a group of German far-right, anti-Muslim bloggers, who toured the streets of Israel expressing their desire to blow up mosques, and calling African refugees “invaders”. Unsurprisingly, as they visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust victims memorial, it became apparent that this group was full of Holocaust deniers, but since they spoke about the importance of supporting Israel’s fight against “the Muslim problem”, they were seen as friends and allies. Meanwhile, Jewish proponents of BDS have not been allowed entry at the border.

Historical zionism by white supremacists:

Sadly, none of what was described above is new. Historically speaking, some of the most dedicated supporters of Zionism have been raging antisemites themselves. Even the infamous Lord Balfour implemented anti-Jewish laws, and saw the Zionist movement as a way to:

“Mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.”

Naturally, these racist views and prejudices extended to other “races”:

“We have to face the facts. Men are not born equal, the white and black races are not born with equal capacities: they are born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change.”

Yet somehow, many Zionists today are under the delusion that a colonial, racist Empire massacring natives all across the globe, and ruthlessly squashing liberation movements, chose to support the creation of Israel out of the goodness of its heart. Instead of correctly viewing the patronage of Zionism as a continuation of imperialist policy, they choose to deceive themselves into thinking it is some grand gesture aimed at redemption.
Support for Zionism in the United States had similar colonial roots. Zionists, understanding the need for Western support, emphasized how similar they were to the American pioneers in their desire to “tame” the wild land, and vanquish the savage natives. This was before the liberal Zionists of today tried to re-frame colonial ethno-nationalism as an indigenous rights movement.
These pleas resonated the most among Christian Zionists, who until today form the largest body of support for Zionism and Israel in the United States, if not the world. Christian Zionists offered their support to the Zionist movement not out of any humanistic or altruistic considerations, but out of religious ones. According to their beliefs, Israel needed to be restored before the second coming of Christ so Armageddon could occur. During these events, the Jewish people would be forced to convert to Christianity or die.
With support for Israel dwindling among Jewish youth in the United States -to the point where ~40% of them agree that Israel is an Apartheid state- maintaining the support of Christian Zionists becomes paramount. Even though groups like Christians United for Israel (CUFI) hope to see the Jewish people either convert or die, Israel would rather cater to them than the Jewish people it claims to represent. Quite simply, just one of the many Christian Zionist organizations such as CUFI has more members than the entirety of the Jewish population in the United States. This is a support base that is dogmatically committed to Israel, and is not swayed by considerations of human rights or international law.
Overall, the Christian Right has been found to constitute the largest social movement in the U.S and the largest voting bloc within the Republican Party, and its support for U.S. imperialist policy vis-a-vis Israel for years has culminated in billions of dollars of aid. This is in addition to the millions evangelicals have poured into West Bank settlement projects over the past 10 years, estimated at somewhere between $50 million and $65 million.
Ultimately, we find ourselves in a situation where antisemites who are supportive of Israel come to be branded as “allies of the Jewish people”, and Jewish critics of Israel are called the new “antisemites”. Meanwhile, Palestinians can’t sneeze without being accused of inciting genocide.
Time and time again, Israel, the so-called Jewish state, has been shown to throw world Jewry under the bus if it furthers its aims. It would ally itself with the most reactionary forces on earth if it was deemed beneficial to the state. We must refute Israel’s claim to represent the Jewish people worldwide and reject its false accusations of antisemitism whenever it is rightly denigrated. Ultimately, we must reject Israel’s claims to moral authority on what does and does not constitute antisemitism, as this authority is seriously unearned.

Myth of Palestinian “Rejectionism”

taken directly from this post on r/Palestine by u/Foxodroid

So i make the mistake of reading comments in r/worldnews about Palestine (because i'm an idiot) sometimes and a frequent myth is that Palestinians keep "rejecting peace", "refuse to coexist" and the most ironic of all, should've accepted the UN partition plan but didn't because they want an Arab ethnostate.

First of all what did Palestinians want? At evert turn the demand was a democratic state with protection to minority rights citing the Peel comission (1936) which was already promised.

The Arabs opposed the partition plan and condemned it unanimously.[4] The Arab High Committee opposed the idea of a Jewish state[5] and called for an independent state of Palestine, "with protection of all legitimate Jewish and other minority rights and safeguarding of reasonable British interests".[6] They also demanded cessation of all Jewish immigration and land purchase.[5] They argued that the creation of a Jewish state and lack of independent Palestine was a betrayal of the word given by Britain.[3][7]

a) Jewish presence was never rejected

This objection was accompanied by a proposal that Britain adhere to its promise of a sovereign democratic state with constitutional guarantees for the rights of the Jewish minority.[5]

b) The proposed solution took away all the good land who was inhabited primarily by Arabs

Indignation was widespread with Arabs complaining that the Plan had allotted to them "the barren mountains," while the Jews would receive most of the five cultivable plains, the maritime Plain, the Acre Plain, the Marj Ibn 'Asmir, Al Huleh and the Jordan Valley[29] For the Arabs, the plan envisaged giving Zionists the best land, with 82% of Palestine's principle export, citrus fruit, consigned to Jewish control.[29][28][30]

c) They rejected their own inevitable ethnic cleansing

The idea of transfer of population met strong opposition.[11] Under the Peel proposal, before transfer, there would be 1,250 Jews in the proposed Arab state, while there would be 225,000 Arabs in the Jewish state. The Peel proposal suggested a population transfer based on the model of Greece and Turkey in 1923, which would have been "in the last resort ... compulsory".[6] It was understood on all sides that there was no way of dividing the land which would not have meant a large number of Arabs (a large minority or even a majority) in the land designated for a Jewish state.[31]

Zionists literally rejected coexistance at every turn, fully supported an ethnic cleansing project and demanded a racially pure state backed by a world power.

Then Palestinian rejectionism of Zionist fascism is painted as rejecting "peace" but Zionist rejection of coexistance is conveniently left out.

Too often the partition is assumed to be done in good faith except the British never believed or were serious about Palestinian self determination because they literally believed colonized nations are subhuman

"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."

Winston Churchill To the Peel Commission (1937) on a Jewish Homeland in Palestine.

Even the Arab peace initiative based on the 2 states model were rejected by Zionists.

I'm leaving this here because i'm sure i'll keep encountering this hasbara.

Additional resources

https://decolonizepalestine.com/intro/the-mandate-years-and-the-nakba/

Despite their propaganda and rhetoric, the Arab states sought different secret opportunities to avoid and end the war with Israel. Some offers went as far as to agree to absorb all Palestinian refugees. These were all rejected by Israel with the goal of maximizing its land-grabs [You can read more about this here]. For example, when it became clear that Israel would ignore all negotiations regarding partition and unilaterally declare its independence, there were enormous efforts behind the scenes aimed at avoiding war, not to mention ending it early when it did eventually break out. These efforts were heavily sponsored by the United States, who asked in March 1948 that all military activities be ceased, and asked the Yishuv to postpone any declaration of statehood and to give time for negotiations. Outside of Abdallah of Transjordan, the Arab states accepted this initiative by the United States. However, it was rejected by Ben Gurion, who knew that any peaceful implementation of the partition plan meant that the refugees he had expelled earlier would have a chance to return, not to mention that war would offer him a chance to conquer the lands he coveted outside the partition plan.
This followed a long series of Zionist rejection of overtures by the native Palestinians. In 1928, for example, the Palestinian leadership voted to allow Zionist settlers equal representation in the future bodies of the state, despite them being a minority who had barely just arrived. This was faced with Zionist rejection. Even after this, in 1947 the Palestinians suggested the formation of a unitary state for all those living between the river and the sea to replace the mandate to no avail. There were many attempts at co-existence, but this simply would not have benefited the Zionist leadership who never intended to come to Palestine to live as equals.

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/zionism-is-not-colonialism-just-jewish-self-determination/

When it came to Palestinians, the issue was never with an abstract Jewish self-determination. Everybody should be able to determine their own destiny, but not at the expense of the oppression of others. As a matter of fact, there is ample evidence -recorded by the Zionist pioneers themselves- that the native Palestinian population was welcoming of the first Zionist settlers. They worked side by side, they taught them how to work the land, even when they showed arrogance and saw the natives as inferior. Only after it became clear that these settlers did not come merely to live in Palestine, but to become its landlords as Usishkin said, did resistance to Zionism begin.
Palestine has always been home to countless refugee populations, the idea that the Jewish people fleeing persecution could find a safe home in Palestine was never the issue. The issue is that these ideals of coexistence were never reciprocated by the Zionist movement, who showed disdain towards Palestinians from the very beginning and sought to take over the land. For example, it sanctioned settlers working with Palestinians, even calling Arab labor an “illness” and formed a segregated trade union that banned non-Jewish members.

Israel never wanted peace

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/israel-has-always-sought-peace/

On the partition

This point is further reinforced by the Yishuv’s position on partition. While accepting the partition in public, in private Ben Gurion reemphasized that any acceptance of partition would be tactical and temporary:

“After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”

This was not a one-time occurrence, and neither was it only espoused by Ben Gurion. Internal debates and letters illustrate this time and time again. Even in letters to his family, Ben Gurion wrote that “A Jewish state is not the end but the beginning” detailing that settling the rest of Palestine depended on creating an “elite army”. As a matter of fact, he was quite explicit:

“I don’t regard a state in part of Palestine as the final aim of Zionism, but as a mean toward that aim.”

Chaim Weizmann expected that “partition might be only a temporary arrangement for the next twenty to twenty-five years”. From the offset, any claims that the Zionist settlers simply wanted to live in peace with the Palestinians are highly suspect. As chairman of the Jewish National Fund and Zionist leader Usishkin emphasized:

“..the [Palestinian] Arabs do not want us because we want to be the rulers. I will fight for this. I will make sure that we will be the landlords of this land . . . . because this country belongs to us not to them ..”

During the 1947-1949 war

Even during the war of 1948, there were many opportunities to cease hostilities which Israel rejected. There were negotiations between Israel and Egypt in October 1948, where based on previous correspondences, Egypt was prepared to offer many concessions in exchange for peace, even offering to resettle the Palestinian refugees in the UN decreed “Arab” areas of Palestine. Four days after Israeli politician Eliyahu Sasson went to meet with Heikal, chairman of the Egyptian senate, Ben Gurion launched a new military operation. Naturally, this put an end to any attempt at avoiding bloodshed.
From their side, the Syrians also attempted to end the war at the beginning of 1949, where prime minister al-Azm informed the US ambassador of their desire to stop the fighting. The only conditions they put forward was that Palestinians be afforded the right to self-determination, and the recognition of traditional and historic Syrian fishing rights in certain areas of lake Tiberius. In the same month, a Syrian mediator attempted to meet with Eliyahu Sasson’s assistant in Paris to directly discuss a peace treaty. He was instantly turned down because the Israelis believed that any negotiation with Syria meant discussing the division of water sources, which Israel wanted to control in their entirety.
Following a coup in Damascus, Husni al-Zaim seized power and offered Israel even more concessions. As a matter of fact, he suggested meeting Ben Gurion face to face to negotiate a full-fledged peace. Not only that, he offered absorbing and resettling 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria. The US was enthusiastic about this development, the Israelis however, were indifferent and refused the offer. Ben Gurion wanted to force an agreement through military might only. Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote that:

“During his brief tenure of power [Zaim] gave Israel every opportunity to bury the hatchet and lay the foundations for peaceful coexistence in the long term. If his overtures were spurned, if his constructive proposals were not put to the test, and if a historic opportunity was frittered away . . . the fault must be sought not with Zaim but on the Israeli side.”

This refusal is only perplexing if you have internalized the idea that Israel actually sought peace, and not that it used it as a charade to justify its brazen expansionism. This would not be the only time Israelis could have avoided war but chose to pursue territorial gains instead.

1967 war

Hoping to repeat the success of 1948, Israel purposefully marched into the 1967 war despite all the claims of it being a defensive war of no-choice. This becomes exceedingly clear once we examine the diplomatic record, and the numerous times Israel sabotaged any attempt at mediation or diplomacy to avert the outbreak of war.
For example, throughout much of the crisis of 1967 Egypt expressed its willingness to resurrect and expand the Egyptian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission (EIMAC), which was officially rejected by Israel in May. In the same month, the UN secretary-General U Thant, personally attempted to avert an escalation by travelling to Cairo to mediate between the Egyptians and Israelis. He came with a proposal which called for a two week moratorium in the straits of Tiran [You can read more about this here]. Egypt agreed to the proposal in an attempt to lower tensions. Israel rejected the proposal. Brian Urquhart, who was a senior UN official at the time, wrote in his memoir that “Israel, no doubt having decided on military action, turned down U Thant’s ideas“.
This is hardly the only attempt at averting an escalation, the United States also tried its hand at mediation. High ranking American diplomats and politicians met with Nasser in late May in a meeting that was deemed a “breakthrough in the crisis”. In this meeting Nasser showed flexibility and a willingness to include the World Court to arbitrate in some of the issues. However, what was most promising was that Nasser agreed to send his vice-president to Washington within a week in an attempt to reach a diplomatic settlement for the crisis.
You may be wondering why you’ve never heard of such a meeting, or what its results were. That is because two days before the meeting, Israel decided to launch its surprise attack, torpedoing all efforts to reach a non-violent diplomatic solution to the crisis.
This shocked even the Americans, Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State wrote that:

“They attacked on a Monday, knowing that on Wednesday the Egyptian vice-president would arrive in Washington to talk about re-opening the Strait of Tiran. We might not have succeeded in getting Egypt to reopen the strait, but it was a real possibility.”

Following the diplomatic developments of the time leaves no shadow of a doubt that Israel was purposely seeking war. It rebuffed all attempts at mediation and even deceived and humiliated its ally, the United States, by allowing it to continue with the charade of diplomacy when Israel knew it was going to attack anyway. On the other hand, this shows Nasser to have been far more flexible, and amenable to diplomatic solutions than many suggest. Yet until this day, Israel is portrayed as being forced into a defensive war, while Nasser is portrayed as a warmonger.
In his memoir, U Thant, the UN Secretary General at the time wrote that:

“if only Israel had agreed to permit UNEF to be stationed on its side of the border, even for a short duration, the course of history could have been different. Diplomatic efforts to avert the pending catastrophe might have prevailed; war might have been averted.“

This was further confirmed by Odd Bull, chief of staff of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) at the time, who stated that:

“it is quite possible that the 1967 war could have been avoided’ had Israel acceded to the Secretary-General’s request.“

Oslo Accords

There are many other examples where Israel chose war or the status-quo over peace to maintain its interests. During the Oslo Accords, the amount of Israeli settlement construction skyrocketed. This was embodied by Ariel Sharon’s quote over Israeli radio in 1998: “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many [Palestinian] hilltops as they can to enlarge the [Jewish] settlements because everything we take now will stay ours… Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”
Even the “dove” Rabin never agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state, but a “state-minus” with no real sovereignty [you can read more about this here]. Like virtually all Israeli talking points, reality and history paint an entirely different picture than the one offered. However, with the proliferation of the internet and easier access to information, they are coming under considerable attack. A sign that Israel is losing the battle for hearts and minds is that it has now resorted to lawfare to make its case, such as its attempts to outlaw BDS. This is not the behavior of somebody secure in their narrative or their history.

1967 war

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/war-of-1967-was-self-defense/

Israel does not wish to avert war, but wants war in order to expand:

The 1967 war did not materialize out of a vacuum, nor should it be understood as such. The 1967 war was merely a continuation of Israel’s wars against the region to achieve maximum territorial expansion. Particularly, this war would finish what was begun in 1956, when Israel invaded Egypt with the help of Britain and France.
The United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was created in the aftermath of the 1956 war on Egypt to secure peace, and patrol both sides of the border between Egypt and Israel. Despite being the aggressor, Israel refused to cooperate with the UN force, and rejected the idea of any peace-keeping force on their side of the border, meanwhile Egypt accepted the UN force and cooperated with them. Not only did Israel refuse to cooperate, but over its decade-long existence, Israeli troops “regularly patrolled alongside the line and now and again created provocations by violating it“.
This, however, was only the tip of the iceberg of Israeli provocations towards its neighbors. Much of Israel’s military actions were designed to goad Nasser into war, an example of this can be seen in the disproportionate Israeli assault on Gaza in 1955, or the assault on Samu in 1966, or the frequent unprovoked bombings of Syrian border positions. This is hardly our unique interpretation of events; at the time this was widely understood. For example the British ambassador in Israel explained that this tactic aimed to spawn a “deliberately contrived preventive war“.
But even if this is unconvincing to you, and you remain adamant that Israel was acting purely in self-defense, there is ample evidence to show that Israel was not intent on avoiding war. As mentioned, war was an opportunity to achieve many of its objectives, one of which is the expansion into territories not conquered in 1948, as Ben Gurion lamented. This becomes exceedingly clear once we examine the diplomatic record, and the numerous times Israel sabotaged any attempt at mediation or diplomacy to avert the outbreak of war.
For example, throughout much of the crisis of 1967 Egypt expressed its willingness to resurrect and expand the Egyptian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission (EIMAC), which was officially rejected by Israel in May. In the same month, the UN secretary-General personally attempted to avert an escalation by travelling to Cairo to mediate between the Egyptians and Israelis. He came with a proposal which called for a two-week moratorium in the straits of Tiran (Which we will be discussing shortly). Once again, Egypt agreed to the proposal in an attempt to lower tensions. Israel rejected the proposal. Brian Urquhart, who was a senior UN official at the time, wrote in his memoir that “Israel, no doubt having decided on military action, turned down U Thant’s ideas“.
This is hardly the only attempt at averting an escalation, the United States also tried its hand at mediation. High ranking American diplomats and politicians met with Nasser in late May in a meeting that was deemed a “breakthrough in the crisis”. In this meeting Nasser showed flexibility and a willingness to include the World Court to arbitrate in some of the issues. However, what was most promising was that Nasser agreed to send his vice-president to Washington within a week in an attempt to reach a diplomatic settlement for the crisis.
You may be wondering why you’ve never heard of such a meeting, or what its results were. That is because two days before the meeting, Israel decided to launch its surprise attack, torpedoing all efforts to reach a non-violent diplomatic solution to the crisis.
This shocked even the Americans, Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State wrote that:

“They attacked on a Monday, knowing that on Wednesday the Egyptian vice-president would arrive in Washington to talk about re-opening the Strait of Tiran. We might not have succeeded in getting Egypt to reopen the strait, but it was a real possibility.”

Following the diplomatic developments of the time leaves no shadow of a doubt that Israel was purposely seeking war. It rebuffed all attempts at mediation and even deceived and humiliated its ally, the United States, by allowing it to continue with the charade of diplomacy which Israel knew it was going to attack anyway. On the other hand, this shows Nasser to have been far more flexible, and amenable to diplomatic solutions than many suggest. Yet until this day, Israel is portrayed as being forced into a defensive war, while Nasser is portrayed as a warmonger.
In his memoir, U Thant, the UN Secretary General at the time, wrote that “if only Israel had agreed to permit UNEF to be stationed on its side of the border, even for a short duration, the course of history could have been different. Diplomatic efforts to avert the pending catastrophe might have prevailed; war might have been averted.” This was further confirmed by Odd Bull, chief of staff of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) at the time, who stated that “it is quite possible that the 1967 war could have been avoided’ had Israel acceded to the Secretary-General’s request.“
Israel had no interest in avoiding war, this much is clear. But let us delve a little bit deeper and inspect the pretexts it used for the justification of its sneak attack on Egypt, which it labeled as a “preemptive strike”.

They knew Egypt was not preparing to attack:

One of the main pretexts used to justify the Israeli attack on Egypt is claiming that the concentration of Egyptian troops in Sinai constituted an imminent danger. The claim is that these troops were preparing to attack, so Israel struck first to “defend” itself. However, once again, none of this holds up to any kind of scrutiny.
Israel knew that Egypt was not about to attack, and that their military movements were purely defensive. There is a wealth of documented proof of this, it is actually quite difficult to argue the opposite when even Israeli leaders were so frank about it.
For example, Mossad Chief Meir Amit observed at the time that “Egypt was not ready for a war; and Nasser did not want a war.” US President Johnson shared the evaluation of US intelligence networks with the Israelis that “..there is no Egyptian intention to make an imminent attack” Some years later, Menachem Begin candidly admitted that:

“The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

Furthermore, if Israel was truly worried about an Egyptian attack that would threaten its existence, it would have simply accepted U Thant’s offer to deploy UN peace keeping forces.

They knew Syria was not responsible for tensions, and Israel was provoking them into a response:

The second pretext for the war was to put a stop to what Abba Eban called the “bombardment of our northern settlements“. However, you should by now know better than to take any of these claims at face value. In the aftermath of the 1948 war, a demilitarized zone was established between Syria and Israel. In the Israeli narrative, Syrians constantly rained fire down on Israel without provocation from their positions in the Golan heights. Unsurprisingly, the details of the clashes among the northern front paint an entirely different story.
Israeli general Moshe Dayan admitted that Israel was responsible for at least 80% of all clashes that occurred with the Syrians. He described how Israel would deliberately trespass into the demilitarized zone to provoke the Syrians and create a justification to take over more land:

“We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was.”

This is confirmed by Odd Bull, who recollected that “the situation deteriorated as the Israelis gradually took control over that part of the demilitarized zones which lay inside the former national boundaries of Palestine…as the status quo was all the time being altered by Israel in her favor”. US consular cables from Jerusalem concluded that the:

“Arabs concerned selves basically with preservation situation envisioned in [the UN armistice agreements] while Israel consistently sought gain full control”.

As a matter of fact, these same cables even mentioned that the UN observers generally credited Syria for practicing restraint in the face of Israel’s behavior.
But why provoke these clashes in the first place?
Dayan was of the view that the occupation of the Golan was driven mainly by the fertile agricultural lands it possessed and not any real concern for security. This is reinforced by the fact that for an entire 6 month period preceding the war, there was not a single Israeli casualty on that front.
The situation was quite clear cut, with almost unanimous agreement that Israel bore the responsibility for the vast majority of escalations with Syria. As a matter of fact, there were four different UN resolutions condemning Israel for its violations of the armistice agreement and encroachments into the demilitarized zone, while none targeted Syria. At the time it was plain to see who the aggressor was, which is why the twisting of the narrative today into the complete opposite is so insulting. It is historical revisionism of the highest order with no basis in reality.

The blockade of the Tiran straits:

“Perhaps the most cited pretext to justify the Israeli assault is Egypt’s blockade of the straits of Tiran. Israelis at the time dramatically described it as a “strangulation”.
The official Egyptian reason for closing the straits was due to Israel’s violation of various UN resolutions. This is plausible, but of secondary importance to us. What interests us here is the Israeli claim of a “strangulation” so bad that it constituted an act of war which necessitated a military response.
First, it is important to establish that the affected port of Eilat is not the crucial lifeline that Israel claimed it was. It is estimated that at the time barely five percent of Israel’s trade arrived through Eilat. Had Haifa been the blockaded port, perhaps this talking point could have held some water, but it was not.
Second, the blockade only targeted ships flying the Israeli flag, or other ships carrying cargo which was deemed strategic. Yet the records show that for the preceding 2.5 years not a single ship flying the Israeli flag had docked at the port of Eilat. So even if fully enforced, this blockade would barely affect Eilat’s port.
Third, there is strong evidence to suggest that the Egyptians did not actually enforce the blockade. They initially searched a few ships, but relaxed their measures fairly quickly.
And finally, if you recall, Nasser was in the process sending a delegation to Washington DC to discuss lifting the blockade and de-escalating tensions with Israel. As mentioned above, Israel chose to attack two days before the arrival of said delegation.
In any case, the idea that the ineffective, partial blockade of a minor port was tantamount to “strangulation” which threatened to destroy Israel is pure propaganda aimed at justifying Israel’s aggression.”

The real reason for the war?

Under no circumstance was Israel under an imminent threat of destruction, not even the Israelis believed that at the time. Israeli Minister Mordecai Bentov frankly admitted a few years later that:

“This entire story about the danger of extermination was invented and exaggerated after the fact to justify the annexation of new Arab territories“.

For Israel, the 1967 war had nothing to do with “self-defense” and everything to do with finishing what it started in 1948 and 1956. It had to do with acquiring new territories and expanding, and it had to do with striking Nasser’s project before it could become too big of a threat.
Ben Gurion’s apprehension regarding Nasser was never a secret, he admitted that he:

“..always feared that a personality might arise such as arose among the Arab rulers in the seventh century or like [Kemal Ataturk] who arose in Turkey after its defeat in the First World War. He raised their spirits, changed their character, and turned them into a fighting nation. There was and still is a danger that Nasser is this man.”

https://books.google.dk/books?id=VaUvqHNd6m0C&pg=PA164&dq=Israel+1967+Strait+of+War+existence+in+danger&sig=6GkdFAkh39zp1qRkmfpC__nxobg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

No evidence that the six-day war was a preemptive strike:

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19/d69

“Mr. McNamara said that our intelligence differed on some of the facts Prime Minister Eshkol had relied upon; but, more importantly, our appraisal of the facts was different. We thought the Egyptian deployments were defensive in character and anticipatory of a possible Israeli attack.”

https://carnegiecouncil-media.storage.googleapis.com/files/v16_i009_a009.pdf

Was there, then, a real threat of annihilation of Israel in 1967? Thc answcr is clearly no. The number and stature of the Israeli generals who havc spoken out, the clarity and cxplicitncss of their statements, the glare of publicity surrounding the debate which would have brought out any weaknesses in these generals’ arguments, the fact that a “dove” like Gcneral Peled and a “hawk” like General Wcizman, who differ on the future of the occupied territories, concur on the central issue of the controversy - all these considerations make the answer emphatically clcar.
There are, moreover, several clements which weaken the case of those who affirm that in 1967 a danger of annihilation did exist-the “establishment” connections of most of these persons, the dutifulness of their denials and the appcal to the generals who spoke out to refrain from further discussion lcst Israel’s imagc bc adversely affected.
A second relevant question is: Was Egypt actually about to attack Israel in May and June, 1967? Peled, as we have secn, admitted that there was no proof that Egypt planned to attack. Herzog stated that the Isracli General Staff did not believe in this danger, nor did President Johnson. In his memoirs Lyndon Johnson tells of the meeting on may 26, 1967, with Abba Eban. Eban reported that, according to Israeli intelligence, Egypt was preparing an all-out attack. Johnson wrote:

I asked Secretary McNamara . . . to give Mr. Eban a summary of our findings. Three separate intelligence groups had looked carefully into the matter, Mr. Namara said, and it was our best judgment that a UAR-Egyptian attack was not imminent. “All of our intelligence people are unanimous,” I added, “that if the UAR attacks, you will whip hell out of them.”*

https://books.google.dk/books?id=OLogAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA135&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

Nakba

Overview

Every year on the 15th may, Palestinians mourn Nakba (catastrophe). This event consists of the ethnic cleansing of around 750,000 Palestinians by the actions of Zionist militias.

r/Palestine - NAKBA (ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS)

There are several documents that are declassified so far which definitively show how Israeli policies lead to expulsion of Palestinians. One of most important pieces of evidence is the intel report by Israeli intelligence, where they admitted that actions of Zionist forces were the main reason for expulsion of Palestinians

r/Palestine - NAKBA (ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS)

https://www.akevot.org.il/en/article/intelligence-brief-from-1948-hidden-for-decades-indicates-jewish-fighters-actions-were-the-major-cause-of-arab-displacement-not-calls-from-arab-leadership/?full#popup%2F15413e71e82f9865d9e05c83102c4751

Research by Professor Al-Gazi of Tel Aviv university has also shown a well versed state plan to expel the Bedouin population:

r/Palestine - NAKBA (ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS)

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-documents-reveal-israel-s-intent-to-forcibly-expel-bedouin-from-their-lands-1.10579891

Prof. Gadi Algazi, a historian from Tel Aviv University. His in-depth research has uncovered a military operation commanded by Moshe Dayan whose goal, the documents show, was to forcibly expel Bedouin from their lands.

“Transferring the Bedouin to new areas will revoke their rights as landowners and the land will be leased as government land,” wrote Dayan, then head of the army’s Southern Command, in a letter Algazi discovered. And a document written by the military government predicted that if the Bedouin, who refused to leave, didn’t move voluntarily, the army “would have to move them,” Algazi’s opinion added

Another important evidence is this, recently de-classified document (of Israeli military leader David Ben Gurion ) from Israeli state archives, shows how Ben Gurion wanted to wipe Palestinian villages.

r/Palestine - NAKBA (ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS)

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-state-archive-error-shows-israeli-censorship-guided-by-concerns-over-national-image-1.10517841

the uncensored part reads

here are places that constituted a great danger and constitute a great danger, and we must wipe them out. But this must be done responsibly, with consideration before the act

Ben Gurion in various private memoirs supported expulsion of Palestinians, in a letter to his son, he said this.

r/Palestine - NAKBA (ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS)

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT-commander-of-deadly-1948-operation-at-deir-yassin-dies-at-94-1.10305564

SOME POPULAR PRO-ISRAELI ARGUMENTS ON THIS

a)Expulsions of Palestinians happened since Arab armies launched a war on Israel:

This is a very popular argument, that pops up time and again, it is often used to give a premise that expulsions of Palestinians were bought about as a result of war between Arab armies of neighboring countries and Israel.

Although this narrative is false, since war between arab countries and Israel started on 15th may 1948, by 13th may (two days before war ) more than 400,000 Palestinians were already expelled out

r/Palestine - NAKBA (ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus#Results_of_the_Palestinian_exodus

Palestinians villages like Dier Yassin who had a peace pact with Zionist leaders, also ended up being massacred

b)Most Palestinians left due to the command of Arab leaders:

This is a very classic argument from the pro-israeli side, this argument was first debunked and challenged by BBC journalist Erskine Childers, who studied the radio broadcasts of Arab Higher committee and found no evidence of orders of expulsions

r/Palestine - NAKBA (ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS)

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/12th-may-1961/8/the-other-exodus

This myth was later thoroughly debunked by Benny Morris in the book Birth of Palestinian refugee problem, (pg 269)

r/Palestine - NAKBA (ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS)

Additional resources

https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1650102

Mustafa Abbasi's “The Fall of Acre in the 1948 Palestine War” draws on archival sources to trace the six months leading up to the Nakba and the preparations the people of Acre took amidst heightening tensions there. Despite Acre's historical legacy as one of the most important Palestinian cities and its staunch past resistance to foreign invaders, it nonetheless fell to Haganah forces just a few days after the founding of the state of Israel. In a similar vein, Nafez Nazzal's “The Zionist Occupation of Western Galilee, 1948” confronts persistent myths about the Nakba and uses interviews with residents of six Palestinian villages to further explicate the systemic methods Israeli forces used to “cleanse” entire regions of their Arab inhabitants.
“The End of Arab Tiberias: The Arabs of Tiberias and the Battle for the City in 1948” by Mustafa Abbasi, presents an interesting case from 1948 when considering the traditional positive Arab-Jewish relations there that preceded the Nakba. While the Arab leadership of the city placed an absolute premium on intercommunal relations, Tiberias fell quickly after the outbreak of the 1948 war and rapidly became almost exclusively Jewish. Spiro Munayyer's “The Fall of Lydda,” which features an introduction by Walid Khalidi, also tells of the massive preparations the city undertook to prepare for the oncoming conflict and its inhabitants' attempts to prevent catastrophe. Despite agreements with other Jewish localities and leaders, Lydda became overwhelmed with displaced Palestinian refugees who were forced out of surrounding areas. It was ultimately occupied and ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces in July of 1948. Soon afterwards, another 25 villages were also conquered by advancing Israeli forces, displacing some 80,000 Palestinians, the largest single deliberate expulsion of Palestine's Arab population during the Nakba.

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/what-is-nakba-the-day-when-palestine-s-ethnic-cleansing-began-explained-46728

What happened:

“In 1948, Zionist militias expelled 700,000 Palestinians from their native land through a campaign that included murder, rape, and intimidation.”
“Millions of Palestinians and their supporters worldwide will mark 73 years since the ‘Nakba’ or ‘catastrophe’ on May 15, a day that coincides with the Israeli declaration of independence…for Palestinians it is a day that symbolises their expulsion from their land.”
The Jewish state of Israel was formed amid a war that started in 1947 between Palestinians backed by some Arab states and Jewish settlers who had been arriving in hordes in historic Palestine over the course of decades due to persecution in Europe and the development of a form of Jewish nationalism known as Zionism.
The 1917 Balfour declaration by the UK unashamedly handed over Palestine to the Zionist movement despite the large Arabic-speaking majority in the region.
In the ensuing three decades, spurred by persecution in Europe, the migration of Jews to the territory accelerated, leading to tensions with indigenous Palestinians who were afraid of being muscled out of their homeland.
Their fears would eventually materialise as Zionist settlers formed militias with the aim of securing as much territory as possible for the new Jewish state and to reduce the Arab population in the newly acquired territories. Scores of Arab villages disappeared off the map, as a result of this campaign.”

Deliberately done:

“While Israel has sought to propagate the idea that Palestinian populations left of their own volition, historic records, including statements by the most senior Zionist leaders, make clear that there was a deliberate campaign to expel Palestinians from their land.
As early as 1937, the Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, made clear that Palestinian populations needed to be cleansed from the territory the Zionists acquired or were in the process of seizing through force. “We must expel Arabs and take their place,” Ben-Gurion declared in a letter to his son.”

Tactics used:

“In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe details the tactics used by Zionist militias to force Palestinians out of their villages and land.
These included outright massacres, such as the one that occurred in the villages of Deir Yassin and Abu Shusha, as well as threats to villagers that they might be next in line if they did not leave their homes.
Some Zionist fighters were also responsible for raping women, including minor girls, during the 1948 war. Such incidents further forced Palestinians into leaving for fear of getting caught up in the violence.
In total, around 700,000 Palestinians were forced to leave never to return. Today, their descendants number in the millions and are also forbidden by the Israelis from ever returning to their homes.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/15/nakba-mapping-palestinian-villages-destroyed-by-israel-in-1948

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/5/23/the-nakba-did-not-start-or-end-in-1948

The Nakba itself:

“Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population (note that this 1.9 million includes both Palestinians and zionist settlers) were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.”

The intentions were clear:

“From 1919 onwards, Zionist immigration to Palestine, facilitated by the British, increased dramatically. Weizmann, who later became Israel’s first president, was realising his dream of making Palestine “as Jewish as England is English”.”

Leading up to the Nakba

“The roots of the Nakba stem from the emergence of Zionism as a political ideology in late 19th-century Eastern Europe. The ideology is based on the belief that Jews are a nation or a race that deserve their own state.
From 1882 onwards, thousands of Eastern European and Russian Jews began settling in Palestine; pushed by the anti-Semitic persecution and pogroms they were facing in the Russian Empire, and the appeal of Zionism.
In 1896, Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl published a pamphlet that came to be seen as the ideological basis for political Zionism – Der Judenstaat, or “The Jewish State”. Herzl concluded that the remedy to centuries-old anti-Semitic sentiments and attacks in Europe was the creation of a Jewish state.
Though some of the movement’s pioneers initially supported a Jewish state in places such as Uganda and Argentina, they eventually called for for building a state in Palestine based on the biblical concept that the Holy Land was promised to the Jews by God.
Between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population rose from nine percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinian tenants from their lands as Zionists bought land from absentee landlords.
Leading Arab and Palestinian intellectuals openly warned against the motifs of the Zionist movement in the press as early as 1908. With the Nazi seizure of power in Germany between 1933 and 1936, 30,000 to 60,000 European Jews arrived on the shores of Palestine.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/may/12/israel1

"We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return ... The old will die and the young will forget," said David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, in 1949.

The Nakba was pre-planned

https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/15208/1948%20Ethnic%20Cleansing%20of%20Palestine.pdf;sequence=2

The zionist project was not able to purchase a significant portion of land, in spite of its best efforts:

“Despite the JNF’s best efforts, its success in land acquisition fell far short of its goals. Available financial resources were limited, Palestinian resistance was fierce, and British policies had become restrictive. The result was that by the end of the Mandate in 1948 the Zionist movement had been able to purchase no more than 5.8 percent of the land in Palestine.”

In the meantime, they had been planning an ethnic cleansing when the time was ripe. They started mapping Palestinian villages in a collection of “village files”, collecting extensive details on every village. This was used during the ethnic cleansing, during the Nakba. This was used for their “Plan Dalet”:

“Plan C added that the data necessary for the successful performance of these actions could be found in the village files: lists of leaders, activists, “potential human targets,” the precise layout of villages, and so on. 31
The plan lacked operational specifics, however, and within a few months, a new plan was drawn up, Plan D (Dalet). This was the plan that sealed the fate of the Palestinians within the territory the Zionist leaders had set their eyes on for their future Jewish State. Unlike Plan C, it contained direct references both to the geographical parameters of the future Jewish state (the 78 percent provided for in the 1946 Jewish Agency map) and to the fate of the one million Palestinians living within that space:

These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those population centers that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state. 32

No village within the planned area of operations was exempted from these orders, either because of its location or because it was expected to put up some resistance. This was the master plan for the expulsion of all the villages in rural Palestine. Similar instructions were given, in much the same wording, for actions directed at Palestine’s urban centers.”

https://imeu.org/article/plan-dalet

On March 10, 1948, Zionist political and military leaders, including Ben-Gurion, met in Tel Aviv and formally adopted Plan Dalet (or Plan D). The operational military orders specified which Palestinian population centers should be targeted and laid out in detail a blueprint for their forcible depopulation and destruction. It called for:

Mounting operations against enemy population centers located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:

Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously
Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.

The Haganah (soon to be Israeli army) launched military operations under Plan Dalet at the beginning of April 1948. Although attacks by Zionist forces against Palestinian population centers actually began a few days after the UN Partition Plan was passed on November 29, 1947, with the adoption of Plan Dalet expulsions accelerated and became systematic, marking a new phase in the conflict in which Zionist and then Israeli forces went on "the offensive," in the words of Israeli historian Benny Morris.
Following Israel's establishment on May 14, 1948, the new Israeli government set up an unofficial body, the "Transfer Committee," to oversee the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages or their repopulation with Jews, and to prevent displaced Palestinians from returning to their homes. In a report presented to Ben-Gurion in June 1948, the three-man committee, which included the JNF's Weitz, called for the "destruction of villages as much as possible during military operations."
Results
By the time the state of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948, more than 200 Palestinian villages had already been emptied as people fled in fear or were forcibly expelled by Zionist forces, and approximately 175,000 Palestinians had been made refugees. By 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians had been made refugees, losing their land, homes and other belongings in what became known as the "Nakba" ("catastrophe"). Their flight was accelerated by massacres such as the one that took place on April 9, 1948, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, where approximately 100 Palestinian men, women, and children were murdered by Zionist paramilitaries. Today, refugees displaced during Israel's creation and their descendants number approximately 7.1 million people.

Some 400 Palestinian towns and villages, including vibrant urban centers, were systematically destroyed or taken over by Israeli Jews. Most of them were demolished to prevent the return of their Palestinian residents, now refugees outside of what would become Israel's internationally recognized borders, or internally displaced inside of them.
Only about 150,000 Palestinians remained inside what became Israel, many of them internally displaced people. Although they were granted Israeli citizenship, they were governed by Israeli military rule until 1966, had most of their land taken from them, and continue to suffer widespread, systematic discrimination today.

The Nakba did not start in 1948, and is still ongoing

https://www.de-colonizer.org/map

In 1948, 614 Palestinian localities were destroyed. These include

161 up to 100 inhabitants (click here to see them separately)
418 from 100 to 3000 inhabitants (click here to see them separately)
35 more than 3000 inhabitants (click here to see them separately)

The Nakba also did not start in 1948 (it had already started before), and did not end in 1948 (it is still happening). During this whole process till today, 817 Palestinian localities have been destroyed.

The Nakba was not started by war, but by direct expulsion at the hands of zionists

https://decolonizepalestine.com/intro/the-mandate-years-and-the-nakba/

It is within this context that Plan D (Tochnit Dalet) was developed by the Haganah high command. Although it was adopted in May 1948, the origins of this plan go back a few years earlier. Yigael Yadin reportedly started working on it in 1944. This plan entailed the expansion of the borders of the Zionist state, well beyond partition, and any Palestinian village within these borders that resisted would be destroyed and have its inhabitants expelled. This included cities that were supposed to be part of the Arab Palestinian state after partition, such as Nazareth, Acre and Lydda.
Ben Zohar, the biographer of Ben Gurion wrote that:

“In internal discussions, in instructions to his men, the Old Man [Ben-Gurion] demonstrated a clear position: it would be better that as few a number as possible of Arabs would remain in the territory of the [Jewish] state.”.

Although it could be argued that Plan D did not outline the exact villages and cities to be ethnically cleansed in an explicit way, it was clear that the various Yishuv forces were operating with its instructions in mind.
It is important to stress that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began before the 1948 war, and before even a single regular Arab soldier set foot in Palestine. This is important to understand because many still erroneously argue that the Nakba -Arabic for catastrophe- was a byproduct of the Arab war on the fledgling Israeli state. Approximately 300,000 Palestinians had been expelled through ethnic cleansing campaigns before the onset of war or the end of the mandate. These campaigns were accompanied by massacres and war crimes, even against villages that were neutral and had non-aggression pacts with the Zionist Yishuv. The ethnic cleansing of the village of Deir Yassin demonstrates this perfectly [You can read more about this here].

https://archive.ph/S6NIS#selection-1235.164-1235.296

Recently uncovered evidence shows that zionist forces poisoned the wells that Palestinian communities used in preparation for the Nakba — the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands and homes.
“[T]he excerpts from the diary of the man who would become Israel’s first prime minister are traces of his involvement in a secret operation to poison the drinking water of Arab communities during the War of “Independence”.”
Excerpts:

“This operation was partially exposed decades ago when rumors and oral testimonies were reported in newspapers and books about an attempt in 1948 by the IDF to poison wells in Acre and Gaza by adding bacteria to the drinking water. However, only now, in Morris and Kedar’s research, has the “smoking gun” been revealed – in the form of official documentation. The newly unearthed documents show that this operation was much broader in scope than earlier believed and that other top military and political figures besides Ben-Gurion were involved.”
““We uncovered a lot of new information. We deciphered how the operation developed through its various stages; we discovered who authorized, organized and controlled the operation, and how it was carried out in different areas,” Morris says. “We have a much fuller picture now, and one that is based in part on IDF documentation,” Kedar adds.”

Rebuttals to criticism

Benny Morris

Benny Morris, who released his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem: 1947-1949 showing that the Nakba was indeed not voluntary, also shows that it was pre-meditated. As is shown here, Benny Morris “wrote in his landmark work The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem: 1947-1949, that Plan Dalet was "a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions by front, district, brigade and battalion commanders" providing "post facto a formal persuasive covering note to explain their actions." Morris, a right-wing Zionist ideologically who has at times himself denied there was a premeditated plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, noted that from the beginning of April 1948, there were "Clear traces of an expulsion policy on both national and local levels with respect to certain key districts and localities and a general 'atmosphere of transfer' are detectable in statements made by Zionist officials and officers."”

The entire argument around Benny Morris essentially hinges on him thinking that the Nakba happened, but that it was good. As is said succinctly in this haaretz article: “Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People were mistaken when they labeled him a post-Zionist, when they thought that his historical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem was intended to undercut the Zionist enterprise. Nonsense, Morris says, that's completely unfounded. Some readers simply misread the book. They didn't read it with the same detachment, the same moral neutrality, with which it was written. So they came to the mistaken conclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that the Zionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually being condemnatory, that when he describes the large-scale expulsion operations he is being denunciatory. They did not conceive that the great documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with those sins. That he thinks some of them, at least, were unavoidable.”

Pappe

We often see pro-Israelis and often people who are on the fence in Israel Palestine conflict discrediting academic work of Ilan Pappe, you would often see them using typical cliche line of Pappe being an "academic fraud"

So I tried to academically analyze research work of Ilan Pappe, usually following classic arguments are made over and over again on Ilan Pappe

1)Because Pappe used testimonial evidences and thus biased:

The most frequent charge leveled against his book ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, according to the main premise of the argument, "Pappe extensively employed testimonial evidence from Palestinians who survived the Nakba", thus book is biased.

To begin with testimonial evidence plays a significant role in academic histories of many historical events, such history of Holocaust is significantly based on testimonial evidences of survivors. Second, Pappe used data from declassified military papers from Israeli official archives in addition to testimonial evidence.

Academically when you test credibility of research work of a historian you would look at citations of his work by other scholars.

Ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe is extensively cited by other scholars as a supportive argument, for example in this very recent scholarly paper by Neve Gordan

r/Palestine - Ilan Pappe and history of Israel-Palestine

Another scholarly paper by pioneer in settler colonialism Professor Patrick wolfe, extensively cited Ilan Pappe in his peer reviewed papers.

r/Palestine - Ilan Pappe and history of Israel-Palestine

Academic Papers that are "fraud" are usually retracted by Research Journals, I searched research papers of Ilan Pappe, and not only were they not retracted but they were extensively cited

r/Palestine - Ilan Pappe and history of Israel-Palestine

Pappe even Published a concise Peer reviwed paper from the book Ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

r/Palestine - Ilan Pappe and history of Israel-Palestine

I can cite several more, point being that if work of Ilan Pappe was “academic fraud” why were these other scholars citing research work of Pappe as a supporting argument in their own scholarly work ?. A good way to determine worth of research work in academics is to see how much that work is cited by other scholars

Another important point while assessing credibility of scholarly work is to see how much it agrees with other scholars who had studied the subject. Running thesis in Pappe’s book Ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is that, there was a deliberate policy on part of Zionists to ethnically cleansing Palestinians.

This thesis by Pappe is in agreement with other historians who had studied 1948 Palestinian exodus, such as Rashid Khalidi, Walid Khalidi and Nur Masha.

2)Ilan Pappe is fraud because Benny Morris says so:

Not only this argument uses Benny Morris in a fallacious premise of argument from authority, but Morris himself is criticized by other historians for his conclusion and toning down on his own analysis

Such as Scholar Norman Finkelstein gave a extended critque of Morris work "Birth of Palestinian refugee problem", in his book "Image and reality of Israel Palestine conflict", Norman shows how Morris asserted absurd conclusions from his own source data to give a "happy median image of Palestinians being forced out as a result of war not by a deliberate design by Zionists"

Also another historian Daniel Blatman criticized Morris.

r/Palestine - Ilan Pappe and history of Israel-Palestine

Would all this critique mean Benny Morris is "academic fraud" no, infact historians criticize one another, way to check academic credibility of a historian is to see the scholarly consensus, and citations of research work.

3)Tantura Massacre and Ilan Pappe:

For decades Pro-Israelis have critcized Pappe for standing behind Tantura Massacre, which they considered as fabricated one,

A while back I came across this following comment in another subreddit.

r/Palestine - Ilan Pappe and history of Israel-Palestine

Until recently Tantura Msaccre was proven true by self admission of soldiers who participated in this Massacre

r/Palestine - Ilan Pappe and history of Israel-Palestine

4)Ilan Pappe is academic fraud because he “mistranslated” letter by Zionist Leader Ben Gurion:

This is another very common accusation, it is based on following translated quote of Ben Gurion by Ilan Pappe.

“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”

This accusation was first made by Pro-Israel org CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America)

r/Palestine - Ilan Pappe and history of Israel-Palestine

This translated quote of Ben Gurion by Ilan Pappe, appeared in a scholarly paper publihsed by Journal of Palestine studies.

When CAMERA made this accusation of quote fabrication, Journal of Palestine studies translated the entire original hebrew letter of Ben Gurion, interestingly it appears Ben Gurion said more stronger words than that of translated by Pappe.

Here is what Journal inquiry commission concluded

r/Palestine - Ilan Pappe and history of Israel-Palestine

Ilan Pappe's translation of Ben-words, Gurion's "Arabs must leave," appears even gentler than Bne Gurion original words, "we must evict Arabs and take their place."

There are several more accusations made against Pappe, but they are often made with a disingenuous premise to discredit people who point out Israel's war crimes, often at times exaggerating critiques that are very commonly leveled against any historian.

Ongoing Colonization

Right of return

According to the most recent data I’ve seen (end of 2021), 7 million Palestinians currently live outside of Historic Palestine, as refugees and descendants of refugees. Israel does not allow their Right of return, in spite of this right having been agreed upon by the United Nations with Resolution 194: “The United Nations General Assembly adopts resolution 194 (III), resolving that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”

At the same time, Israel not just allows, but encourages and sponsors the immigration of Jews from all over the world who have no real connection to the land, have never been there, and who serve in this case, in tandem with denying the Palestinians’ right of return, as Israel’s method of creating, maintaining, and expanding a Jewish demographic majority.

Human Rights Watch explains it here: “Most significantly in demonstrating Israel’s demographic goals is the 1950 Law of Return. It guarantees Jewish citizens of other countries the right to settle in Israel, and its 1952 Citizenship Law entitles them to citizenship.[96] The same Citizenship Law, by contrast, denies Palestinian refugees and their descendants, 5.7 million of whom were registered as of February 2021 with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA),[97] the ability to enter and live in areas where they or their families once lived and have maintained links to. The right to live in Israel or the OPT is guaranteed to them under international human rights law, alongside the options of integration in place or resettlement elsewhere.[98] These policies create a reality where a Jewish citizen of any other country who has never been to Israel can move there or to a West Bank settlement and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian refugee expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country cannot move to either Israel or the OPT.”

Other laws

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

“A stated aim of the Israeli government is to ensure that Jewish Israelis maintain domination across Israel and the OPT. The Knesset in 2018 passed a law with constitutional status affirming Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” declaring that within that territory, the right to self-determination “is unique to the Jewish people,” and establishing “Jewish settlement” as a national value. To sustain Jewish Israeli control, Israeli authorities have adopted policies aimed at mitigating what they have openly described as a demographic “threat” that Palestinians pose. Those policies include limiting the population and political power of Palestinians, granting the right to vote only to Palestinians who live within the borders of Israel as they existed from 1948 to June 1967, and limiting the ability of Palestinians to move to Israel from the OPT and from anywhere else to Israel or the OPT. Other steps are taken to ensure Jewish domination, including a state policy of “separation” of Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza, which prevents the movement of people and goods within the OPT, and “Judaization” of areas with significant Palestinian populations, including Jerusalem as well as the Galilee and the Negev in Israel. This policy, which aims to maximize Jewish Israeli control over land, concentrates the majority of Palestinians who live outside Israel’s major, predominantly Jewish cities into dense, under-served enclaves and restricts their access to land and housing, while nurturing the growth of nearby Jewish communities.”
The ”one-way permit” and encouragement of emigration from Gaza to outside of Palestine:

Demographics factor centrally in Israel’s separation policy. Israeli policy since 2000 has created what Israeli rights groups have called a “one-way permit” from the West Bank to Gaza, whereby, in the rare cases where authorities permit Palestinians to transit between Gaza and the West Bank, they permit it only exclusively in the direction of Gaza.[219] The army’s “Procedure for Settlement in the Gaza Strip by Residents of Judea and Samaria,” published in 2018, states that “[i]n 2006, a decision was made to introduce a policy of separation between the Judea and Samaria Area and the Gaza Strip in light of Hamas’ rise to power in the Gaza Strip. The policy currently in effect is aimed at reducing travel between the areas.” The document, though, notes that “a resident of Judea and Samaria may file an application for permanent settlement in the Gaza Strip for any purpose that is considered humanitarian (usually family unification).” It then clarifies that “as settlement of Gaza residents in the Judea and Samaria Area is possible only in the rarest cases… the need to allow the family to be maintained in the Gaza Strip arises.”[220]
Its guidelines for Gaza residents seeking to settle in the West Bank, published in a separate Israeli army document, re-enforce the same policy. It sets out that “for all practical purposes entry of residents of Gaza into the Judea and Samaria Area shall only be allowed in the most exceptional humanitarian cases.” It notes that the deputy defense minister “established that in every case involving the settlement of Gaza residents in the Judea and Samaria Area one should adopt the most restrictive policy” and “clarified that a family relationship, in and of itself, does not qualify as a humanitarian reason that would justify settlement by Gaza residents in the Judea and Samaria Area.”[221]
Gisha found, based on information obtained from the Israeli army via Freedom of Information requests, that between 2009 and March 2017, the Israeli army had approved only six applications for Gaza residents to reside in the West Bank, in each case following the filing of a petition to Israel’s Supreme Court. Four of the six cases involved children who had no one to care for them in Gaza.[222] By contrast, between January 2011 and August 2014, the army approved 58 applications for West Bank residents to relocate to Gaza on the condition they sign a pledge never to return to the West Bank.[223] In addition, between 2004 and 2017, the Israeli army removed back to Gaza more than 130 Palestinians from Gaza living in the West Bank without a valid Israeli-issued permit, but apparently none in the other direction.[224]
These policies pressure Palestinians to leave the part of the OPT that authorities covet for Jewish settlement—the West Bank—for the Gaza Strip, and join the more than 2 million Palestinians who are effectively off the demographic balance sheet in the lands where Jews reside. Without Gaza, the demographic ratio of Jews to Palestinians between the river and the sea shifts from about 50-50 to a 59-41 Jewish majority.
In addition, Israeli officials have at times encouraged the emigration of Palestinians from Gaza out of the OPT altogether.[225] In August 2019, a senior official apparently close to Netanyahu told Israeli journalists that authorities were actively promoting the emigration of Palestinians from Gaza and would cover the emigration costs and even allow Palestinians to use an Israeli airfield to leave for their new host countries.[226]

https://101.visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/israeli-law-institutionalizes-discrimination

https://101.visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/some-people-are-more-equal-others

In all of Historic Palestine

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/

“The dispossession and displacement of Palestinians from their homes is a crucial pillar of Israel’s apartheid system. Since its establishment the Israeli state has enforced massive and cruel land seizures against Palestinians, and continues to implement myriad laws and policies to force Palestinians into small enclaves. Since 1948, Israel has demolished hundreds of thousands of Palestinian homes and other properties across all areas under its jurisdiction and effective control.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/7/26/israels-nation-state-law-parallels-the-nazi-nuremberg-laws

Erasure of the Arabic language:

This new law also marks the beginning of the erasure of Arabic from the land, as it decrees Hebrew to be the only official language of the state, while Arabic has “special status”. Its fourth clause further explains that use of “the Arab language [sic]” institutionally “will be regulated by law.”

Further colonization of Palestinian land:

As for the 4.5 million indigenous Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who do not have Israeli citizenship, the nation-state law eludes to their fate in the seventh clause, which states: “The state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labour to encourage and promote its establishment and development.”
Simply stated, Israel will continue to work in earnest to build Jewish-only colonies on seized Palestinian land, ostensibly where a Palestinian state was to be formed per the Oslo Accords.
We can expect that more settlement will simply accelerate Israel’s ongoing displacement of Palestinians to replace them with imported Jews. We know from the past decades of settlement construction that this process is accomplished by systematic dispossession, marginalisation, ghettoisation and robbing of indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. This process more closely resembles the Manifest Destiny removal and marginalisation of First Nations in North America.
Western media should stop mincing words by calling the nation-state law “controversial” when in fact it is encoding the worst human impulses into law, the likes of which were promoted in Nazi Germany, Jim Crow and Indian Removal America and other abominable moments in human history.”

https://www.de-colonizer.org/map

Within 1948 Palestine (Israel)

Explainer: 1948 Palestine is the land stolen by Israel in 1948. This land is also called Israel, but is called “the lands of 1948” by Palestinians. Palestinians who come from 1948 Palestine are called “1948 Palestinians”. As that is the term used by Palestinians themselves, it is the term used here.

Overall

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

Confiscation of land:

The Israeli government has also carried out discriminatory seizures of land inside Israel. Authorities have seized through different mechanisms at least 4.5 million dunams of land from Palestinians, according to historians, constituting 65 to 75 percent of all land owned by Palestinians before 1948 and 40 to 60 percent of the land that belonged to Palestinians who remained after 1948 and became citizens of Israel. Authorities in the early years of the state declared land belonging to displaced Palestinians as “absentee property” or “closed military zones,” then took it over, converted it to state land, and built Jewish communities there. Authorities continue to block Palestinian citizen landowners from accessing land that was confiscated from them. A 2003 government-commissioned report found that “the expropriation activities were clearly and explicitly harnessed to the interests of the Jewish majority” and that state lands, which constitute 93 percent of all land in Israel, effectively serve the objective of “Jewish settlement.” Since 1948, the government has authorized the creation of more than 900 “Jewish localities” in Israel, but it has allowed only a handful of government-planned townships and villages for Palestinians, created largely to concentrate previously displaced Bedouin communities living in the Negev.
Land confiscations and other discriminatory land policies in Israel hem in Palestinian municipalities inside Israel, denying them opportunities for natural expansion enjoyed by Jewish municipalities. The vast majority of Palestinian citizens, who make up around 19 percent of the Israeli population, live in these municipalities, which have an estimated jurisdiction over less than 3 percent of all land in Israel.

Restrictions on where Palestinians can live:

While Palestinians in Israel can move freely, and some live in “mixed cities,” such as Haifa, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and Acre, Israeli law permits small towns to exclude prospective residents based on their asserted incompatibility with the town’s “social-cultural fabric.” According to a study by a professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, there are more than 900 small Jewish towns, including kibbutzim, across Israel that can restrict who lives there. None of them have any Palestinians living among them.
In 2011, the Israeli Knesset passed a law permitting towns in the Negev and Galilee with up to 400 households to maintain admissions committees that can reject applicants from living there for being “not suitable for the social life of the community” or for incompatibility with the “social-cultural fabric.”[152] The law’s sponsors openly spoke about how the law would facilitate the creation and maintenance of Jewish-only communities.[153]

Plans to Judaize the Galilee and Naqab (Negev):

In Israel, authorities maintain a policy to Judaize the Galilee and Negev regions, one pursued in coordination with the JNF, the Jewish Agency, and the WZO. These areas account for nearly two-thirds of the land in Israel,[140] and encompass much of the Palestinian population.[141] The Israeli government has a ministry focused on the “development” of the Galilee and the Negev, has invested significantly in these areas, and has considered it a major government priority for much of the past two decades.[142] In 2004, the Sharon government unveiled a cross-sectional plan estimated to cost 16.8 NIS billion ($5 billion) that aimed to “increase the number of residents in the Negev to 1.5 million and in the Galilee to 1.1 million by 2010.”[143] Haaretz described efforts to develop these areas as possibly the “largest settlement effort inside the Green Line in the last 25 years.”[144]
While Israeli authorities use non-discriminatory language of seeking to “develop” or “populate” these regions, the Israeli rights group Sikkuy wrote in 2005 that “it is clear to everyone that the plan is intended for Jewish residents.”[145] The Negev plan, for example, defined the ideal new residents as a “strong population,” including “families with high income” who work in central Israel, an area that has a much higher proportion of Jews to Palestinians and who will continue to commute to their old jobs.[146] Authorities also offered a 90 percent discount on the leasing fees for Negev properties to soldiers who had served for at least one year, an offer that would attract mainly Jews since Bedouins are exempt from military service and only a small percentage volunteer to serve in the army.[147] Shimon Peres, then deputy prime minister, described the development of the Negev and the Galilee as a “battle for the future of the Jewish people.”[148] The Jewish Agency has said that it sought to guarantee a “Zionist majority” in the Negev and the Galilee, launching its own programs in these areas “to get around the problem that the government must act on behalf of all citizens of the state of Israel while the WZO is entitled to act for the sake of the Jewish people.”[149] The government approved the WZO establishing settlements in these areas.[150]

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/israel-discriminatory-land-policies-hem-palestinians

“…policy discriminates against Palestinian citizens of Israel and in favor of Jewish citizens, sharply restricting Palestinians’ access to land for housing to accommodate natural population growth.
Decades of land confiscations and discriminatory planning policies have confined many Palestinian citizens to densely populated towns and villages that have little room to expand. Meanwhile, the Israeli government nurtures the growth and expansion of neighboring predominantly Jewish communities, many built on the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948. Many small Jewish towns also have admissions committees that effectively bar Palestinians from living there.
“Israeli policy on both sides of the Green Line restricts Palestinians to dense population centers while maximizing the land available for Jewish communities,” said Eric Goldstein, acting Middle East executive director at Human Rights Watch. “These practices are well-known when it comes to the occupied West Bank, but Israeli authorities are also enforcing discriminatory land practices inside Israel.”
The Israeli state directly controls 93 percent of the land in the country, including occupied East Jerusalem. A government agency, the Israel Land Authority (ILA), manages and allocates these state lands. Almost half the members of its governing body belong to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), whose explicit mandate is to develop and lease land for Jews and not any other segment of the population. The fund owns 13 percent of Israel’s land, which the state is mandated to use “for the purpose of settling Jews.”
Palestinian citizens of Israel constitute 21 percent of the country’s population, but Israeli and Palestinian rights groups estimated in 2017 that less than 3 percent of all land in Israel falls under the jurisdiction of Palestinian municipalities.”
Example of the result of such discriminatory policies:

“One historian estimates that of the 370 Jewish towns and villages established by the Israeli government between 1948 and 1953, 350 were built on land confiscated from Palestinians.”
These restrictions create density problems and a housing crunch in Palestinian communities. The Arab Center for Alternative Planning, based in Israel, told Human Rights Watch that it estimates that 15 to 20 percent of homes in Palestinian towns and villages lack permits, some because owners’ applications were rejected and others because they did not apply knowing that authorities would reject their requests on the grounds that they were contrary to the existing zoning. The group estimates that 60,000 to 70,000 homes in Israel, excluding Jerusalem, are at risk of full demolition. A 2017 amendment to Israel’s 1965 Planning and Building Law, known as the “Kaminitz Law,” increases “enforcement and penalization of planning and building offenses.” As of July 2015, 97 percent of Israel’s 1,348 judicial demolition orders in force were for structures located in Palestinian towns.
By contrast, in the cases reviewed by Human Rights Watch, planning authorities provided sufficient land and zoning permissions to similarly-situated, predominantly Jewish communities to facilitate their growth.
900 settlements created only for Jews within Israel, while none have been created for Palestinians:

Land policies in more recent years have not only failed to reverse the earlier land seizures, but in many cases further restricted the land available for residential growth. Since 1948, the government has authorized the creation of more than 900 “Jewish localities” in Israel, but none for Palestinians except for a handful of government-planned townships and villages in the Negev and Galilee, created largely to concentrate previously dispersed Bedouin communities.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/

“The report documents how Palestinians are effectively blocked from leasing on 80% of Israel’s state land, as a result of racist land seizures and a web of discriminatory laws on land allocation, planning and zoning.”
Decades of deliberately unequal treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel have left them consistently economically disadvantaged in comparison to Jewish Israelis. This is exacerbated by blatantly discriminatory allocation of state resources: a recent example is the government’s Covid-19 recovery package, of which just 1.7% was given to Palestinian local authorities.

https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/533

“Through the Land and Acquisition Law (Actions and Compensation), 1.2-1.3 million dunams of land were expropriated from the Arab population. These lands were confiscated from a total of 349 towns and villages, in addition to the "built-up areas" of about 68 villages, whose precise area was not included in the expropriation orders.”

https://visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/a-policy-of-displacement

Galilee

https://bookshome.net/book/944242/4b307e

“The examples of Judaization plans are abundant (see Yiftachel 1991 and 1995 for more details). Information about a new planning map for the Galilee (by the Regional Planning Board) was leaked to the press in 1995. The goal of the new plan was explicitly stated as Judaization: to increase the number of Jews in the Galilee in relation to Arabs and “to distribute them in such a way that they would disrupt any Palestinian geographical continuity.” The plan allocates considerably more land to Jews than it does to Arabs as part of an attempt to ghettoize the Arabs (Ittihad, June 9, 1995; Galilee Society, personal communication). According to Yusif Jabbarin, who has studied these plans extensively, Arabs are totally excluded from the plans’ “national goals,” and are in fact dealt with only as a hindrance to them (Jabbarin 1997; Fasl ul-Maqal, Nov. 1, 1996a). Needless to say, no Arabs are among the members of these planning committees.
Similarly, the project Galilee 2000 was designed for the development and expansion of the Jewish settler community in the Galilee at the expense of the Palestinian community, whose human rights and needs are simply considered nonexistent (M. Kanaaneh 1996). Yet another recent example is the David’s Shield 2020 plan (by the Housing Ministry), which calls for the doubling of Jewish settlements in Arab-dominated areas, but with a new post-Oslo twist: a central area in the Galilee is reserved to become a romanticized pastoral model for “coexistence” and will attract “coexistence tourists” to support economically the new “more demographically balanced” population (Yediot Ahronot, Oct. 31, 1996; Fasl ul-Maqal, Nov. 1, 1996a, and Nov. 29, 1996) (see Figure 2).” (Page 53)

https://bookshome.net/book/647313/87d4dc

“The key event occurred on March 30, 1976, when the National Committee for the Defense of Arab Lands—a political organization claiming to represent the Arab population in Israel—declared a general strike, which quickly got out of hand. As in the past, the most immediate issue was impending confiscation of Arab land by the state, which the government had announced in February of that year. Confiscation was to take place in the Galilee as part of a plan (insensitively) labeled “Judaization of the Galilee.”80 Residents of Arab villages who joined the protest demonstrations clashed with massive deployed police forces, resulting in six Arabs dead and many more wounded and arrested.” (page 195)

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/israel-discriminatory-land-policies-hem-palestinians

Example from a town in the Galilee:

Ein Mahel, a town of about 13,000 Palestinian residents with an area of about 5,200 dunams near Nazareth in Israel’s Northern District, is surrounded on all sides by the Jewish-majority city of Nof HaGalil, which until 2019 went by the name Nazareth Illit (Upper Nazareth). Nof HaGalil, with nearly 33,000 dunams of land, has a population of 41,200 people, many of whom immigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.
Formally a “mixed city,” with about 26 percent of its population now Palestinian, Israeli authorities from the outset envisioned Nazareth Illit as a “Jewish town that will assert a Jewish presence in the area,” as Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wrote in 1957. As the Israeli army’s then-Planning Department Director Yuval Ne’eman put it, the town would “emphasize and safeguard the Jewish character of the Galilee as a whole.” Nazareth Illit constituted a key part of the government’s strategy to “Judaize the Galilee.” The then-northern military governor, Colonel Mikhael Mikhael, wrote that Nazareth Illit would “swallow up” Nazareth, a Palestinian city, and result in the “transfer of the center of gravity of life from Nazareth to the Jewish neighborhood.”
Nof HaGalil, bordering Nazareth, wholly surrounds Ein Mahel and weaves between five other Palestinian towns and villages, impeding the establishment of a larger, contiguous Palestinian municipal area.
During the period of military rule over most Palestinian citizens, including the residents of Ein Mahel, the Israeli authorities in 1957 established Nazareth Illit in part on lands they confiscated from Ein Mahel including under laws governing “absentee property,” as documented in a book by a Palestinian lawyer in Israel, Hussein Abu Hussein, and the British human rights lawyer Fiona McKay. Confiscations continued after the end of military rule, including more than 1,000 additional dunams confiscated in the mid 1970s. Ein Mahel today is about one third its original size, according to the local council.

https://web.archive.org/web/20020804110230/http://www.hanitzotz.com/challenge/67/asaf.html

“During the first week of October 2000, the Arabs in Israel joined the Intifada. In response, the Israeli regime has returned to its old ways. "Out" are joint projects between Arabs and Jews, calls for co-existence and mutual development. "In" are plans to beef up the Jewish presence in areas with heavy Arab populations. Since the demonstrations of March 30, 1976, Land Day has been a central political event in the life of the Arab population. This year, as the day approached, Sharon held a number of friendly meetings with Arab leaders, promising to consider their grievances. This was a bid to neutralize the expected Arab protests. In recent months, however, the real shape of Sharon's attitude toward Arab citizens has begun to appear. The change does not find expression in public pronouncements. The Likud has learned, it seems, the sound old methods of the Labor Party: Don't talk about doing it - do it! Nevertheless, the newspapers report on plans and projects whose gist is the "judaization" of Galilee. Thus, Israel returns to the very same policy that caused the eruption on March 30, 1976, Land Day.
An article in the Hebrew daily, Yediot Aharonot (March 13) exposed part of the truth. According to its author, Ofer Petersburg, the al-Aksa Intifada deeply shook the small Jewish settlements - called "lookouts" (Heb. mitzpim) - in Galilee. From tiny communities famous for fresh air and quality of life, they became, in a flash, outposts under siege. Following their frightening experience, conclusions were drawn. "In the coming days," wrote Petersburg, "a drive will begin to expand Jewish settlement in Galilee."
The mayors of the main Jewish cities there (Nazareth Ilit, Carmiel, Acre and Migdal Ha-Emek) have prepared a document stating the need to bring half a million Jews to the area. According to the regional newspaper, Kol Ha-Emek v' Ha-Galil (Feb. 23), the document was prepared in consultation with the Prime Minister's Office. It provides that Nazareth Ilit and Carmiel, centers of judaization for the last four decades, are each to expand their populations from the present 40,000 to 100,000.
The real-estate supplement of Ha'aretz (April 29) reported plans by the Housing Ministry to develop existing locations, as well as build new towns in the Negev, in the Gilboa region (on the southern end of Galilee) and near Haifa. Among the places to be expanded is Harish, located south of Um al-Fahem. Originally one of the towns in Sharon's Seven Stars Plan of the nineties, Harish is to become an ultra-orthodox center with 20,000 dwelling units. Housing Minister Natan Sharansky has also proposed building a new city in the Tefen area (in Upper Galilee, north of Majd al-Krum).”

Naqab (Negev)

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/

The situation in the Negev/Naqab region of southern Israel is a prime example of how Israel’s planning and building policies intentionally exclude Palestinians. Since 1948 Israeli authorities have adopted various policies to “Judaize” the Negev/Naqab, including designating large areas as nature reserves or military firing zones, and setting targets for increasing the Jewish population. This has had devastating consequences for the tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins who live in the region.
Thirty-five Bedouin villages, home to about 68,000 people, are currently “unrecognized” by Israel, which means they are cut off from the national electricity and water supply and targeted for repeated demolitions. As the villages have no official status, their residents also face restrictions on political participation and are excluded from the healthcare and education systems. These conditions have coerced many into leaving their homes and villages, in what amounts to forcible transfer.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261591896_The_Ongoing_Judaisation_of_the_Naqab_and_the_Struggle_for_Recognising_the_Indigenous_Rights_of_the_Arab_Bedouin_People

This paper argues that there is a current and renewed escalation in Israeli policies towards the indigenous Bedouin of the Naqab and Beersheba, and that this escalation emerges from two longstanding, fundamental Israeli aims: Judaising the Naqab; and putting an end to the persistent Bedouin claims to their historical land and rights. The repeated demolition of the village of Al-Araqib on July 2010 is just the latest outstanding example of the Israeli policies of Judaising the Naqab and denying Bedouin land claims and historical rights. Israel appears to be pursing an ultimate solution to the demographic concern of the Bedouin in the Naqab by bringing more settlers into the area, and expelling the majority of the Bedouin of the unrecognised villages to live in urban towns.

https://www.academia.edu/33808224/Settler_Colonialism_and_the_Elimination_of_the_Palestinian_Bedouin_The_Palestinian_Bedouin_and_the_Elimination_of_Settler_Colonialism

Israel has vigorously pursued Dayan's goal of “transform[ing] the Bedouins” but has only partially succeeded in destroying their “national pattern.” Most Bedouins who remained under Israeli rule after the Nakba were evicted from the original lands, said at the time to be a temporary removal, and placed under military rule until 1967 and remaining under settler rule to date. Most were never allowed to return.

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

“In the Negev in Israel, Israeli authorities have refused to legally recognize 35 Palestinian Bedouin communities, making it impossible for their 90,000 or so residents to live lawfully in the communities they have lived in for decades. Instead, authorities have sought to concentrate Bedouin communities in larger recognized townships in order, as expressed in governmental plans and statements by officials, to maximize the land available for Jewish communities. Israeli law considers all buildings in these unrecognized villages to be illegal…The communities do not appear on official maps, most have no educational facilities, and residents live under constant threat of having their homes demolished. Israeli authorities demolished more than 10,000 Bedouin homes in the Negev between 2013 and 2019, according to government data. They razed one unrecognized village that challenged the expropriation of its lands, al-Araqib, 185 times.”

https://jewishcurrents.org/in-protests-the-naqab-affirms-its-palestinian-national-identity

By withholding legal status, Israeli authorities leave the villages without services such as power, water, sewage, roads, and schools. The designation of the villages as unrecognized also places them in danger of being destroyed. “The Bedouin villagers have been placed in an impossible situation,” said Rawia Aburabia, assistant professor of law at the Sapir Academic College School of Law in the Naqab. “They cannot legally obtain any building permits, and the homes in which they were born and raised are considered illegal by the state. These homes are perpetually under the threat of demolition.” Between 2013 and 2019, Israeli forces demolished more than 10,000 Bedouin homes in the Naqab.
As it has worked to push Palestinian Bedouins onto as little land as possible, Israel has established new rural Jewish settlements in the Naqab as part of a decades-long plan to Judaize the region. According to Human Rights Watch, the Israeli government, which has created a ministry focused on the development of the region, has treated investment in the area as a top priority for much of the past two decades. In 2004, for example, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government unveiled a plan, estimated to cost 16.8 billion shekels ($5 billion), that aimed to “increase the number of residents in the Negev to 1.5 million by 2010.” Today, more than 100 Jewish settlements exist in the area around Be’er Al-Sabe’, with an average population of only 300 residents each. “They are using the discourse of development to lure Jews to the area and spread them on very large pieces of land,” Abou Shehadeh said. In addition, settlers have built dozens of isolated farms in the area; though these are often constructed without permits, the government has at times recognized their status retroactively, including them in regional planning. Today, although Arab Bedouins make up a third of the Naqab’s population, they occupy only 3% of the region’s land.

https://www.de-colonizer.org/map

64 Palestinian localities unrecognized by Israel (click here to see them separately)

We have also decided to include the communities unrecognized by Israel: 64 Bedouin Palestinian villages in the Negev desert in the south, as well as in the north of the country. They have not been destroyed but some are threatened by complete destruction. The fact that Israel persists in its refusal to recognize them leaves them without infrastructures and utilities, so that they are experiencing a kind of protracted destruction.
By the time the map was printed in October 2016, the Bedouin village of Al-‘Araqib had been destroyed over one hundred times. It is marked on the map as a locality destroyed in 1948, as an unrecognized village, and as a community in danger of future destruction, in that it is the perfect embodiment of the ongoing Israeli destruction project. Perhaps the villagers’ insistence to cling to their homes is the thin silver lining that graces these ruins.

1967 Palestine (the officially occupied territories)

Overall

Numbers of settlers and settlements

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/6/israel-set-to-approve-4000-settler-units-in-occupied-west-bank

Israeli settlements are fortified, Jewish-only housing complexes built on Palestinian land in violation of international law. Between 600,000 and 750,000 Israeli settlers live in at least 250 illegal settlements in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

https://www.islamweb.net/en/article/224434/israel-moving-rapidly-towards-annexation-un-envoy

There are currently 600k-750k illegal zionist settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, distributed over 150 settlements.

“Currently, there are some 600,000-750,000 illegal settlers living in about 150 settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, built on land the Palestinians had envisioned for a future state.”

The intentions are clear:

"We are here to stay, forever," Netanyahu told settlers at the event. "We will deepen our roots, build, strengthen and settle."

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/06/israel-occupation-50-years-of-dispossession/

“The very existence of settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories violates international humanitarian law and is a war crime. Despite multiple UN resolutions, Israel has continued to appropriate Palestinian land and support at least 600,000 settlers living in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

Annexation

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53139808

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could annex parts of the occupied West Bank this summer. He says the move, stemming from US President Donald Trump's peace plan, will write another "glorious chapter in the history of Zionism".

https://www.btselem.org/jerusalem

Israel unlawfully annexed East Jerusalem to its territory. Since then, and despite its incursion upon their home, it has treated the Palestinian residents of the city as unwanted immigrants and worked systematically to drive them out of the area.
In June 1967, immediately upon occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel annexed some 70,000 dunams [1 dunam = 1,000 sq. meters] of West Bank land to the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem and applied Israeli law there, in breach of international law. The annexed territory greatly exceeded the size of Jerusalem under Jordanian rule (about 6,000 dunams), encompassing approximately 64,000 more dunams. The additional land belonged, in large part, to 28 Palestinian villages, and some of it lay within the municipal jurisdiction of Bethlehem and Beit Jala. The annexed area is currently home to at least 350,000 Palestinians and some 209,000 Israeli settlers.
The new municipal boundaries of Jerusalem were drawn largely in accordance with demographic concerns, chief among them to leave out densely populated Palestinian areas in order to ensure a Jewish majority in Jerusalem. In keeping with this logic, Israel included some lands belonging to villages near Jerusalem within the city’s municipal jurisdiction, yet left the owners outside it. This occurred, for example, with Beit Iksa and al-Birah to the north, and with sparsely populated areas within the municipal jurisdictions of Bethlehem and Beit Sahour to the south. In doing so, Israel divided Palestinian villages and neighborhoods, annexing only parts of them.

West bank

The legality of settlements

The West Bank is a territory of Palestine that, even under international law, is illegally seized by Israel in an occupation.

There are currently 450,000 settlers in the West Bank. These settlers are agreed upon, unanimously, by all countries except the US since 2019, to be illegal. They are also illegal under international law, citing article IV of the Geneva convention: "there is an overwhelming (and rare) international legal consensus that the territories are occupied, that the law of belligerent occupation applies, and that the settlements are illegal and indeed constitute a grave breach of the GC IV," (Ben-Naftali, Sfard & Viterbo 2018, p. 280)

From the book “Israeli Settlements: Land Politics beyond the Geneva Convention”

by Martin Blecher, Page 124:

List of UN resolutions against Israel regarding the West Bank and OPT settlements:

December 13: Resolution 32/91: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories. Calls on Israel to respect the Geneva Conventions
Resolution 465: " ... 'deplores' Israel's settlements and asks all member states not to assist Israel's settlements program".
Resolution 452: " ... 'calls' on Israel to cease building settlements in occupied territories".
Resolution 2334 (23 December 2016) called for an end to Israeli settlement building
United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/33/24 of 29 November 1978: “2. Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle;” (3)

Overall picture

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

In Area C, for example, authorities approved less than 1.5 percent of applications by Palestinians to build between 2016 and 2018—21 in total—a figure 100 times smaller than the number of demolition orders it issued in the same period, according to official data. Israeli authorities have razed thousands of Palestinian properties in these areas for lacking a permit, leaving thousands of families displaced. By contrast, according to Peace Now, Israeli authorities began construction on more than 23,696 housing units between 2009 and 2020 in Israeli settlements in Area C. Transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population to an occupied territory violates the Fourth Geneva Convention.
These policies grow out of longstanding Israeli government plans. For example, the 1980 Drobles Plan, which guided the government’s settlement policy in the West Bank at the time and built on prior plans, called for authorities to “settle the land between the [Arab] minority population centers and their surroundings,” noting that doing so would make it “hard for Palestinians to create territorial contiguity and political unity” and “remove any trace of doubt about our intention to control Judea and Samaria forever.”

Settlement expansion

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/wbank-settler-population-up-42-since-2010-report/2170039

The settler population in the occupied West Bank has risen 42% since 2010, a new Israeli report found on Tuesday.
There are now 440,000 settlers in the occupied territory, added the report by Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and Kerem Navot.
“Various state authorities encourage Jews to move to settlements and develop financial ventures in and around them,” the report said.
“The state offers a slew of benefits and incentives to settlers and settlements, through both official and unofficial channels – extensively reviewed here. Housing benefits are the most significant, allowing families that lack capital or substantial sources of income to buy homes in settlements,” it added.
The report noted that the settler population increase was rapid, especially in Modi’in Illit and Beitar Illit, two large ultra-Orthodox settlements in the West Bank.
By the end of 2020, the number of settlers in the two settlements reached 140,053, which is nearly a third of the settler population in the West Bank. This is an increase of 435% compared to 2000, when the settler population of the two settlements at that time was just 32,200.
“Further benefits and incentives are offered to industrial zones in the West Bank, including discounted land fees and employment subsidies,” the report said.
“Israel also encourages Jews to set up new outposts, which operate as agricultural farms and enable extensive takeover of Palestinian farmland and pastureland. Forty such farms have been established in the past decade, effectively taking over tens of thousands of dunams,” the report said, using a unit of measurement equivalent to about a quarter acre.
The report stressed that “the Israeli regime, which strives to promote and perpetuate Jewish supremacy in the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, is an apartheid regime.”
“Two decades into the 21st century, Israel appears more determined than ever to continue upholding and perpetuating an apartheid regime throughout the area under its control, well into the coming decades,” B’Tselem said.
The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is regarded as occupied territory under international law, making all Jewish settlements there illegal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/22/israel-palestinian-masafer-yatta-biden/

The demolitions of Palestinian houses come amid massive construction of new houses for settlers, with a recent approval for 4200 housing units.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190320-israel-begins-construction-of-840-new-illegal-settlement-units-in-west-bank/

839 illegal settlement units being built in the West Bank:

"Israeli Minister of Construction and Housing Yoav Galant along with Mayor of Ariel Eli Shaviro yesterday laid the cornerstone of new a settlement project comprising 839 settlement units in the illegal settlement, Arab48 reported.
The new project is expected to attract hundreds of young settler families to the second largest Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.
According to Arab48, the project includes new malls, education facilities, parks and attraction sites serving the new illegal Jewish community

The project was approved of two years ago, by Netanyahu personally:

…the project was approved two years ago, according to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who visited the area on Monday.
"Tomorrow, as the mayor of Ariel told me, we are beginning construction of some 840 housing units in a new neighborhood, a neighborhood that I approved two years ago," Haaretz reported Netanyahu saying.
Shapiro called for the Israeli political leadership to approve more settlement units in Ariel, reminding them that only one third of its planned area had been completed.
Expanding the settlement, Shapiro claimed, would stop discrimination against the settlers, stressing that it tells Palestinians that "settlement is here forever."”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/20/land-beyond-road-forbidden-israeli-settler-shepherds-displacing-palestinians

Israeli settler shepherds steal land:

The difference is the only perceptible sign of the biggest strategic shift in the battle for control of Area C, the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control, in recent years: the emergence of Israeli settlers using shepherding as a tool for seizing the most land, with the least effort.
“We used to be able to take the sheep and goats all over the mountains and the valley,” said Mohammed, a 16-year-old herding a flock of 200 on the side of the road that is safe for Palestinians. “Now the road is the border and beyond that is forbidden.”
“They come down from the mountain and take the water, take the land, but bring goats,” said Abu Fadi, 52, a Bedouin shepherd from Al-Auja, a village north of Jericho. “There’s not enough space any more and the price of food for the animals is going up. We are being pressured on both sides.”

The shepherd settlements are very new, showing acceleration of settler colonialism:

A new Kerem Navot investigation has found that there are now 77 Israeli farms and shepherding outposts across the West Bank; 66 were established over the last decade, and 46 in the last five years, part of an explosion in settlement growth during the Trump administration. The area now controlled by shepherd settlers is around 60,000 acres – just under 7% of Area C.

Settlers do not mince words; they are deliberately using shepherding as a method of colonization of as much land as possible:

As Ze’ev Hever, the secretary general of Amana, a settler organisation, put it at an online conference last year: “Construction takes up little ground, due to economic considerations of building development … The shepherd farms – over the last three years we have ventured into a large expanse – now cover an area almost twice as large as the built area of the settlements.”

Image captioned “Israeli settler shepherds now control 7% of Area C of the West Bank”

https://www.nrc.no/shorthand/stories/in-the-west-bank-segregated-roads-displace-palestinians/index.html

“For decades, Israel has declared its intention to build settlements in an area just east of Jerusalem, referred to in planning documents as “E1”. Doing so would completely surround East Jerusalem with settlements and preclude meaningful geographic contiguity between the northern and southern West Bank. In addition, such settlements are illegal under international law.
Any Palestinian presence in E1, both those living there and even Palestinian traffic passing through, poses a major obstacle to Israel’s settlement plans. However, Palestinians travelling between the northern and southern West Bank must currently use a highway that traverses the so-called E1 area.
Israeli authorities, therefore, are working toward “eliminating the need for Palestinians to travel through E1,” according to Amy Cohen, director of international relations and advocacy at Ir Amim, an Israeli organisation that focuses on Jerusalem within the context of the Palestinian-Israeli issue.
“The road project lays the groundwork for the future annexation steps of the area of E1,” she adds.”

Evictions, demolitions and lack of permits

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/07/israel-opt-immediately-halt-forced-eviction-of-more-than-1000-west-bank-residents-and-stop-demolitions-of-bedouin-homes-in-the-negev-naqab/

“The Israeli authorities must immediately halt the forcible eviction of more than 1,000 residents from Masafer Yatta, a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank, Amnesty International said today, following weeks in which the Israeli army has repeatedly harassed people in the area, demolished homes and placed restrictions on freedom of movement. Inside Israel, the authorities must recognize the housing rights of Palestinian Bedouin citizens in the Negev/Naqab desert, who saw their village, al-‘Araqib, demolished again this morning, Tuesday 19 July.
In recent weeks, Masafer Yatta communities have been hit by wave after wave of demolitions according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). A campaign of intimidation by the Israeli authorities has sought to create unbearable living conditions that coerce residents into leaving. Roadblocks and other restrictions on movement have also prevented residents from celebrating the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha with their extended families in the nearby town of Yatta. On 11 May and 1 June, the Israeli army destroyed the homes of dozens of residents, with some suffering a third home demolition in the past 12 months.
Around 1,150 Palestinians currently live in Masafer Yatta, of whom 569 are children, in over 200 homes, according to OCHA. Living conditions are dire, with residents almost entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. The Israeli authorities have issued orders to demolish or stop construction of almost all homes, animal shelters, cisterns, and community infrastructure in the area, on the grounds that they were built without permits, which are almost impossible to obtain.
“More than 1,000 Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, including around 500 children, are bracing themselves for the potential arrival of Israeli bulldozers that would demolish their homes, solar panels and animal pens. Going ahead with this large-scale expulsion would amount to an act of forcible transfer, which is a war crime and crime against humanity,” said Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s Regional Middle East and North Africa Director.”

https://www.de-colonizer.org/map

11 Palestinian localities:

Since the 1967 war, Israel has destroyed 11 Palestinian localities. The best known were destroyed during the war itself. These are the three villages in the Latrun area across the 1949 Israeli-Jordanian border: ‘Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba. Since then, however, Israel completely destroyed several more localities, in addition to thousands of houses demolished in existing ones.

70 Palestinian localities under threat of destruction:

In recent years, Israel has continued its intensive destruction activities in the Jordan Valley and south of Hebron. This destruction is accompanied, and sometimes initiated by violent harassment by Jewish settlers who do not enable their Palestinians neighbors to lead a normal life. Based on a study by B’Tselem the map shows 70 Palestinian localities threatened by total destruction. Upon their future erasure, these will represent the “natural” continuation of the Israeli destruction project. For years, they have been suffering from massive house demolitions, and their chances of survival are minimal. Without significant international intervention, it appears that in the future, when we update the map, these too will be included under the category of localities completely destroyed since 1967.

https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/west-bank-demolitions-and-displacement-overview-november

Building permits “are nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain in Area C (of the West Bank) and East Jerusalem.”
Total demolitions in 2021 have increased over past years:

In total in 2021, 902 structures were demolished or seized, the vast majority, 898, for lack of building permits. This is the highest number of demolitions recorded in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since 2016. The number of people displaced, 1,203, also represents a five-year-high.
In Area C, of the 718 structures targeted in 2021, 381 (53 per cent) were seized without, or with very short, prior notice, utilizing various military orders, effectively preventing people from objecting in advance. This compares with about 31 per cent in the previous three years, and around 10 per cent in 2016-17.
The number of structures demolished in East Jerusalem in 2021 for lack of building permits, 177, is approximately the same as the past four years (2017-2019). However, the proportion of buildings demolished by their owners in 2021 reached 55 per cent, up from 50 per cent in 2020, and an average of 23 per cent in the previous three years (2017-2019). Anecdotal evidence suggests that this increase in ‘self-demolitions’ is related to new Israeli legislation passed in recent years. This legislation has made it more difficult for Palestinian residents to protect their properties and avoid displacement via legal proceedings, increased fines and other penalties, while making it easier for the Jerusalem Municipality to pressure them to demolish their properties by themselves.
In 2021, the number of EU-funded structures that were demolished or seized (140) is the highest since 2016, and represents a 15 and 43 per cent increase compared with 2020 and 2019, respectively.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220726-israel-demolishes-2-palestinian-homes-in-hebron-2/

A close-up example of how demolitions of houses and vital living facilities works:

Israeli forces yesterday demolished two houses south of Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank, a local official said.
Ratib Al-Jabour, the coordinator of the National Committee for the Resistance of the Apartheid Wall and Settlements in the area, said the Israeli forces raided the Umm Qassa community in the Yatta desert, and demolished a house belonging to NajehTaimat which housed ten people.
Al-Jabour added that occupation forces also demolished and seized a residential tent belonging to Mohammed Hassan Daoud, in the village of Al-Buwaib, east of Yatta.
He explained that the Israeli authorities have escalated their attacks against the citizens of Yatta and the Masafir Yatta area, south of Hebron, by demolishing homes and facilities, preventing citizens from building, and depriving them of electricity and drinking water to force them to leave their homes and lands, in order to expand illegal settlement outposts in the area.
Israeli forces have also demolished a house and a pond to collect water in Birin village, south of Hebron.
In Bethlehem, in the southern West Bank, occupations forces handed nine citizens demolition and halting construction notices in the town of Nahalin.
Occupation forces also set up a number of military checkpoints and intensified their presence south of Jenin, in the northern West Bank.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/world/middleeast/west-bank-public-land-israel-palestinians.html

By 2018 it was calculated that of grants to people in the West Bank of areas Israel declared to be state lands, 99.7% was given to Israeli settlements, with just 0.24% (400 acres (160 ha)) being earmarked for allocation to Palestinians who constitute 88% of the population.

https://www.ochaopt.org/content/most-palestinian-plans-build-area-c-not-approved

According to the Israeli authorities, the extensive demolition of Palestinian homes and other structures in Area C is due to the structures being erected without Israeli-issued building permits. However, this is because: “The vast majority of Palestinian applications for Israeli building permits in Area C are rejected by the Israeli authorities on the grounds that the relevant area has not been zoned for construction. This is the case even when the land for which the permit is requested is undisputedly owned by the Palestinian applicant. Consequently, it is virtually impossible for Palestinians to obtain building permits: according to data obtained by the Israeli organization Peace Now from the ICA, between 2009 and 2018 only two per cent of all requests submitted by Palestinians for building permits in Area C were granted (98 out of 4,422).”
Between 1988 and 2014, the Israeli Civil Administration (ICA) issued over 14,000 demolition orders against Palestinian-owned structures located in Area C on these grounds. In 2020, a total of 668 structures were demolished in Area C, the highest annual number recorded with the exception of 2016, since OCHA began systematically documenting this practice in 2009. In 2021, the trend is seemingly continuing, with a total of 259 Palestinian-owned structures demolished or seized in Area C (as of 31 March), an increase of 216 per cent compared with the equivalent period in 2020.

https://www.btselem.org/publications/summaries/200205_land_grab

While facilitating Jewish settlement, the planning system works vigorously to restrict the development of Palestinian communities. The main tool used to this end is to reject requests for building permits filed by Palestinians. In most cases, the requests are rejected on the grounds that the regional outline plans - approved in the 1940s during the British Mandate - prohibit construction in the relevant area of land. These plans do not reflect the development needs of the Palestinian population, and the planning system deliberately refrains from preparing revised plans. Houses built by Palestinians without building permits are demolished by the Civil Administration, even in cases when the construction took place on private land.

Israeli PR stunts and use of permits against Palestinians

https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/op-ed/israels-construction-permits-for-palestinians-are-meaningless

“Many Palestinians believe the decision to grant Palestinians permits is nothing more than a PR stunt to stave off international opposition to its settlement expansion. Israel will most likely not follow through on its decision.
There are historical precedents for this. In 2017, the Israeli government announced plans for around 5,000 housing units in and around the Palestinian city of Qalqilya in the north of the West Bank. The plan never moved forward and was frozen by Israeli then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In addition, in 2019, the Israeli government approved 700 building permits for Palestinians in what was widely seen as an attempt to quell international criticism for failing to allow Palestinian construction. Only six of the initial 700 buildings were given final approval, according to Peace Now, an Israeli anti-occupation advocacy group.
Similarly, with this recent Israeli plan, the vast majority of the 1,300 approvals are "initial approvals," and according to the Israeli media, based on statements from Israeli officials, the full approval process will take years to materialize. This opens the door for procrastination that will eventually lead to the alleged approvals simply being set aside.”
PR for image

“Overall, these announcements are made by Israel every now and then, and are meant for international marketing rather than actual execution. It’s a stunt for Israel to embellish its image before the international community, and play its liberal allies in the West for fools. But the real outcome is always this: Israel doesn’t follow through with granting actual permits to Palestinians, and it has no intention to do so in the first place.
Even if Israel moves to approve most or all of the 1,300 permits, this would only meet a tiny fraction of the needed construction permits for Palestinians in the West Bank.”

It’s a right, not a favor

“Needless to say, the Palestinian people should not need a permit from Israel to build on their own land. Palestinian construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is a right and not a favor to be bestowed upon them by Israel. On the other hand, it’s the Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories that are not only illegal but are considered war crimes by the United Nations.”

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-08-01/ty-article/.premium/report-civil-admin-eases-palestinians-permits-in-exchange-for-intel-on-west-bank-mood/00000182-548f-d364-abff-5d8f3e650000

“Matan, David and Alon (not their real names) served in recent years in the Civil Administration unit in a number of areas in the West Bank. They told Haaretz about what their unit defined as “interlocutors” – Palestinians with whom the administration fostered special ties, involving give-and-take: Give us information and general assessments of the mood in the Palestinian street, and we will make it possible for you to receive a travel permit for yourself, your family and perhaps friends and others in your circle.”
“…the unit is actually a mechanism of control and domination that wields “bureaucratic violence” in its dealings with people, as some described it.”

Ghettos (bantustans)

How the situations looks:

https://web.archive.org/web/20081202200143/http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/806575.html

The Israelis have improved on the colonial system: Instead of the occupying powers dictating the lives of the natives on a daily basis in their towns and their villages, they force an indirect regime of imprisonment on the natives, fencing them off and interfering in their daily routines. Here, the ruler does not encroach on their space, but they are forced to plead with him in the temples of the occupation, the roadblocks; and as long as they surrender to the rules imposed on them, the occupier knows his status is secure.
The roadblocks serve as a first-class geo-strategic means: They institutionalize the expropriation of the physical space and the public infrastructure of the West Bank and their transference to the exclusive use of the Israelis. The map of the hundreds of roadblocks erected in Palestinian populated areas outlines the physical division of the West Bank into areas west of the separation fence that have been annexed de facto, and the Jordan Valley that has been cut off from its surroundings, and 10 Palestinian enclaves from Jenin in the North to Mt. Hebron in the South.
The mounds of earth and the cement blocks, which are ostensibly scattered randomly, in effect constitute a complete geo-strategic system, and therefore the "removal" of several mounds of earth or obstructions is liable to spoil the scheme so carefully planned out. And those who believe that "the ideology of Greater Israel has been shelved" should understand that the roadblocks symbolize the expropriation of the West Bank territories without annexation, albeit with the addition of the creation of Palestinian "reservations." The geographical division has fragmented the Palestinian community into weak and impoverished sub-communities, where centers are disconnected from peripheries, urban centers are eroding and rural areas becoming poor, families are separated, and medical treatment is denied along with access to higher education. This division is imposed in the hopes that the political and social siege will result in demographic distress and perhaps to emigration.
The planners of the roadblock regime devoted great effort to the planning and implementation of the system, but apparently were mistaken in their assessments of the efficacy of their method. Palestinian society is demonstrating signs of strong cohesion and adjustment to the cruel living conditions forced on it, and there are no signs that the strategic goals have in fact been achieved. Therefore, the planners feel that they must increase the number of roadblocks each year, and this number has already reached 522, i.e. an obstruction for every 3,500 Palestinians.

https://books.google.dk/books?id=Ya8cDgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=da&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

(page 10)
(page 10)

East Jerusalem

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/

“Palestinians in annexed East Jerusalem are granted permanent residence instead of citizenship – though this status is permanent in name only. Since 1967, more than 14,000 Palestinians have had their residency revoked at the discretion of the Ministry of the Interior, resulting in their forcible transfer outside the city.”
“38% of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem was expropriated between 1967 and 2017. Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem are frequently targeted by settler organizations which, with the full backing of the Israeli government, work to displace Palestinian families and hand their homes to settlers.”

https://www.alhaq.org/cached_uploads/download/2020/08/26/house-demolitions-and-forced-evictions-in-silwan-web-1598440511.pdf

According to OCHA, between a third to a half of East Jerusalem's houses do not have permits, potentially placing over 100,000 Palestinian residents of the city at risk of forced displacement and forcible transfer as a result of demolitions.
Despite the clear and unequivocal stance taken by the international community, Israel has deepened its unlawful measures with regards to Jerusalem. Since 1967, Israel has appropriated 35 per cent of privately owned Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, constructing 13 settlements in the eastern part of the city, in violation of international law. By 2016, some 302,188 Israeli settlers had been transferred in to colonise the East Jerusalem Governorate.
Since 2000, through its construction of the Annexation Wall, Israel has isolated East Jerusalem from the rest of the OPT, effecting illegal changes to the character and status of the city and altering the demography of the city to ensure a Jewish majority. Critically, in 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) called on Israel to dismantle and cease all construction work on the Annexation Wall, including in and around East Jerusalem, noting: “...the route chosen for the wall gives expression in loco to the illegal measures taken by Israel with regard to Jerusalem and the settlements, as deplored by the Security Council... There is also a risk of further alterations to the demographic composition of the Occupied Palestinian Territory resulting from the construction of the wall inasmuch as it is contributing... to the departure of Palestinian populations from certain areas. That construction, along with measures taken previously, thus severely impedes the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination, and is therefore a breach of Israel’s obligation to respect that right.”

https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/iopt1210webwcover_0.pdf

In a number of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem Israel has, as of 2010, not issued a single building permit since 1967. Lack of a permit was given as the reason for the demolition of 730 Palestinian houses in this area between 2000 and 2009. Taking Jerusalem as a whole, for the one year 2004, 85% of known building violations were registered in predominantly Jewish West Jerusalem, and yet 91% of administrative demolition orders related only to East Jerusalem

https://sci-hub.wf/10.1111/j.1747-4469.2007.00062.x

“It is estimated that 85 percent of the Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem are “illegal.”1 This implies that since 1967 approximately twenty thousand buildings were built by Palestinians in East Jerusalem without acquiring sufficient building permits. 2 From 1987 to 2004 Israel demolished four hundred of these houses (Bimkom and Ir Shalem 2004). These demolitions were not executed on the houses of “terrorists,” nor were they based on rationales of military security, but rather on an enforcement of apparently benign planning regulations centered around the definition of the demolished house as illegal.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/1/what-is-happening-in-occupied-east-jerusalems-sheikh-jarrah

“…in 1990, Ariel Sharon – who was the minister of housing construction at the time – set in motion the plans to build settlement blocs right in the middle of Palestinian neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, in order to encircle, fragment and disperse the Palestinian residents.”
Odeh said all of these policies are in line with Israel’s so-called “Greater Jerusalem” plan, which aims to cut off the surrounding Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem from the city by way of the separation barrier and annexing surrounding Jewish settlements.
“As a result, some 140,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites live outside the separation barrier, and cannot access the city,” he said.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/01/israel-settlements-jerusalem-tourism-un

According to a European Union Heads of Mission report, "East Jerusalem is the only place where Israeli national parks are declared on populated neighbourhoods,"

https://www.timesofisrael.com/denied-legal-building-permits-some-east-jerusalem-families-raze-their-own-homes/

Virtually impossible to obtain a building permit:

The UN’s Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) noted in an April 2019 report that in East Jerusalem “a restrictive planning regime applied by Israel makes it virtually impossible for Palestinians to obtain building permits.”
“At least one-third of all Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem lack an Israeli-issued building permit, potentially placing over 100,000 residents at risk of displacement,” it added.
OCHA says that only 13 percent of East Jerusalem is designated for Palestinian construction, much of which is already built up, while 35 percent has been allocated to Israelis for construction.

Israel’s demolitions also mean that the victims have to pay for the demolition. This causes many in East Jerusalem to tear their own houses down instead:

But many Palestinians still prefer to demolish their property themselves, fearing arrest if they are unable to pay the city’s demolition bill or fines.

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

“In Jerusalem, the government’s plan for the municipality, including both the west and occupied east of the city, sets the goal of “maintaining a solid Jewish majority in the city” and a target demographic “ratio of 70% Jews and 30% Arabs”—later adjusted to a 60:40 ratio after authorities acknowledged that “this goal is not attainable” in light of “the demographic trend.””
“Between 2009 and 2020, Israeli authorities demolished 1,434 structures in East Jerusalem, in more than 98 percent of the cases for lacking a permit, according to OCHA.[398] According to B’Tselem, authorities demolished 786 homes in East Jerusalem during this period, leaving 2,561 Palestinians displaced.[399] By contrast, Israeli authorities almost never demolish the homes of Jewish Israelis in Jerusalem, even where there are building violations.[400]”

https://pij.org/articles/651/east-jerusalem-a-case-study-in-political-planning

Land takeover:

By a system of spot zoning that reduces the size of existing Palestinian neighborhoods, allocates land for new Jewish neighborhoods, and leaves large quantities of interstitial land unplanned and vacant, the land resources of East Jerusalem have been completely redistributed. Staged spot zoning has made it possible for the State to achieve control of 87% of the land of East Jerusalem. In other words, during a period of only 28 years, it has been possible to effect a near complete turnaround in the matter of land control in East Jerusalem, from 1967 when the Palestinians owned approximately 90% of the land of East Jerusalem to 1995 when the Israeli government is in control of 87% of the land. The Palestinians may now live on and develop only 13.5% of the land in East Jerusalem. Within the entirety of Jerusalem, this percentage is likely to be half that amount, given other statistics given in this document

Height of houses:

The Town Planning and Building Law that permits the designation of a variety of housing zones, ranging from low- to high-density zones (15%, 25% and 50% of the size of a building lot) is applied to Palestinian neigh¬borhoods. By contrast, building lots in Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem have enjoyed building rights of as much as 200%.
Similarly, building heights in Arab neighborhoods are confined to one or two stories, whereas building heights of as many as eight stories have been approved in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.

And more is talked about in this source.

https://www.btselem.org/jerusalem

Immediately after the annexation, Israel cancelled all the Jordanian outline plans for the annexed areas but left those for the rest of the West Bank in place. This created a planning vacuum that took some time to fill. Only in the 1980s did the Jerusalem Municipality draw up outline plans for all Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. The most striking feature of these plans was the designation of huge swathes of land as “open scenic areas” where development is forbidden. In 2014, after several amendments made to the plans over the years, these “scenic areas” made up about 30% of the land in Palestinian neighborhoods. Only some 15% of the land area in East Jerusalem (about 8.5% of Jerusalem’s municipal jurisdiction) is zoned for residential use by Palestinian residents, although Palestinians currently account for 40% of the city’s population.
Another measure Israel has employed to limit the amount of land available to Palestinians is declaring national parks where development is almost entirely forbidden. To date, four national parks have been declared in East Jerusalem, within the city’s municipal boundaries, including on privately owned Palestinian land or on land that lies within or adjacent to the built-up areas of Palestinian neighborhoods and villages. The Jerusalem Municipality is planning more parks in East Jerusalem.
The unusually high number of national parks in East Jerusalem, some of which contain nothing of archaeological or natural importance, indicates that – unlike other parks declared by Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority – the purpose of these parks is not conservation. Instead, they are an instrument for sealing off large expanses of land in East Jerusalem in order to further political goals such as ensuring Jewish-only contiguity from the Old City to the planned settlement area of E1, while increasing Jewish presence in East Jerusalem.

https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/6359.html

Throughout its occupation, Israel has enacted discriminatory legal and political policies to diminish the presence of the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem. Israel has engineered a clear governmental policy that sought to maintain a demographic balance of 60 percent Jews to 40 percent “Arabs” within the Israeli declared boundaries of the Jerusalem municipality - which it unilaterally declared as the unified capital of Israel in 1980.
Punitive measures specifically targeting the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem include:

Expropriating land and property, denying building permits, and demolishing Palestinian homes in a systematic and discriminatory manner;
Severely restricting the natural development of Palestinian neighborhoods by instead facilitating the expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem;
Revoking residency status and rights of East Jerusalem Palestinians; and,
Severely restricting family (re)unification and child registration of East Jerusalem Palestinians.

https://visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/city-for-all

http://palestine.mei.columbia.edu/events-fall-2018/visualizing-palestine-a-behind-the-scenes-look-with-co-founder-ramzi-jaber

Gaza

Settlements

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/06/israel-occupation-50-years-of-dispossession/

Until 2005, more than 9,000 Israeli settlers were illegally residing in Gaza.

Gaza is still occupied

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/the-gaza-strip-is-no-longer-occupied/

While it is true that Israeli forces and settlers withdrew from within Gaza in 2005, this does not mean that the occupation was ended. How is this possible?
There is a general misconception regarding what constitutes a military occupation. Many believe that it takes boots on the ground to consider an area occupied, but today this is no longer the case. For an area to be considered occupied the occupying state must exercise “effective control” over the occupied area. This idea becomes even more clear when we consider Israeli surveillance and monitoring technology that allow for greater control of an area through controlling select key positions without the necessity of a full occupation force in the territory.
It is without a doubt that Israel holds effective control over the Gaza strip, Israeli law experts would naturally beg to differ, but these same experts argued that Gaza was unoccupied even before Israel withdrew its forces and settlers anyway. Israel controls virtually every aspect of life in Gaza. Israel maintains control of Gaza’s airspace, its territorial waters, no-go zones within the strip and even the population registry, meaning Israel even gets to determine who is a Palestinian and who isn’t inside the Gaza strip. What kind of sovereign, non-occupied entity can’t even determine who its citizens are?
This is not conjecture, but the opinion of the United Nations, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross and countless other international organizations specialized in human rights and international humanitarian law.
However, we must situate the Israeli claims that Gaza is not occupied within its correct historical context. As mentioned above, even prior to 2005, Israel always argued that the Gaza strip was unoccupied, even with its troops and settlements and military bases. As a matter of fact, Israel even claims the same about the West Bank to this day. The argument being that for an occupation to exist, a territory must be part of a sovereign state, which the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were not, even though they were controlled by other sovereign states. This same justification is used to argue that the Geneva conventions, and international and humanitarian law in general, don’t apply to Palestinians. Of course, this argument was never accepted by the world community which still maintains that these areas are occupied.
The lesson here is that Israeli legal claims have never been in good faith. If Israel could legally claim that an area with thousands of soldiers and dozens of bases and settlements is not occupied, then of course it would argue the same for Gaza today.

https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/israel-has-effective-control-over-gaza/

While Israel has in fact redeployed its ground troops out of the populated centers and does not handle the daily affairs of Gazans, it continues to exercise very effective control, from the outside, on all aspects of life there. Specifically, Israel’s dominance is evident and exercised in the following areas:

Whenever they desire, the Israel Defense Forces enter Gaza and carry out operations both openly and clandestinely.
Israel regulates the borders so that no persons or goods can enter or leave the area without its permission. Although one part of Gaza’s southern border is controlled by Egypt, a joint agreement between Israel and Egypt ensures that no goods or personnel can enter or exit without coordinating with Israel. Illegal tunnels that attempt to circumvent this system of control are frequently bombed or flooded by Israel and Egypt.
Israel commands the airspace above Gaza. Its planes and drones constantly conduct surveillance and military operations.
Israel controls the sea coast and territorial waters. It regularly prohibits fishermen from fishing beyond the limits it sets and changes from time to time. The Israeli navy blockades the coast, fires on fishing boats, and interdicts any attempts to break the siege by sea flotillas, even in international waters. Israel also exploits—for its own purposes exclusively—the subterranean natural gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea off Gaza’s shores.
Israeli currency is used in Gaza and Israel controls the flow of any other currency.
Israel controls the entry of any humanitarian assistance into the area.
The population register for Gaza is in Israeli-controlled computers and all Gazans are required to use Israeli-issued ID numbers. To be effective, documents officially issued by the Palestinian Authority or Hamas require numbers that are issued and approved by Israel.
Postal, telephone, and internet connections between Gaza and the outside world are all “hosted” and conducted through Israel.
While Hamas ostensibly runs internal day-to-day affairs in Gaza, both Israel and the Palestinian Authority deny its legitimacy. Daily affairs are conducted within the parameters of Israeli approval. While such cooperation is not always acknowledged by either side, in fact Israel considers Gaza to be a territory under its effective control. In practice, Israel is happy to cede the responsibility for running the affairs of the Gaza Strip but it has never relinquished control or power over the area in any matter that it deemed was in its interest.

In reality, therefore, Gaza continues to be effectively under Israeli occupation. The responsibility for protecting Gaza’s citizens from the spread and serious effects of the coronavirus must rest with Israel. Gaza’s Health Ministry has issued warnings about the epidemic and has appealed to Israel to provide necessary supplies in order to help stem the impact of the virus. To be sure, Israel must understand and implement its obligations toward Gaza’s citizens and abide by its responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/14/gaza-israels-open-air-prison-15

Gaza is an open-air prison, and is occupied. “As an occupying power that maintains significant control over many aspects of life in Gaza,”.

Colonization outside of Palestine

Golan heights

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190328-israel-official-reveals-plan-to-change-golan-heights-demographic-balance/

An Israeli official revealed a plan to triple the number of Jewish settlers in the Golan Heights in the coming years in order to create a Jewish majority in the occupied Syrian territory.
The Mayor of Katzrin settlement in the occupied Golan, Dmitry Apartzev, said the plateau's total population will increase to 150,000 people which means the number of Jews will reach 100,000 people while the number of Druze will be 50,000.
Apartzev expected the population of Katzrin settlement alone to increase from 8,500 to 50,000.
According to the Israeli official, the recognition of Israel's sovereignty over the Golan will open new horizons for foreign investment in the area, hoping that the recognition would also contribute to counter the international boycott campaigns urging investors not to invest in the occupied territories.

https://www.de-colonizer.org/map

130,000 Syrians expelled from the Golan heights, with 195 villages and localities of varying sizes destroyed

Sinai

https://www.jpost.com/Features/Personal-Encounter-The-meatman-of-Yamit

Yamit, a settler colony in the Sinai peninsula, was envisioned as a large city for 200,000 settlers

https://ecf.org.il/media_items/717

Locations of Israeli settler colonies built during their occupation of the Sinai peninsula, showing that Israel had planned to make it a part of their settler colonial ethnostate.

Apartheid

Clarification: Separating settler colonialism from the apartheid system is impossible; apartheid laws are used to continue settler colonialism. I have decided to include things such as discrimination on the basis of ID cards, water, etc. here, and let the colonialism section be for explicit land ownership. In reality, however, this entire system, including water and ID cards, is made with the goal of replacement of the native Palestinian population.

https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/7207.html

Apartheid which applies to all of Historic Palestine

Overall

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/

Palestinian citizens in Israel currently enjoy greater rights and freedoms than their counterparts in the OPT, while the experience of Palestinians in Gaza is very different to that of those living in the West Bank. Nonetheless, Amnesty International’s research shows that all Palestinians are subject to the same overarching system. Israel’s treatment of Palestinians across all areas is pursuant to the same objective: to privilege Jewish Israelis in distribution of land and resources, and to minimize the Palestinian presence and access to land.
Amnesty International demonstrates that Israeli authorities treat Palestinians as an inferior racial group who are defined by their non-Jewish, Arab status. This racial discrimination is cemented in laws which affect Palestinians across Israel and the OPT.
For example, Palestinian citizens of Israel are denied a nationality, establishing a legal differentiation from Jewish Israelis. In the West Bank and Gaza, where Israel has controlled the population registry since 1967, Palestinians have no citizenship and most are considered stateless, requiring ID cards from the Israeli military to live and work in the territories.

ID cards

https://101.visualizingpalestine.org/resources/glossary/id-system

Israeli authorities control the population registry of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as that of Israeli citizens.[1] Based on these records, a system of different coloured ID cards dictates where people can live, work and travel, and what other rights they can access.[2] This ID system, akin to the pass system in apartheid South Africa,[3] creates a hierarchy in which Jewish Israelis have the most rights, and Palestinians are granted (or denied) rights depending on which “population group” they belong to. The system also entirely excludes exiled Palestinian refugees who are denied the right to live anywhere in historic Palestine.

Movement

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

Referring to Gaza ID holders:

Israel bans Palestinians living there (with only narrow exceptions) from leaving through the Erez Passenger Crossing it controls and instituted a formal “policy of separation” between Gaza and the West Bank, despite Israel having recognized within the framework of the Oslo Accords these two parts of the OPT as collectively forming a “single territorial unit.” The generalized travel ban, which has remained in place since 2007 and reduced travel out of Gaza to a fraction of what it was two decades ago, is not based on an individualized security assessment and fails any reasonable test of balancing security concerns against the right to freedom of movement for over two million people.

Referring to West Bank ID holders

Within the West Bank as well, Israeli authorities prohibit Palestinian ID holders from entering areas such as East Jerusalem, lands beyond the separation barrier, and areas controlled by settlements and the army, unless they secure difficult-to-obtain permits. They have also erected nearly 600 permanent obstacles, many between Palestinian communities, that disrupt daily life for Palestinians. In sharp contrast, Israeli authorities allow Jewish settlers in the West Bank to move freely within the majority of the West Bank under its exclusive control, as well as to and from Israel, on roads built to facilitate their commutes and integrate them into every facet of Israeli life.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/08/08/israel-jerusalem-palestinians-stripped-status

Palestinians with an East Jerusalem ID card are subject to arbitrary revocation if they “don’t have their center of life” in Jerusalem:

“Palestinians from East Jerusalem and offered them permanent residency, the same status afforded to a foreigner who wants to live in Israel. Permanent residents may live, work, and receive benefits in Israel, but that status derives from their presence, which can be withdrawn if one settles outside of Israel. It does not automatically pass to one’s children or non-resident spouse and can be revoked at the Interior Ministry’s discretion.”

Roads

https://www.972mag.com/israel-settler-roads-apartheid/

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-01-10/ty-article-magazine/.premium/new-apartheid-road-opens-separating-palestinians-and-west-bank-settlers/0000017f-e8cc-df2c-a1ff-fedda5460000

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-advances-plan-for-apartheid-road-in-west-bank/1760032

https://visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/segregated-roads-west-bank

Anti-miscegenation laws

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/7/26/israels-nation-state-law-parallels-the-nazi-nuremberg-laws

“This brings us to the second Nuremberg Law: Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which sought to prevent mixing of Aryan blood, dubbed “race defilement”.
The new “nation-state law” may not mention “race defilement” but in Israel, anti-miscegenation laws are already in place, masquerading as legislation meant to protect traditional values. Marriage can only be performed by religious officials and the Orthodox rabbinate has exclusive purview over Jewish marriages. Interreligious marriage within Israel is strictly forbidden by law.”

https://www.msuilr.org/msuilr-legalforum-blogs/2017/8/24/the-right-to-marry-in-israel-an-anti-miscegenation-law-masquerading-as-traditional-religious-values

“By and large anti-miscegenation[3] statutes, like those contained in the Nuremburg Laws of Nazi Germany,[4] and the Jim Crow laws of the Southern United States,[5] were left behind in the Twentieth Century. However, anti-miscegenation appears to be alive and well in the Jewish State of Israel where all marriages must be performed by religious officials,[6] and interreligious marriage is strictly prohibited.[7] This religious based restriction on marriage becomes the equivalent to an anti-miscegenation law when the bloodline requirement to be considered Jewish enough for marriage to another Jew by the Orthodox Jewish Rabbinical Court is also taken into account.
Those who follow Israel politics closely should not be shocked to learn that the Rabbinical Courts have become even more hostile in recent years to Jewish converts and the children of Jewish converts. A recent United Nations report has accused Israel of establishing "an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole."[8] Similarly, Israel’s treatment of people who cannot readily prove that their Jewish bloodline or conversion to Judaism in a way that complies with halakha,[9] is rapidly detreating.[10]”

Family seperation

https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2107/S00043/family-separation-law-israels-demographic-war-on-palestine-intensifies.htm

The purpose of the “Citizenship and Entry Law”, which prevents Palestinians without citizenship from gaining citizenship, or living in Israel, by marrying Palestinians within Israel and with Israeli citizenship:

Israel’s main fear is not simply a decisive Palestinian majority between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Israel’s Jewish ruling classes are also rattled by the real possibility of the growing political influence of Israel’s Palestinian Arab constituency, and are doing everything in their power to ensure Palestinian holders of Israeli citizenship are kept at a minimum. The Citizenship and Entry Law was designed specifically to keep this population in check.
The general elections of March 2020, in particular, provided a taste of what a doomsday scenario would look like. Arab Israeli parties unified under the single ticket of the Joint List and emerged with 15 seats, making it the third-largest political bloc in the Israeli Knesset, after Likud and Blue and White. If Palestinian Arabs mastered this much influence, though they represent only 20% of the overall Israeli population, imagine what they could do if the demographic tide continues to shift in their favor.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/7/7/2-hours-8-years-israels-separation-of-palestinians

Israel’s policies of separation between different parts of the Palestinian population, including, but not limited to, those in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, have been described by local and international human rights groups as tactics of fragmentation and domination, aimed at ensuring Jewish demographic control over Palestinians.
It is estimated that tens of thousands of Palestinian couples and families across Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories are forced to live apart.
“Israel has pursued a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy … and engages in population control by encouraging, coercing and preventing movement in ways that meet its demographic goals,” the Israeli NGO Gisha said in a 2020 report.
The policy, another report says, “severs the fabric of life that exists between Gaza and the West Bank, de facto erasing Palestinians’ right to family life while splitting families apart, separating partners, parents from children, and grandparents from grandchildren.”

Within 1948 Palestine

Overall

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/

Decades of deliberately unequal treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel have left them consistently economically disadvantaged in comparison to Jewish Israelis. This is exacerbated by blatantly discriminatory allocation of state resources: a recent example is the government’s Covid-19 recovery package, of which just 1.7% was given to Palestinian local authorities.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-03-12/ty-article/.premium/whats-new-in-the-citizenship-law-whats-the-next-step-in-fighting-it/0000017f-e938-d62c-a1ff-fd7b25010000

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/all-israelis-are-equal/

Discrimination by law:

At first glance it does seem that all citizens in Israel enjoy the same rights, they can all vote, for example, among many other rights granted by citizenship. However, after a more thorough look it becomes clear that this talking point is only held together by the omission of one very important fact:
Israel distinguishes between citizenship and nationality. For example, you can be a citizen of Israel but be a Druze national, or a Jewish national. Your nationality is determined by your ethnicity and it cannot be changed or challenged. But how is this relevant to the original question being discussed?
It is relevant because many of the rights you are accorded in Israel stem from your nationality not your citizenship. Meaning an “Arab” Israeli citizen and a Jewish Israeli citizen, while both citizens, enjoy different rights and privileges determined by their “nationality”. Seeing how Israel is an ethnocracy it is not a mystery who this system privileges and who it discriminates against [You can read more about this here].
This is not merely discrimination in practice, but discrimination by law. Adalah have composed a database of discriminatory laws in Israel that disfavor non-Jewish Israelis. For example, the Law of Return and Absentees’ Property Law are but two examples of flagrant racism and discrimination in the Israeli legal system [You can read more about this here].
This is not some old, odd oversight, but a very deliberate part of the design of Israeli society. This is periodically reinforced whenever some Israelis petition the Supreme Court to recognize an Israeli nationality that does not discriminate based on ethnicity. A recent example of these petitions was in 2013, where the Supreme Court rejected such an idea on the grounds that it would “undermine Israel’s Jewishness“.
It says quite a lot about Israel that a unifying egalitarian identity not based around ethnicity would “pose a danger to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people“, as the court ruled. The fact that such discrimination is seen as a cornerstone of Israeli society only reinforces its colonial ethnocratic nature, and undermines any claims to equality among citizens.

Discrimination in practice:

But this kind of discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg, as it only covers some aspects of de jure inequality among Israelis. Inspecting the de facto discrimination against non-Jewish Israelis shines an even brighter light on Israel’s ethnocratic hierarchy.
Almost half of all Palestinian citizens of Israel live under the poverty line, with a considerable percentage close to the poverty line. They also have a considerably lower life expectancy, a higher infant mortality rate, less access to education and resources as well as less municipality and government funding. Should you be interested in delving into some of the more detailed aspects of this discrimination, you can read Adalah’s The Inequality Report. It is an excellent overview of many issues facing Palestinians within the green line. Another report shining the light on Israel’s discrimination is “Discrimination against Palestinian Citizens in the Budget of Jerusalem Municipality and Government Planning: Objectives, Forms, Consequences” by the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute.
Additionally, you could read this report from the Adva center which illustrates quite clearly how this discrimination touches almost every aspect of life.
Furthermore, most land inside the green line is off limits to Palestinian citizens of Israel. A large percentage of land in Israel is under the control of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which has a:

“specific mandate to develop land for and lease land only to Jews. Thus the 13 percent of land in Israel owned by the JNF is by definition off-limits to Palestinian Arab citizens, and when the ILA tenders leases for land owned by the JNF, it does so only to Jews—either Israeli citizens or Jews from the Diaspora. This arrangement makes the state directly complicit in overt discrimination against Arab citizens in land allocation and use…”.

The JNF is not the only entity blocking Palestinian citizens of Israel from purchasing, leasing or renting land and property, but also the so-called regional and local councils, which account for the vast majority of land. These councils have the authority to block anyone from settling in these areas that do not seem like a “good fit” for the community there. For example, a religious community would not want to allow secular residents from moving in on the grounds that it would be against the spirit of their communities. In practice, this has translated into a virtual ban on non-Jewish Israelis moving into Jewish areas. In a Statement submitted by Habitat International Coalition and Adalah to the United Nations, it was estimated that almost 80% of the entire country is off limits to lease for Palestinian citizens of Israel. You can click here to read their full statement.
No matter how you look at it, Israeli society is a heavily segregated and hierarchical one. Whether through the legal system or just the attitudes of average Jewish Israelis, the ethnocratic nature of Israel and its obsession with ethnic gerrymandering always rises to the surface. Some would deny it, citing standards of living or some random “Arab” judge as a refutation of this point, but as discussed in [this article], none of these claims dispute the extreme inequality -by design- of Israeli society. This denial is not unique to Israelis, we saw similar sentiments among white Americans who denied the existence of white supremacy, even though they reaped its benefits either directly or indirectly.
Ultimately, the goal of this article is not to advocate for a “more just” or equal settler-colonial state. As Audre Lorde observed, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. A just society is the complete antithesis to an ethnocracy, which elevates one group of people over the rest by virtue of their blood. It falls on us, however, to advocate for decolonization and a new polity for everyone between the river and the sea, where justice is its cornerstone rather than ethnic supremacy.
Sound utopian?
Perhaps, but to quote Pliny the elder, how many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible, until they have been actually effected?

Naqab (Negev)

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

When referring to unrecognized villages in Naqab (Negev):

“Israeli law considers all buildings in these unrecognized villages to be illegal, and authorities have refused to connect most to the national electricity or water grids or to provide even basic infrastructure such as paved roads or sewage systems. The communities do not appear on official maps, most have no educational facilities”

1967 Palestine (officially occupied territory)

West Bank

Martial law vs. Civil law

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/

“Since the mid-1990s Israeli authorities have imposed increasingly stringent movement restrictions on Palestinians in the OPT. A web of military checkpoints, roadblocks, fences and other structures controls the movement of Palestinians within the OPT, and restricts their travel into Israel or abroad.
A 700km fence, which Israel is still extending, has isolated Palestinian communities inside “military zones”, and they must obtain multiple special permits any time they enter or leave their homes.”

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

“Several widely held assumptions, including that the occupation is temporary, that the “peace process” will soon bring an end to Israeli abuses, that Palestinians have meaningful control over their lives in the West Bank and Gaza, and that Israel is an egalitarian democracy inside its borders, have obscured the reality of Israel’s entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians. Israel has maintained military rule over some portion of the Palestinian population for all but six months of its 73-year history. It did so over the vast majority of Palestinians inside Israel from 1948 and until 1966. From 1967 until the present, it has militarily ruled over Palestinians in the OPT, excluding East Jerusalem. By contrast, it has since its founding governed all Jewish Israelis, including settlers in the OPT since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, under its more rights-respecting civil law.
For the past 54 years, Israeli authorities have facilitated the transfer of Jewish Israelis to the OPT and granted them a superior status under the law as compared to Palestinians living in the same territory when it comes to civil rights, access to land, and freedom to move, build, and confer residency rights to close relatives. While Palestinians have a limited degree of self-rule in parts of the OPT, Israel retains primary control over borders, airspace, the movement of people and goods, security, and the registry of the entire population, which in turn dictates such matters as legal status and eligibility to receive identity cards.
A number of Israeli officials have stated clearly their intent to maintain this control in perpetuity and backed it up through their actions, including continued settlement expansion over the course of the decades-long “peace process.” Unilateral annexation of additional parts of the West Bank, which the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to carry out, would formalize the reality of systematic Israeli domination and oppression that has long prevailed without changing the reality that the entire West Bank is occupied territory under the international law of occupation, including East Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally annexed in 1967.
International criminal law has developed two crimes against humanity for situations of systematic discrimination and repression: apartheid and persecution. Crimes against humanity stand among the most odious crimes in international law.”

Water

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occupation-of-water/

While restricting Palestinian access to water, Israel has effectively developed its own water infrastructure and water network in the West Bank for the use of its own citizens in Israel and in the settlements – that are illegal under international law. The Israeli state-owned water company Mekorot has systematically sunk wells and tapped springs in the occupied West Bank to supply its population, including those living in illegal settlements with water for domestic, agricultural and industrial purposes. While Mekorot sells some water to Palestinian water utilities, the amount is determined by the Israeli authorities. As a result of continuous restrictions, many Palestinian communities in the West Bank have no choice but to purchase water brought in by trucks at a much high prices ranging from 4 to 10 USD per cubic metre. In some of the poorest communities, water expenses can, at times, make up half of a family’s monthly income.
The Israeli authorities also restrict Palestinians’ access to water by denying or restricting their access to large parts of the West Bank. Many parts of the West Bank have been declared “closed military areas”, which Palestinians may not enter, because they are close to Israeli settlements, close to roads used by Israeli settlers, used for Israeli military training or protected nature reserves.
Israeli settlers living alongside Palestinians in the West Bank – in some cases just a few hundred meters away – face no such restrictions and water shortages, and can enjoy and capitalize on well-irrigated farmlands and swimming pools.
The resulting disparity in access to water between Israelis and Palestinians is truly staggering. Water consumption by Israelis is at least four times that of Palestinians living in the OPT. Palestinians consume on average 73 litres of water a day per person, which is well below the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommended daily minimum of 100 litres per capita. In many herding communities in the West Bank, the water consumption for thousands of Palestinians is as low as 20 litres per person a day, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). By contrast, an average Israeli consumes approximately 300 litres of water a day.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220706-israel-destroys-water-pipelines-in-occupied-west-bank/

Israeli forces destroyed water pipelines today in the village of Duma, in the occupied West Bank to the south of Nablus.The destruction is seen as being part of the apartheid state's efforts to control all water sources in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The head of the local council in Duma, Suleiman Dawabsheh, said that Israeli occupation forces escorted a bulldozer to the local spring and demolished the water infrastructure that the village council had set up, along with the fence that was built around it.
He added that this was the main water supply used by local Palestinians for their cattle. Moreover, he pointed out that the village has already been suffering from serious water shortages due to Israel's ongoing destruction of Palestinian land and infrastructure in the occupied territories. An effort by the council to have such destruction stopped by an Israeli court was to no avail, said the local official
Israel violates international law by destroying and pillaging water resources in occupied Palestine. It then uses stolen water to increase the supply to illegal Israeli settlements, which have a much higher demand and consumption rate. The state discriminates blatantly by not boosting or even protecting water supplies to Palestinian communities.
Dawabsheh noted that Israel's restrictions force Palestinians to buy water directly from the occupation state, even as it prevents them from constructing their own wells or engaging in other projects to enhance access to fresh water.

https://visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/west-bank-water

East Jerusalem

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

Former Mayor of Jerusalem’s words regarding East Jerusalem:

“In a 1990 interview with an Israeli newspaper, Kollek said: For Jewish Jerusalem, I did something in the past twenty-five years. For East Jerusalem? Nothing! What did I do? Nothing. Sidewalks? Nothing. Cultural institutions? Not one. Yes, we installed a sewerage system for them and improved the water supply. Do you know why? Do you think it was for their good, for their welfare? Forget it! There were some cases of cholera there, and the Jews were afraid that they would catch it, so we installed sewerage and a water system against cholera. [179]”

Palestinian neighborhoods of Shuafat and Beit Hanina have two playgrounds for population of 60,000, while nearby Jewish neighborhoods had a playground for every 1,000 residents.
The Jerusalem municipality in 2013 allocated only 10.1 percent of its municipal budget for projects and spending in Palestinian neighborhoods, according to the Israeli rights group Ir Amim, despite Palestinians making up about 37 percent of the city’s population at the time and paying taxes.[403] Ir Amim estimated in 2020 that Palestinians in East Jerusalem faced a shortage of 3,794 classrooms; while some shortages also existed in Jewish communities, in particular Orthodox communities, the group estimated that, by the end of 2022, “the classroom shortage in Jerusalem will be confined to the Arab sector alone.”[404] In addition, only 44 percent of Palestinians in East Jerusalem are connected to the water grid “in an orderly and legal manner,” according to ACRI, leaving many residents with limited supply.[405]
The discriminatory allocation of resources contributes to the starkly different realities faced by Palestinians and Jewish Israelis in Jerusalem. Seventy-two percent of Palestinian families live below the poverty line, as compared to 26 percent of Jewish families.[406] Despite this, the Israeli government maintains six welfare offices, or offices that provide information to residents looking to receive government aid or other services, in Palestinian neighborhoods, but 19 in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods.[407] Thirty-two percent of Palestinian students in East Jerusalem do not complete 12 years of education, as compared to 1.5 percent of Jewish students in Jerusalem.[408]

https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/gdsapp2012d1_en.pdf

Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem (which host 30 per cent of the city’s population) received only 11.72 per cent of the municipal budget in 2003 (Margalit, 2006) and 7 per cent in 2009 (ACRI, 2009). Data from the Israeli Interior Ministry show that Jerusalem has the highest rate of arnona among the 10 largest cities in Israel (Tzur, 2010). In 2009, Palestinians paid some 55 per cent of Jerusalem municipality arnona charged/owed (Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 2011), reflecting inter alia the preferential rates applied to Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem as part of government-sponsored settlement of the city.

https://www.ir-amim.org.il/sites/default/files/PL_Investment%20in%20East%20Jerusalem%20December%202014-2%2025%2015.pdf

While 37% of Jerusalem residents are in Palestinian neighborhoods, they only get 10% of the city budget
In some areas, this is even lower, and specifically in areas of cultural investment and youth support;

“Furthermore, in five different departments the Municipality’s relative investment is smaller than 5% of the budget. In the culture department, the share of investment is a mere 3.4%; in the sports department, 0.6%; in the welfare department, 4.2%; in the business promotion department, 1.5%; and in the youth promotion department, 2.5%. The scale of investment from the welfare department is astounding when considering the high poverty rates in East Jerusalem. So too is the percentage of investment in youth promotion—mainly targeting dropouts—considering the fact that East Jerusalem has a dropout rate of 13%, in contrast to the 1% dropout rate in West Jerusalem”

https://www.btselem.org/jerusalem

Palestinians in East Jerusalem are required to pay taxes like any other inhabitant of the city, but do not receive the same services that others do. The Jerusalem Municipality deliberately avoids significantly investing in infrastructure and services in the Palestinian neighborhoods – including roads, pavements, water and sewage systems, schools and cultural institutions. This policy affects almost every aspect of Palestinians’ lives in East Jerusalem. For example, Ir Amim estimates that as of 2017, there is a shortage of 2,557 classrooms in Palestinian neighborhoods, and about a third of the children do not complete twelve years of schooling. Only some 52% of the population in these neighborhoods has legal access to the water grid.
In addition, while Palestinians make up 40% of the Jerusalem population, the municipality runs only six family health centers in the Palestinian neighborhoods, as opposed to 27 centers in Jewish neighborhoods. The municipality also has only four social services offices in the Palestinian neighborhoods, as opposed to 19 in Jewish neighborhoods – although in the former, 76% of all residents and 83.4% of the children live below the poverty line.

https://www.dci-palestine.org/israeli_law_tears_palestinian_families_apart

There are potentially 10,000 unregistered children in East Jerusalem, which means they are exempt from a variety of social and education benefits. They are not able to obtain a driver's license or permits, and cannot legally seek employment. They live a life in limbo, without either Jerusalem or West Bank identification. This leaves thousands of Palestinians as stateless persons. Their future and security are precarious in the city.

https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israel-targets-palestinian-children-east-jerusalem-harsh

On November 3, the Knesset passed a series of amendments to the Israeli penal code and youth law. They imposed a 10-year prison sentences for throwing stones or other objects at moving vehicles with the possibility of endangering passengers or causing damage. Those convicted of throwing stones with the purpose of harming other would receive double the sentence. The amendments also reduced judicial discretion, instituting mandatory minimum sentences of no less than one-fifth of the potential maximum sentence and restricting suspended sentences to special circumstances only.
The Knesset also amended the national insurance law to deprive children convicted of “nationalistic-motivated” offenses and “terrorist activities” from social benefits during their imprisonment. It further allowed Israeli juvenile courts to impose fines on their families up to NIS 10,000 (US$2,580).
Addameer and DCIP are deeply concerned by these amendments and proposed laws aimed at Palestinian youth, and specifically children. While they should apply to Israeli Jews and Palestinians alike, in practice they discriminately target Palestinian residents of Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel. Previous policy changes affecting related offenses have applied almost exclusively to the Palestinian population. Israeli extremists and settlers on the other hand rely on their government to ignore their attacks against Palestinians. Israel’s record of seldom holding perpetrators accountable speaks for itself.

Gaza

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/

“In Gaza, more than 2 million Palestinians live under an Israeli blockade which has created a humanitarian crisis. It is near-impossible for Gazans to travel abroad or into the rest of the OPT, and they are effectively segregated from the rest of the world.”

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occupation-of-water/

“In Gaza, some 90-95 per cent of the water supply is contaminated and unfit for human consumption. Israel does not allow water to be transferred from the West Bank to Gaza, and Gaza’s only fresh water resource, the Coastal Aquifer, is insufficient for the needs of the population and is being increasingly depleted by over-extraction and contaminated by sewage and seawater infiltration.”

https://gaza.ochaopt.org/2015/07/the-gaza-strip-the-humanitarian-impact-of-the-blockade/

“The daily average of crossings by permit holders out of Gaza via the Israeli-controlled Erez Crossing in the first five months of 2015 stood at 449, more than double the same period of 2014, but less than 2% of the 26,000 daily crossings prior to September 2000 (second intifada).”
The Egyptian-controlled crossing (Rafah) has been continuously closed, including for humanitarian assistance, since 24 October 2014, except for 15 out of 219 days of partial openings, as of May 2015.
Kerem Shalom is the only commercial crossing currently operating, out of four such crossings prior to the imposition of the blockade.
Israel defines basic construction materials (gravel, steel bars, and cement), along with a wide range of spare parts, computer equipment, and vehicles, as “dual use” items, restricting their import.
Less than 1% of the construction materials required to rebuild houses destroyed and damaged during hostilities, and to address natural population growth, have so far entered Gaza (Shelter Cluster, June 2015).
408 truckloads of commercial goods exited Gaza via Israel in the first five months of 2015, an almost five-fold increase compared to the same period of 2014 (83), but only 7% of the volume in the equivalent period of 2007, prior to the imposition of the blockade (5,451 truckloads).
Access to areas within several hundred metres from the Israeli fence surrounding Gaza is risky or prohibited, discouraging or preventing farming activities.
Fishermen are allowed to access less than one third of the fishing areas allocated to them under the Oslo Accords: six out of 20 nautical miles.

https://visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/the-gaza-diet

Effects on Gazans

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/05/21/gaza-economy-on-the-verge-of-collapse

“The report estimates that Gaza’s GDP would have been about four times higher than it currently is if it weren’t for the conflicts and the multiple restrictions. It also states that the blockade in place since 2007 has shaved around 50 percent off Gaza’s GDP. Unemployment in Gaza is the highest in the world at 43 percent. Even more alarming is the situation of youth unemployment which soared to more than 60 percent by the end of 2014.”
“Gaza's population suffers from poor access and quality of basic public services such as electricity, water, and sewerage. Nearly 80 percent of Gaza’s population receives some kind of social assistance, and nearly 40 percent of them still fall below the poverty line. While shocking, these numbers fail to fully convey the difficult living conditions that nearly all Gaza’s residents have been experiencing.”

https://www.savethechildren.net/news/after-15-years-blockade-four-out-five-children-gaza-say-they-are-living-depression-grief-and

The research found the mental wellbeing of children, young people and caregivers has dramatically deteriorated since a similar study in 2018, with the number of children reporting emotional distress increasing to 80% from 55%. These findings again show that maintaining the current status quo is negatively impacting children’s wellbeing and hopes for a better future.
The report, titled “Trapped”, found a huge increase in children who reported feeling fearful (84% compared to 50% in 2018), nervous (80% compared to 55%), sad or depressed (77% compared to 62%) and grieving (78% compared to 55%). It also found that more than half of Gaza’s children have contemplated suicide[i] and three out of five are self-harming[ii] .
For the report Save the Children consulted 488 children and 168 parents and caregivers in the Gaza Strip in a repeat of similar research by the child rights organisation in 2018.
Caregivers described concerning behaviour in children and young people, with 79% reporting an increase in bedwetting over the past few years and 78% reporting that their children rarely completed tasks. About 59% said there had been an increase in children experiencing difficulties in speech, language and communication, including temporary reactive mutism, which is a symptom of trauma or abuse. All these behaviours have a huge immediate and long-term impact on the development, learning and social interaction of children, Save the Children said.
Caregivers are also experiencing higher levels of emotional distress, according to the report, with 96% reporting feeling unhappy and constantly anxious.

Rebutting dumb arguments

“There are Palestinians in parliament!”

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/israel-not-an-apartheid-state/

Firstly, it is important to establish what we mean with Apartheid. There is a widespread misconception that Apartheid refers solely to the case of South Africa. While it’s understandable that people think of South Africa when Apartheid is mentioned, it is critical to recognize that it was merely one manifestation of it, and that there were different regimes with different configurations which upheld the same system.
According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the crime of Apartheid is defined as follows:

“The crime of apartheid” means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime;”

There are many inhumane acts listed under paragraph 1, but the most relevant to our case are:

Deportation or forcible transfer of population.
Imprisonment and severe deprivation of liberty.
Persecution based on ethnic, religious or national origins.
Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

It is indisputable that Israel practices these acts against Palestinians, inside and outside of the green line. It is also indisputable that as a state built on a colonial ideology that privileges one ethnic group over the rest, its actions are ultimately committed to maintain this system of supremacy.
You will notice that nowhere in this description does it say that if you have a judge from the oppressed minority then it ceases being an Apartheid system. As a matter of fact, Nelson Mandela was a successful lawyer. The counter-argument that there are “Arab” judges or policemen ceases to be convincing when you realize that the system doesn’t need to be a complete carbon copy of South Africa to be counted as Apartheid.
Mentioning that there are “Arab” members of Knesset is also not as powerful a gotcha moment as Israeli advocates believe it to be, simply because there is a precedent of an Apartheid state having parliament members of the oppressed indigenous group. That precedent is Southern Rhodesia. Despite allowing a certain number of black parliamentarians, it was still a racist entity ruled by a white minority, with the very honest declared goal of maintaining itself as a white state.
As you have surely noticed I have been referring to “Arabs” in parenthesis, this is because most Palestinians living within the green line prefer to call themselves Palestinians, not merely Arab. Naturally, this is a threat to the Israeli narrative of the non-existence of Palestinians as a people [You can read more about this here], so even as they tokenize them in an attempt to prove their egalitarianism, they seek to simultaneously erase their actual identity.
So now that we have established the meaning of Apartheid, and that having a few members of the oppressed group in high profile positions is irrelevant to the definition, we can move onto the next part of our answer.
The argument that Israel does not practice apartheid hinges on one very crucial caveat: that we are distinguishing between Israel and the areas Israel rules. In practice, however, this distinction is functionally meaningless. (Even following this caveat, Israel itself is definitely not a democracy, at best it could be described as an ethnocracy [You can read more about this here]).
In practice, Israel rules everything from the river to the sea, it is the only sovereign power that runs the lives of all who inhabit this area. I know some of you will point to the Palestinian Authority, but in reality, the Palestinian Authority is relegated to the realm of administering occupied territories, without any real power, sovereignty or influence.
For example, the Palestinian Authority can’t even determine who a Palestinian citizen is. The citizen registry for Palestinians is under de facto Israeli control. Meaning that if a Palestinian marries a non-Palestinian, their spouse will never be able to gain Palestinian citizenship as Israel’s demographic obsessions would not allow for any preventable increase in the Palestinian population. Even Abbas needs to coordinate with the Israeli military to be able to visit other Palestinian cities, cities of a “country” he is supposedly president of.
In a watershed moment, B’Tselem, Israel’s largest human rights group recently released a report officially calling Israeli practices Apartheid, it argues that:

“Although there is demographic parity between the two peoples living here, life is managed so that only one half enjoy the vast majority of political power, land resources, rights, freedoms and protections. It is quite a feat to maintain such disfranchisement. Even more so, to successfully market it as a democracy (inside the “green line” – the 1949 armistice line), one to which a temporary occupation is attached. In fact, one government rules everyone and everything between the river and the sea, following the same organising principle everywhere under its control, working to advance and perpetuate the supremacy of one group of people – Jews – over another – Palestinians. This is apartheid.”

They continued:

“There is not a single square inch in the territory Israel controls where a Palestinian and a Jew are equal. The only first-class people here are Jewish citizens such as myself, and we enjoy this status both inside the 1967 lines and beyond them, in the West Bank. Separated by the different personal statuses allotted to them, and by the many variations of inferiority Israel subjects them to, Palestinians living under Israel’s rule are united by all being unequal.”
Indeed, the green line has long been invisible to Israelis, and Israel treats the settlements as parts of its own state. Why should we pretend otherwise? Why pretend that we’re talking about two governing bodies when the Palestinian Authority is a glorified bantustan administrator with no say about anything?

“Netanyahu is the problem”

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/netanyahu-is-the-problem/

Israel is a deeply racist, violent settler colonial state, with the racism serving as the justification for the settler colonialism:

Like all settler societies, Israeli society depends on the dispossession of the natives to exist. Consequently, extreme dehumanization of Palestinians is necessary to justify the war crimes frequently committed; after all, if Israelis viewed Palestinians as equally human, they wouldn’t be able to so easily brush aside the systems of oppression and domination they benefit from.
Decades of brainwashing and incitement against the native Palestinians are evident in the daily attitudes of the Jewish Israeli population. We’re not even talking about Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza Strip, but the Palestinians they refer to as “Arabs” who hold the same citizenship, and who are frequently tokenized to prove how egalitarian and democratic Israel is. For instance, 79% of Jewish Israelis believe they should get preferential treatment over “Arabs”. Half of Jewish Israelis believe that “Arabs” should be completely ethnically cleansed.
None of these sentiments are new, as an older poll from 2007 found that 75% of Jewish Israelis didn’t approve of living in the same apartment building with “Arabs”. Over a half of them considered marrying an “Arab” to be national treason. 55% were for open segregation, keeping ethnicities apart in entertainment sites. Half of Jewish Israelis wanted their government to encourage “Arabs” to emigrate, and a large portion (40%) wanted “Arab” voting rights revoked. Clearly, these racist views have only grown.
These attitudes are also intergenerational, and cut across ideology and demographics. Nearly two thirds of Jewish Israeli teenagers believe that “Arabs” are less intelligent, less cultured, and violent. This was during Ehud Olmert’s tenure as Prime Minister, and before Netanyahu’s long reign. Since then, these attitudes have remained, as today approximately half of the religious, and a quarter of secular Jewish teenagers in Israel are in favor or stripping “Arabs” of their nationality.
One of the most popular Israeli football teams, Beitar Jerusalem, is renowned for its racist slogans, chanting “may your village be burned” whenever going up against a team with any “Arab” players.
As you have surely noticed, we have been referring to “Arabs” in parenthesis; this is because most Palestinians living within the green line see themselves as Palestinian Arabs, not merely as Arabs. Naturally, this is a threat to the Israeli narrative of the non-existence of Palestinians as a people [You can read more about this here]. Even as they are tokenized in international Israeli propaganda efforts, their actual identity is denied and erased.

The “colonial left” is just as colonial:

None of these attitudes were created by Netanyahu, and none of them are unintentional or isolated phenomena. As mentioned earlier, they are part and parcel of Israel as a settler colony. Naturally, a colonial society will also produce a colonial “left”, and even a colonial “peace” movement. This was exemplified by Yitzhak Rabin, who many Israelis consider to be a dove and peace-maker. The issue, of course, is that Rabin was a notorious war criminal responsible for many atrocities against Palestinians. One of them was the policy of breaking the bones of any Palestinian arrested during the first Intifada, and another was signing the order for the ethnic cleansing of Lydda and starting the infamous Lydda death march.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes in Lydda, and forced to march to Ramallah in a single file. No water or aid was given, and hundreds died on the way. Chilling testimonies from the survivors evoke genocidal massacres committed by imperialist forces all over the globe:

“While marching in the blazing heat, he [Shammut] spotted some water. He rushed to fill a pot he was carrying. He later recalled: “At that moment, a jeep pulled up with three people. One of them, a Zionist officer, got out. He pulled a gun and put it to my head and ordered me to put the water down.” The Arab teenager had no choice but to obey. Ismail would never forget the thirst of the thousands of people who trudged on, not knowing where they were going. He saw people chewing grass in the hope of obtaining a bit of moisture. Others drank their children’s urine. By the roadside pregnant women were prematurely delivering babies, their labour brought on by the strain of their ordeal. None of these infants survived. Since no one had any opportunity to bury the dead, they were covered with grass and abandoned. Eventually Ismail managed to get some water out of sight of the Israeli soldiers. Although the water was dirty and obviously polluted he drank some while soaking his clothes in the reddish liquid. As Ismail attempted to return to his family, people followed him hoping to get a few drops of the precious fluid. One woman sucked at his moist shirt.”

Even this supposed “dove” never agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state, but a “state-minus” with no real sovereignty [you can read more about this here]. Ultimately, the debate on the “peace” process in Israeli society was not a disagreement over the subjugation of Palestinians, but over what form it would take. Even this was considered a step too far, and Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli, with his supporters often referred to as “leftist traitors”.

Israel’s murder of Palestinians

The scale

https://visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/timeline-of-violence

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/politics/547-children-killed-in-israels-2014-war-on-gaza-ngo/28029

2160 Palestinians were killed during the 51-day indiscriminate assault by Israel of Gaza in 2014, with 547 children among the killed:

A total of 547 Palestinian children were killed during last year’s Israeli military onslaught against the Gaza Strip, an international rights group devoted to children’s welfare said Wednesday.
“We independently verified the deaths of 547 Palestinian children among those killed in Gaza [by the Israel offensive], 535 of them as a direct result of Israeli attacks,” Defense for Children International-Palestine said in a recent report.
The report said that the Israeli military had committed grave violations against children that amounted to war crimes, including the direct targeting of children by Israeli aerial drones and attacks on schools and residential areas.
“Israel, the world’s largest exporter of aerial drones, killed 164 children in drone strikes during the offensive,” the NGO said.
The report also pointed out that not a single Israeli politician or military official had been held to account for the deaths, adding that “systemic impunity” had allowed the self-proclaimed Jewish state to continue its oppressive policies against children in Gaza.
In July and August of last year, Israel carried out a weeks-long offensive against the Gaza Strip with the ostensible aim of staunching rocket fire from the blockaded coastal enclave.
Over 2,160 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed – and some 11,000 injured – in the onslaught, which finally ended with an August cease-fire deal.

On the other hand, only 73 Israelis were killed. 68 of them were soldiers. ONLY 5 were civilians.

Ceasefire violations

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/2/22/what-a-period-of-calm-looks-like-in-the-occupied-territories/

Ceasefire violations in the aftermath of the 2012 Israeli war on Gaza:

Three months have passed since the ceasefire that brought an end to Israel’s eight-day attack on the Gaza Strip known as Operation “Pillar of Defence”. Since late November, Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have averaged over one a day, everyday. These include shootings by troops positioned along the border fence, attacks on fishermen working off the Gaza coast, and incursions by the Israeli army.
This fits with a familiar and disturbing pattern, where a regional “period of calm” is exclusively defined in terms of attacks on Israelis. “Calm” from this perspective means security for Israelis – but more dead and injured Palestinians.
Second, data of this nature lay bare the daily reality for Palestinians and the power imbalance between the occupier and an occupied, colonised people fighting for their basic rights. It is instructive that the Israeli army refers to the entry of its forces into the Gaza Strip as “routine activity”. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers continue to snatch Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank, enforce segregation, and protect settler land theft. We have included numbers for Palestinians killed and wounded in the West Bank over this same period because developments there and in Gaza ought not to be viewed as isolated from one another.
Third, if or when there is another assault by Israel on the Gaza Strip, the Israeli government and many in the West will seek to emphasise the “rockets” narrative once again. So remember this data, and note what the Israeli army has been doing when – in the words of Israel’s own consul general in Los Angeles – “for the last three months, there hasn’t been a rocket fired from Gaza”.

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/infographic-who-violates-ceasefires-more-israelis-or-palestinians

The aims of Israeli bombings

Dahiye doctrine (deliberate killing of civilians)

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/palestinians-use-human-shields/

There is plenty of evidence that Israel deliberately targets civilians:

Fortunately, these investigations into the supposed Palestinian use of human shields tend to backfire on Israel, and have historically produced a wealth of literature showing how often Israel targets civilians far removed from any combat context. Amnesty International reported that

“In the cases of precision missiles or tank shells which killed civilians in their homes, no fighters were present in the houses that were struck and Amnesty International delegates found no indication that there had been any armed confrontations or other military activity in the immediate vicinity at the time of the attack.”

This is not in error, and is in fact by design. The destruction of non-military infrastructure and incurring massive losses in civilians is a deliberate policy followed by the IDF. This policy has come to be known as the Dahiya doctrine, where it was first practiced in the Dahiya area of Beirut.
Gadi Eizenkot was quoted as saying that:

“We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.”

This is a direct admission that Israel sees civilian areas as military targets, now the only thing that remained was finding a way to justify it. This is where the human shields accusation comes in. And in the end when the war is over, the fact that no evidence is ever presented, or that various organizations exonerate the accused is forgotten, and the smears remain, and contribute to justify the same inhumane actions in any future conflagration.

https://mondoweiss.net/2018/02/justifies-slaughter-civilians/

The Israeli chief of staff who came up with the idea said explicitly that it was aimed at “harming the population” — the slaughter of civilians– so as to make Israel’s non-state opponents think twice about taking on Israel (yes, including with terrorist attacks).

“[This will] happen in every village from which shots were fired in the direction of Israel. We will wield disproportionate power against [them] and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases. […] This isn’t a suggestion. It’s a plan that has already been authorized. […] Harming the population is the only means of restraining Nasrallah.”

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/israel-s-dahiya-doctrine-a-plan-for-mass-civilian-deaths-in-gaza-46709

“But muh Hamas human shields!”

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/palestinians-use-human-shields/

No evidence that Hamas in Gaza uses human shields:

If the use of human shields was so wide as to cause hundreds upon hundreds of dead Palestinian civilians, then surely there would be a reporter or an observer on the ground that could have caught a whiff of it. But reporters on the ground could find no trace of such a supposedly widespread action, Jeremy Bowen of the BBC wrote that he found no evidence of the use of human shields while he was covering the assault on Gaza. Similarly, Kim Sengupta writing for the Belfast Telegraph interviewed Palestinians in Gaza and unsurprisingly came to a similar conclusion: Hamas was not forcing anybody to be a human shield, counter to Netanyahu’s claims.
But perhaps these reporters were missing something, let us consult an organization which specializes in these matters. Fortunately for us, Amnesty international released a detailed report of its investigation into the matter. In their report they indicate that:

“The Israeli authorities have claimed that in a few incidents, the Hamas authorities or Palestinian fighters directed or physically coerced individual civilians in specific locations to shield combatants or military objectives. Amnesty International has not been able to corroborate the facts in any of these cases.”

So, it seems that the Israeli claims have no basis in reality, and are just a way to demonize Palestinians and legitimize their indiscriminate bombardment of civilians. This is hardly the first time Israel has used this accusation to delegitimize their enemies. For example, in the 2006 war against Lebanon Israel accused Hizballah of using human shields. Unsurprisingly, investigations by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch similarly found no evidence.
The same accusations were also hurled at Palestinians during the great march of return when Israeli snipers killed Palestinian nurse Razan Al-Najjar while she was tending to the injured. Naturally, no evidence was provided other than a clearly doctored video in an attempt to defame her.

Israel ACTUALLY uses human shields

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/palestinians-use-human-shields/

Israel is actually the one that uses human shields; Palestinian human shields:

Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of this accusation is that it is a case of pure projection on part of Israel. Israel has been notorious in its use of Palestinians as human shields. As a matter of fact, many of these same reports investigating the Palestinian use of human shields found that it was actually Israel that was using Palestinians as human shields. For example, they would force Palestinian civilians to check houses for traps, or handle suspicious objects, or tie them to military vehicles to discourage stone throwing.
Even a simple search reveals hundreds of cases of Palestinians being used as human shields. This is not a case of a few bad apples, but of rampant and widespread behavior. In fact, using Palestinians as human shields was so popular that when the Israeli high court attempted to outlaw the practice the IDF actually appealed to have the decision reversed.
I would further argue that not only does Israel use Palestinians as human shields, but also its own population when it uses them to settle and colonize areas beyond the green line. They are directly put in danger as a sacrifice to Israel’s expansionist colonial designs, which they can then blame on Palestinians to further accelerate this same project.
So not only is the Palestinian use of human shields a myth lacking any evidence, it is in fact Israel who is infamous for using human shields in its oppression of the Palestinians. Examples of this are incredibly easy to find even with the most rudimentary of research. Like much Israeli propaganda, it seeks to turn reality upside down and accuse the Palestinians of the crimes that Israel so often commits. This is a prime example of baseless dehumanization that many eagerly embrace because they have come to internalize a demonized image of Palestinians based on Israeli propaganda.

Rainbow-washing

Greenwashing

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/israel-made-the-desert-bloom/

http://links.org.au/node/2956

https://www.cjpme.org/fs_210

The claim that Palestine was an empty desert that Israel “made bloom” is false, because:

Almost all of the northern half of Palestine has a Mediterranean climate. [v]
When Zionist settlers arrived in Palestine in the decades before the creation of the state of Israel, the land was inhabited by the Palestinian people, most of whom were farmers. [vi]
Palestinians have cultivated the land for centuries. Palestinian agriculture was sustainable and the “fertility of Palestine was unsurpassed”.[vii] By 1930, all areas “which could be cultivated by Palestinians, were already farmed by them”[viii]. The areas of Gaza, Jaffa, Hebron, Nablus, Galilee, and others were all “intensively cultivated” and became reputed for different crops, such as watermelons, tobacco, wheat, citrus, grapes, olives, and cotton.[ix] Palestine was blooming long before the founding of Israel.

There are a number of ways in which Israel is clearly not environmentally friendly:

Israel has one of the biggest per capita ecological footprints and carbon footprints in the world, ranking in the top 10% and 20% respectively.[x] [xi] Israel is a major contributor to climate change.
Israeli agriculture is “not sustainable, and contributes significantly to the growing environmental crisis on our planet”[xii]. For example, Israel uses pesticides widely which contaminate ground water and soil and cause harm to certain bird species.[xiii]
Especially in the West Bank, Israel has waged a “massive, systematic destruction” of trees. It has uprooted hundreds of thousands of trees to date, including olive, citrus, date, almond, and banana[xiv]. Protected by the Israeli army, Israeli colonizers of Palestinian land often attack Palestinians farmers and burn or bulldoze their trees.[xv]
Israel is one of the top 20 weapon exporters and importers in the world, underlining Israel’s role as a major contributor to warfare.[xvi] According to the UN Rio Declaration, “warfare is inherently destructive of sustainable development”.[xvii] Indeed, the war industry causes 6-10% of air pollution and 10-30% of the total environmental damage worldwide.[xviii] For example, in Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza, Israel needlessly shelled Gaza’s only power plant, [xix] igniting two million liters of diesel fuel for no reason, severely polluting the air.[xx]

While the JNF claims to have had large successes with forestation, combating desertification, rehabilitating forests, and preventing forest fires,[xxv] the JNF has actually done the opposite:

The JNF has frequently destroyed the native environment in the name of development. In the 1950s, for example, it drained Israel’s largest wetlands to gain land for agriculture. As a result, some species went extinct.[xxvi]
While the JNF boasts it has planted over 240 million trees, the vast majority of trees the JNF planted were non-native trees.[xxvii] While the impact of this decision is still being understood, it is known that needles from such trees kill native plants and that these non-native trees are more flammable than native species.[xxviii] Meanwhile, JNF forests were found to be “ecologically impoverished”, as they greatly reduced biodiversity.[xxix]
JNF plantations accelerated desertification. The JNF planted trees in the Negev desert, which absorbed water and heat, causing overheating and “a local effect of climate change”.[xxx]
Aytzim, a New York-based organization which also engages in greenwashing for Israel admits: “[the JNF] had a blemished record on the environment throughout its history".[xxxi]

Forests deliberately hiding ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages

https://www.cjpme.org/fs_210

The Jewish National Fund (JNF) is an organization which enables Israel’s ongoing colonization of Palestine and helps greenwash Israeli crimes. The JNF was founded in 1901 to acquire land in Palestine for Jewish-only use. Despite its racially-based mandate and its involvement in settler-colonial projects, the JNF deceptively depicts itself as an environmental charity, procuring charitable status in many countries – including Canada.[xxii] For example, the JNF plants trees over destroyed Palestinian villages to conceal evidence of the ethnic cleansing carried out by Israeli forces. .[xxiii] To date, 86 destroyed Palestinian villages are buried under JNF forests.[xxiv] The JNF thus uses environmental policy, like tree planting, as a tool to greenwash Israel’s destruction of Palestinian villages.

Pinkwashing

Pinkwashing is the use by Israel of LGBT language to push forward its own agenda. By associating itself with progressive causes, it tries to, well, Pinkwash itself. This way, no one pays attention to its ongoing erasure of Palestinian identity. In fact, Israel even tries to act like it’s a savior for queer Palestinians, even as it tries to erase their identity. Video explaining how Israel does this by Jewish Voice for Peace.

https://decolonizepalestine.com/rainbow-washing/pinkwashing/

Amazing article on the subject. Quite long, so I won't paste it like I usually do. Here are the highlights:

Gives us the background on how Pinkwashing as a concept works
Then, shows us the Pinkwashing in action:

Israeli prime minister Netanyahu in a joint meeting of the U.S Congress declared that the Middle East is “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted. Israel stands out. It is different.” Missing from this narrative, of course, is how Israel profits from the very persecution he describes through Israeli spyware being used to crackdown on dissidents, including queer people.
However, what is significant here is how the “Israeli Arabs” were spoken about, rather than to. Similarly, StandWithUs’s previously mentioned advertisements which declared Tel Aviv, a “gay paradise” for Palestinians has nothing to do with what’s best for Palestinians at all. After all, as Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) have pointed out, “there is no pink door in the apartheid wall”. Queer Palestinians, like all Palestinians, live under the control of a state that has deemed them demographic threats, obstacles in the way of a Jewish State by and for Jews. Most Palestinians have never set foot in Tel Aviv for this reason, and in general Israel prioritizes ethnicity and demographics above all else, including asylum cases.
These statements and advertisements are meant to accomplish the following goals: (1) Israel being absolved of its colonial and military policies which has resulted in the loss of countless Palestinian lives. (2) Israel being contextualized by the Middle East but ceasing to be located there; Israel should be judged according to ‘regional standards’ while also being treated as a cultural outpost of Europe (which they get to be! Tickets to see Israel in Eurovision, anyone?)

The article then goes on to show how Israel is a “profoundly queerphobic society” itself
It even talks about Israel deliberately targetting queer Palestinians, blackmailing them. Here is part of that text which I think is very important to show:

Here it is worthwhile to delineate how Israel also draws upon racialized homophobia and transphobia in its abuse of Palestinians. This includes the blackmailing of queer Palestinians, with a former Israeli Intelligence corps member sharing that in training to disregard Palestinians’ privacy and manipulate their personal lives for Israeli state interests, “we actually learned to memorise and filter different words for ‘gay’, in Arabic.”
Even more horrifically, there are detailed accounts from Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails of verbal and sexual harassment which use homophobia and transphobia as a threat. One 16 year old described a police officer as telling him that “‘I will fuck you and you will sing on my dick’ as part of his threats. Another 23 year old recounted how an Israeli secret service member shouted “you terrorist, I’ll fuck you like a homosexual!”, while another in a separate report described being harassed by an interrogator who asked “Are you a homosexual? You look like a woman. Have you ever fucked a woman?”. Still another detainee described how they were threatened with having their brother undergo a sex change against their will, saying “They put me in an investigation room with a glass partition and on the other side I saw my brother, dressed as a woman, immodest, in a mini-skirt. […] They said that they […] had arranged for him a sex-change surgery in Jerusalem.”
These are not isolated cases, as Israel’s extensive use of sexual harassment and assault as a form of torture against Palestinians are well documented. The reasons for this are betrayed even in the very report most of the aforementioned testimony was drawn from, with the author declaring that “Sexual torture and ill-treatment, including forced nudity and curses with sexual contents, may have particularly deep and sometimes long-lasting humiliating effects among Arab men. This is grounded in the notion of honour, which is basic in social life in much of the Muslim world.” Here the author is taking for granted the idea that Arab and Muslim men (though here he is using the terms interchangeably) are more sensitive to being sexually harassed and assaulted than their western counterparts. He seems to, whether subconsciously or not, believe that the perpetrators of these acts are comparatively enlightened rather than perpetuating the old use of sexual violence against men in armed conflicts and the concurrent bigoted dynamics of emasculation, feminization and/or homosexualization as insult.

http://www.alqaws.org/articles/Beyond-Propaganda-Pinkwashing-as-Colonial-Violence?category_id=0

Palestinian LGBT rights org explaining Pinkwashing. Here is the first part of that text

Over a decade ago, Palestinian activists adopted the term “pinkwashing” to describe how the Israeli state and its supporters use the language of gay and trans rights to direct international attention away from the oppression of Palestinians. Israeli travel guides and promotional videos advertise Tel Aviv beaches as a gay-friendly getaway destination—and hide the reality that tourist partygoers are dancing atop the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages. The open inclusion of gay officers in the Israeli occupation army is used as proof of liberal forward-mindedness, but for Palestinians the sexuality of the soldier at a checkpoint makes little difference. They all wield the same guns, wear the same boots, and maintain the same colonial regime.
Pinkwashing emerged as part of an ongoing international propaganda effort, which aims to rebrand Israel as a liberal and “modern” state in the face of the growing Palestine solidarity movement. By promoting cities like Tel Aviv as gay tourism destinations, Israel’s foreign ministry seeks to win the support of queer communities across the world and prevent international connections with the Palestinian struggle. Crucially, the promotion of “gay-friendly Israel” depends on presenting Palestinians (and Arabs more generally) as the exact opposite: sexually regressive and therefore undeserving of solidarity. These stereotypes draw on the long history of efforts to demonize Palestinian narratives and resistance using political strategies anchored in anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.
The early years of anti-pinkwashing activism focused on identifying and combating efforts to hide the reality of Israeli colonialism and apartheid behind a smokescreen of queer-friendliness. However, as anti-pinkwashing campaigns and theories progressed, activists in alQaws realized that the term “propaganda” could not capture the true scope of pinkwashing. While pinkwashing often appears to the world as a global marketing strategy, it is ultimately an expression of Israel’s deeper gender and sexual politics and the ideological foundations of Zionism.
Pinkwashing is the symptom, settler-colonialism is the root sickness. Recognizing pinkwashing as colonial violence can help us understand how Israel divides, oppresses, and erases Palestinians on the basis of gender and sexuality.

Pinkwashing is not just propaganda in the service of Israeli settler colonialism. It is itself settler colonialism. It seeks to psychologically disempower Palestinians by dividing them “internally and psychologically, in the personal realms of self-perception and collective identification.”:

Pinkwashing pushes the racist idea that sexual and gender diversity are unnatural and foreign to Palestinian society. When this idea is internalized within Palestinian communities, it alienates queer and gender non-conforming Palestinians and isolates them as a social group. These compounding social pressures tell queer Palestinians that they must give up on some part of their identity or experience: we can either be queer and not accepted as a Palestinian, or we can be Palestinian and not accepted as queer. The destructive effects of internalized pinkwashing reverberate throughout Palestinian communities, strengthening myths that associate queer Palestinians with Israeli collaborators or Westernized native informants and propagating feelings of hopelessness that narrow our political imaginaries.
Pinkwashing is also a disempowering framework: if gender and sexual oppression are an essential part of what it means to be Palestinian, then there is no way to challenge or change it. At no point can queer Palestinians be regarded as radical agents of transformation within our own society. Instead, pinkwashing compels queer Palestinians to interpret their experiences and pain through the lens of victimhood and powerlessness, which contributes to the broader disempowerment and suppression of all Palestinians under colonial domination.
When queer Palestinians are spoken about by Israel’s defenders, it is only to paint a portrait of individual victimization that reinforces a binary between Palestinian backwardness and Israeli progressiveness. These portrayals suggest that Palestinian society suffers from pathological homophobia, and that no dissenting voices could ever survive for long within it. Pinkwashing tells queer Palestinians that personal (and never collective) liberation can only be found by escaping from their communities and running into their colonizer’s arms. The pervasive myth of Palestinians finding “queer refuge” in Israeli cities flies in the face of the actual policies of the colonial state, which are premised on the exclusion and destruction of Palestinians—queer, trans, or otherwise. The fantasy of Israeli humanitarianism falls apart as soon as the colonial situation is taken into account. There is no “pink door” in the apartheid wall.

Palestinians are descendants of the ancient jews

Posted by u/Astro880

I think genetics are very interesting but ultimately they don’t really matter that much but I keep hearing “pAleStiNians aRen’t nAtIve tO tHe lEvAnt” so I decided to make this post citing multiple studies.

Biogeographical mapping of Levant populations

The Palestinians were also highly localised to North Israel, West Jordan and Syria

All these areas are in the levant, oh and yes, ISRAEL too

both Syrians and Palestinians are highly localised to the Levant.

Syrians, Palestinians and most of the Lebanese, who exhibit a high affinity to the Levant.

SOURCE: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5111078/]

We propose that the Y chromosomes in Palestinian Arabs and Bedouin represent, to a large extent, early lineages derived from the Neolithic inhabitants of the area

Thats like 10,000 BCE to 6,500 BCE!

Our recent study of high-resolution microsatellite haplotypes demonstrated that a substantial portion of Y chromosomes of Jews (70%) and of Palestinian Muslim Arabs (82%) belonged to the same chromosome pool

SOURCE: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1274378/]

“According to historical records part, or perhaps the majority, of the Muslim Arabs in this country descended from local inhabitants, mainly Christians and Jews, who had converted after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century AD (Shaban 1971; Mc Graw Donner 1981). These local inhabitants, in turn, were descendants of the core population that had lived in the area for several centuries, some even since prehistorical times (Gil 1992)... Thus, our findings are in good agreement with the historical record...

Source: High-resolution Y chromosome haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs reveal geographic substructure and substantial overlap with haplotypes of Jews

PDF link: [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/tcgapdf/Nebel-HG-00-IPArabs.pdf]

According to a study published in June 2017 by Ranajit Das, Paul Wexler, Mehdi Pirooznia, and Eran Elhaik in Frontiers in Genetics, "in a principle component analysis (PCA) [of DNA], the ancient Levantines clustered predominantly with modern-day Palestinians and Bedouins..."[138]

In a study published in August 2017 by Marc Haber et al. in The American Journal of Human Genetics, the authors concluded that "The overlap between the Bronze Age and present-day Levantines suggests a degree of genetic continuity in the region."

The bronze age of the levant was 3500-1150 BCE much before the conquests by Arabs!

Palestinians are closely related to many Jewish populations as well:

When compared only to the European and Middle Eastern, non-Jewish populations (Bedouins, Druze, Palestinians), each of the Jewish populations formed its own distinctive cluster, indicating the shared ancestry

the closest genetic neighbors to most Jewish populations are the Palestinians, Bedouins, and Druze.

Source: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3032072/]

Also a lot of the Muslim population in Nablus are probably descendants of Samaritans

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritans]

Much of the local Palestinian population of Nablus is believed to be descended from Samaritans, who had converted to Islam.[70] According to the historian Fayyad Altif, large numbers of Samaritans converted due to persecution under various Muslim rulers, and because the monotheistic nature of Islam made it easy for them to accept it.[70] The Samaritans themselves describe the Ottoman period as the worst period in their modern history, as many Samaritan families were forced to convert to Islam during that time.[72] Even today, certain Nabulsi family names such as Al-Amad, Al-Samri, Maslamani, Yaish, and Shaksheer among others, are associated with Samaritan ancestry.[70]

Here is also a result from a Palestinian mytrueancestry.com result which was shared by u/CDRNY :

https://m.imgur.com/a/Sm4KNPr

As you can see the results clearly confirm what I linked earlier, for example on the ancient PCA it clusters very closely towards Megiddo late bronze age, and Tel Megiddo is in Northern Israel, on the last image it shows there is shared dna with a levantine man from the neolithic times in 4200 BC which confirms what I also linked above, as well as the closest ancient populations being canaanites and on the sample breakdown almost all of it is the canaanites.

I’ll be updating this post as newer studies come out, I’m trying to find if there’s any genetic connection with Palestinians and the Natufians who inhabited the levant during the Epi paleothic times, however for now we do know that a large amount of Palestinian ancestry comes from the canaanites.

and if any one here took a dna test u can upload it to [https://mytrueancestry.com] to find ancient ppl whom u share dna with and are closest too genetically.

Additional resources

Destroying insane arguments

“Hamas uses human shields!”

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/palestinians-use-human-shields/

No evidence that Hamas in Gaza uses human shields:

If the use of human shields was so wide as to cause hundreds upon hundreds of dead Palestinian civilians, then surely there would be a reporter or an observer on the ground that could have caught a whiff of it. But reporters on the ground could find no trace of such a supposedly widespread action, Jeremy Bowen of the BBC wrote that he found no evidence of the use of human shields while he was covering the assault on Gaza. Similarly, Kim Sengupta writing for the Belfast Telegraph interviewed Palestinians in Gaza and unsurprisingly came to a similar conclusion: Hamas was not forcing anybody to be a human shield, counter to Netanyahu’s claims.
But perhaps these reporters were missing something, let us consult an organization which specializes in these matters. Fortunately for us, Amnesty international released a detailed report of its investigation into the matter. In their report they indicate that:

“The Israeli authorities have claimed that in a few incidents, the Hamas authorities or Palestinian fighters directed or physically coerced individual civilians in specific locations to shield combatants or military objectives. Amnesty International has not been able to corroborate the facts in any of these cases.”

So, it seems that the Israeli claims have no basis in reality, and are just a way to demonize Palestinians and legitimize their indiscriminate bombardment of civilians. This is hardly the first time Israel has used this accusation to delegitimize their enemies. For example, in the 2006 war against Lebanon Israel accused Hizballah of using human shields. Unsurprisingly, investigations by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch similarly found no evidence.
The same accusations were also hurled at Palestinians during the great march of return when Israeli snipers killed Palestinian nurse Razan Al-Najjar while she was tending to the injured. Naturally, no evidence was provided other than a clearly doctored video in an attempt to defame her.

On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that Israel deliberately targets civilians:

Fortunately, these investigations into the supposed Palestinian use of human shields tend to backfire on Israel, and have historically produced a wealth of literature showing how often Israel targets civilians far removed from any combat context. Amnesty International reported that

“In the cases of precision missiles or tank shells which killed civilians in their homes, no fighters were present in the houses that were struck and Amnesty International delegates found no indication that there had been any armed confrontations or other military activity in the immediate vicinity at the time of the attack.”

This is not in error, and is in fact by design. The destruction of non-military infrastructure and incurring massive losses in civilians is a deliberate policy followed by the IDF. This policy has come to be known as the Dahiya doctrine, where it was first practiced in the Dahiya area of Beirut.
Gadi Eizenkot was quoted as saying that:

“We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.”

This is a direct admission that Israel sees civilian areas as military targets, now the only thing that remained was finding a way to justify it. This is where the human shields accusation comes in. And in the end when the war is over, the fact that no evidence is ever presented, or that various organizations exonerate the accused is forgotten, and the smears remain, and contribute to justify the same inhumane actions in any future conflagration.

Israel is actually the one that uses human shields; Palestinian human shields:

Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of this accusation is that it is a case of pure projection on part of Israel. Israel has been notorious in its use of Palestinians as human shields. As a matter of fact, many of these same reports investigating the Palestinian use of human shields found that it was actually Israel that was using Palestinians as human shields. For example, they would force Palestinian civilians to check houses for traps, or handle suspicious objects, or tie them to military vehicles to discourage stone throwing.
Even a simple search reveals hundreds of cases of Palestinians being used as human shields. This is not a case of a few bad apples, but of rampant and widespread behavior. In fact, using Palestinians as human shields was so popular that when the Israeli high court attempted to outlaw the practice the IDF actually appealed to have the decision reversed.
I would further argue that not only does Israel use Palestinians as human shields, but also its own population when it uses them to settle and colonize areas beyond the green line. They are directly put in danger as a sacrifice to Israel’s expansionist colonial designs, which they can then blame on Palestinians to further accelerate this same project.
So not only is the Palestinian use of human shields a myth lacking any evidence, it is in fact Israel who is infamous for using human shields in its oppression of the Palestinians. Examples of this are incredibly easy to find even with the most rudimentary of research. Like much Israeli propaganda, it seeks to turn reality upside down and accuse the Palestinians of the crimes that Israel so often commits. This is a prime example of baseless dehumanization that many eagerly embrace because they have come to internalize a demonized image of Palestinians based on Israeli propaganda.

“There’s no room!”

There’s plenty of room. In fact, if all current Palestinians and Israelis, both Palestinians within Historic Palestine and in the diaspora, moved back, there would be 20 million people within Historic Palestine. Historic Palestine has a size of 26,323 km2. Together, this makes 750 per square kilometer. This is not much more than Lebanon’s 667 people per square kilometer, the Netherlands' 508 people per square kilometer, or South Korea’s 527. It’s also much less than Bangladesh’s 1200 people per square kilometer. This is not to speak of the many city-states, like Singapore or Hong Kong. This is simply not an argument.

This is also an unrealistic scenario. In reality, not all Palestinians would want to move back. In addition, just as with South Africa, many Israelis would move to other countries. The real population density would therefore be lower. Out of a population of 4.1 million white South Africans in 1977, 800k have emigrated as of 2016. If we apply this sort of statistics to our situation, a little under a quarter of the 6.8 million Israeli Jews currently living in Historic Palestine would leave. Without accounting for Palestinians who might not want to return, we therefore already get a population density of 695 people per square kilometer.

“Promised land!”

“Palestinians sold the land!”

https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/15208/1948%20Ethnic%20Cleansing%20of%20Palestine.pdf;sequence=2

The zionist project was not able to purchase a significant portion of land, in spite of its best efforts:

“Despite the JNF’s best efforts, its success in land acquisition fell far short of its goals. Available financial resources were limited, Palestinian resistance was fierce, and British policies had become restrictive. The result was that by the end of the Mandate in 1948 the Zionist movement had been able to purchase no more than 5.8 percent of the land in Palestine.”

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/palestinians-sold-their-land/

“Land without a people!”

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/a-land-without-a-people-for-a-people-without-a-land/

https://www.cjpme.org/fs_007

1878 Ottoman population census

The census figures didn’t include Bedouins (likely numbering over 100,000[4]) and foreign subjects (i.e. individuals with foreign citizenship, without Ottoman residency status) of which there were about 10,000 Jews.

British census for 1922-1931 data and other estimates for 1932-1944 data:

Reminder that Muslims, Christians, and some “others” (Druze, Samaritans) all fall under the Palestinian category.

“Recent migrants!”

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/palestinians-were-economic-migrants/

Explains why the myth that Palestinians were recent economic migrants arriving after the zionists is insane, and then goes on to WHY the myth exists.

While by no means the first to put forward this myth, it was greatly popularized by Joan Peters in her book From Time Immemorial, where she attempted to empirically “prove” this, by inspecting population records from various sources. Needless to say, that at the time it was a smash-hit among Zionists in the United States.
The book was such naked, unsubstantiated propaganda that Noam Chomsky thinks it was probably put together by some intelligence agency, with Peters merely signing her name onto it.
Peter’s main argument is that the growth of the Palestinian Arab population was not natural, and was rather the result of some secret migration that was somehow left undocumented. This is done mainly through a tortured twisting of her sources and purposefully omitting qualifiers and any data which contradicts her assertion.
Naturally, I am not the first to write about Peter’s manipulation of sources and bad faith interpretation of data, nor will I be the last. I will not list in this article every single inconsistency or error in Peter’s writing, as that would probably take a book in itself. Thankfully, this work has already been done for us, and you can browse detailed breakdowns of Peter’s work in the “Further reading” section. Perhaps the best known debunking of Peter’s book comes from Norman Finkelstein, who meticulously documented the problems in detail. For example, Finkelstein uses this claim to illustrate the way Peter’s manipulates quotes and data:
Peters “relies” on Carr-Saunders World Population to present the claim that:

“Medical and sanitary progress has made little headway among the Palestinian Arabs as yet, and cannot account for any considerable fall in the death-rate.”

However, if you are as diligent as Finkelstein, and check the source being relied upon, it paints quite a different picture:

“Medical and sanitary progress, so far as it affects the personal health and customs, has made little headway among the Palestinian Arabs as yet, and cannot account for any considerable fall in the death-rate. But general administrative measures, in the region of quarantine, for example, have been designed in the light of modern knowledge and have been adequately carried out. Measures of this kind can be enforced almost overnight. … Therefore we can find in these administrative changes, brought about by the British occupation of Palestine, what is in any case a tenable explanation of the natural increase of population among Arabs.”

That is to say, that medical and sanitary progress in the personal health and customs had not yet made headway, however, implemented administrative measures such as quarantines and other measures had been implemented and is seen by Carr-Saunders as a likely explanation for the decrease in death rates.
Notice how dropping the important signifier, and removing the information from its original context completely flipped the conclusions of the paragraph. This practice is repeated often throughout the entire book. Another method used to inflate numbers to support her argument, is to suggest that any evidence of something is but “the tip of the iceberg” to quote Finkelstein. She asserts that since the British turned a blind eye to Arab illegal immigration, then only the most flagrant cases were actually deported. That means that for every reported deportation of an Arab immigrant from Palestine, there must have been many others whose conduct was not so flagrant as to be deported. Naturally, she arrived to the conclusion that the British turned a blind eye to Arab immigration through tortured manipulation of data, similar to the example shown above.
It should be noted that this myth was difficult to argue even when it first emerged. For example, the Anglo-American Survey of Palestine in 1946 concluded that:

That each [temporary migration into Palestine] may lead to a residue of illegal permanent settlers is possible, but, if the residue were of significant size, it would be reflected in systematic disturbances of the rates of Arab vital occurrences. No such systematic disturbances are observed. It is sometimes alleged that the high rate of Arab natural increase is due to a large concealed immigration from the neighbouring countries. This is an erroneous inference. Researches reveal that the high rate of fertility of the Moslem Arab woman has remained unchanged for half a century. The low rate of Arab natural increase before 1914 was caused by:

(a) the removal in significant numbers of men in the early nubile years for military service in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, many of whom never returned and others of whom returned in the late years of life; and (b) the lack of effective control of endemic and epidemic diseases that in those years led to high mortality rates.
There is also ample evidence that her sources are often outright false or fabricated, for example Anthony Lewis brings up how Peters cites a report by the Institute for Palestine Studies which”…found that 68 percent of the Arabs who became refugees in 1948 ‘left without seeing an Israeli soldier.”’ Lewis informs us, that the report “was actually about refugees in the 1967 war, and the percentage was of just 37 refugees who were studied.” Other sources are utterly useless and unreliable, such as the journals and hearsay of random European travelers to Palestine, which we’re supposed to believe over a century of population and census data.
Fortunately for us, the love affair with this book did not spread outside the United States. As a matter of fact, it was severely panned by critics in the United Kingdom, and even failed to find traction in Israel itself, with Israeli academics and historians calling it nonsense.
Unfortunately for us, the book is still widespread in the United States, and has received multiple reprints, even today and after its thorough debunking, it still maintains a 4.5 out of 5 star rating on Amazon and other online book retailers.
At the risk of repeating myself, but as always, propaganda does not care for facts, but for political utility, and in this case, it is naked to see that the political message is all that matters. I find it difficult to believe that all these “esteemed” reviewers somehow managed to miss all the issues apparent with the book. Sadly, this belief is reinforced by the fact that even when the problems with the book were made apparent, barely any of these reviewers recanted their position. Even Elie Wiesel, who was made aware of the problems early on never recanted his support for the book, choosing to remain silent instead, as his blurb, praise and name continued to be printed in each subsequent edition of the book. I would have liked to remind the late Mr. Wiesel that silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented, but I suppose he always did have a blind spot for Palestinian torment.
Ultimately, Peters’ book was relegated to the dustbin of history, at least in academia. It is exceedingly difficult to quote from this book and be taken seriously as a scholar. However, the pseudo-scientific illusion of empiricism that undergirds her writing still animates many dehumanizing myths regarding Palestinians to this day.
Peters fabricates, misrepresents and cherry-picks her way through hundreds of pages in an attempt to deny the existence of the Palestinian people and absolve Israel of its original sin. Her attempts have been, and will remain unsuccessful. The truth tends to find a way, if not now, then in the future, and as the popular saying goes: “You can’t cover the sun with a sieve”.

“They left on the orders of Arab leaders!”

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/palestinians-left-based-on-arab-orders/

Arab leaders did not tell Palestinians to evacuate:

First, we must consider the magnitude of the Arab League or the Arab Higher Command evacuating an entire people. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people living in hundreds of communities from the Jalil to the Naqab. This is by no means a simple or brief task. It is very difficult to imagine an order of such scale not leaving behind a trace of some sort. There must have been some mention -even if in passing- of the orders telling the Palestinians to leave. Furthermore, orders such as these do not materialize suddenly, there must have been a preceding process where the decision was taken. These meetings or debates would surely be reflected in some minutes somewhere, right?
The answer is a resounding “no”, because no decision of the sort ever came from these sources. Historian Walid Al-Khalidi reviewed every press release of the Arab league, where every critical announcement was made without a trace of such orders. Not content with official pronouncements, he then examined the minutes of the meetings of the Arab League General Assembly from the relevant periods, there was still no trace of an evacuation order. Determined to be as thorough as possible, he then went through the minutes of the Iraqi Parliamentary Committee which was formed after the 1948 war to report to King Faisal on the causes of the Arab defeat. Once again, zero evidence was found to suggest such orders existed.

In fact, just the opposite; they told them to stay:

However, Khalidi’s research revealed that on the 8th of March 1948, a memo circulated by the Arab Higher Command urged the heads of all Arab governments not to grant entry permits to Palestinians, except for a few exceptions. It also requested that residence permits not be renewed for Palestinians already living in the Arab countries. This was animated by the logic of having as many Palestinians as possible in Palestine to help defend their homeland. This seems to directly contradict Zionist claims on the matter. How could the Arab states order Palestinians to leave their country but at the same time not allow them to?
If these orders exist, then I’m confident that the various newspapers across the Arab world would surely mention them in some form. Perhaps in a passing comment, or even an opinion piece somewhere? Not even once.
But do you know what this foray into these newspaper archives revealed instead? That there were frequent mentions of not allowing Palestinians of military age to enter various Arab countries. There were also some calls for sending back Palestinian refugees fleeing the violence which sometimes bordered on demonization.
For something that supposedly exists -according to Israel- these orders have been incredibly hard to pin down. If anything, the deeper we investigate the matter, the more obvious it becomes that the Arab states did not want Palestinian refugees within their borders, let alone the entirety of the Palestinian people.
Perhaps radio broadcasts could shed some light on this matter, for if such an order existed the radio would be the fastest and most efficient way to broadcast it. Luckily for us, there are ways to investigate this, and British researcher Erskine Childers has already done the investigation for us:

“The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948. The records, and companion ones by a United States monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum. There was not a single order or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine, from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is a repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put.”

Indeed, there are multiple occasions where not only were Palestinians told to stay put and not leave their lands, but that they would suffer punishment should they abandon their houses and flee.
Furthermore, had the Palestinians chose to voluntarily leave their villages, then the brief first or second truces in the fighting would have been ideal opportunities to do so. It is worthy of attention that during those periods, not only did Palestinians stay put in their villages, those who had been expelled earlier attempted to return to their original communities, and were greeted by Israeli gunfire.
All the empirical evidence lies in stark contradiction to the Israeli talking point. There is absolutely no proof to even begin entertaining this as a main cause for the exodus of the Palestinians. To this day, there has not been a single citation, or a shred of paper pointing to such blanket orders. Not one radio station has been named, or even a date given for when these alleged orders were broadcasted. They are a complete fabrication with little basis in reality. It is not a coincidence that no specificities are given when this talking point is employed.

Where did this myth originate?

There is no definite answer to this, but scholars suspect a certain Dr. Joseph Shechtman being responsible. Shechtman, an American revisionist Zionist, authored multiple pamphlets in 1949 where this myth gained prominence for the first time. These pamphlets were full of quotations and references to such orders from Arab newspapers, however, after inspection these cited news items simply did not exist. Many of these fabricated quotes are still passed around by pro-Israel advocates as “indisputable proof”, even though they are never able to produce the actual primary source, not to mention that most of them wouldn’t be able to read them had they they even existed.
Notwithstanding, this is not to say that there weren’t specific local exceptions to this. In a few select cases, Arab armies deemed the evacuation of civilians to neighboring villages as the best course of action for their safety. This, however, was exceedingly rare. Out of approximately 530 Palestinian communities that were ethnically cleansed, only 5 had their residents leaving due to precautionary evacuations. That is to say, less than 1%. It is therefore incredibly intellectually dishonest to suggest that Arab orders were a main cause of the Palestinian diaspora, or that a blanket evacuation order was ever issued.
Nevertheless, for the sake of argument, had such an evacuation order been issued, and had every single Palestinian chosen to heed them, this would still not justify Israelis blocking refugees from returning home after the war under the threat of death. This would still not justify the methodical destruction of hundreds of villages and covering them with forests to hide these crimes. Although this argument is a blatantly unsubtle attempt to shift responsibility for Zionist war crimes onto the Palestinians and Arabs, it still does not address the main point: Palestinian refugees possess a right of return no matter how they became refugees in the first place.

“There were no Palestinians, only Arabs!”

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/palestinian-identity-is-fake/

The ridiculousness of this myth:

Attempts to erase the indigenous population is a staple of virtually all settler colonial contexts. This erasure can be physical such as through genocide or ethnic cleansing, or through ethnocide which aims to destroy their culture and remove them from public memory. This erasure aims to justify the colonization of land, and delegitimize any claims by the indigenous population who might object to it. Palestine is no exception to this.
The claim that there is no such thing as a Palestinian identity, or that it was invented in 1967 -solely as a means to destroy Israel- is quite popular among Israelis and Zionists. What strikes us as humorous is not that these claims are made, on the contrary, every settler population tries to erase indigenous ties to the land [You can read more about this here]. No, what we find funny is that in typical colonist fashion they cannot conceive of an indigenous history that does not in some way center them, it is as if all Palestinian history is just a reaction to Zionist aspirations.
So how exactly did Palestinian identity develop?
First of all, it is important to situate this discussion in its proper context. Nationalism has become so greatly ingrained in our conception of society that it is sometimes difficult to imagine that this is a relatively modern phenomenon. People think of states as so natural and static that it can be challenging to see them as imagined and invented communities.
As a matter of fact, in the case of France, for example, concentrated measures were taken to force the French peasantry to start identifying with the emergent French nation state. This necessitated great indoctrination, suppression of many local cultures and left behind many casualties. Some have even described it as a process of colonization of rural France by the urban centers.
It is important to understand that all nationalisms are at some point made up. In this sense, all nationalisms are “fake”, they are not a natural occurrence. They are fluid, fragile and ever-changing. Take for example national identities such as “Italian” or “German”. These national identities are very recent, barely coming into existence at the end of the 1800s. Yet, nobody claims that Germans or Italians are a “fake” people, despite their national identity not existing 200 years ago. Throughout history, peoples have often changed how they identified politically. The Sardinians eventually became Italians, Prussians became Germans. It is understood that the people who would later become German did not appear from a distant land to take over the territory that is today Germany, but are the same people who inhabited it and called it home, even if under different names at different times.
The ideologically driven impulse to imagine our ancestors as some closed-off, well-defined, unchanging homogeneous group having exclusive ownership over a territory that somehow corresponds to modern day borders has no basis in history. Unfortunately, this is the basis of many reactionary ethno-nationalist ideologies.
It is also worth recognizing that the vast majority of nation states in the global south did not exist 100 years ago. None of this implies that the people who inhabit them today are foreign transplants, as is frequently alleged against Palestinian identity and nationalism.

The roots of Palestinian identity:

The roots of contemporary Palestinian identity have been outlined in many works, but we believe that Rashid Khalidi’s wonderful book, Palestinian Identity, has one of the more exhaustive and detailed explorations of the subject. According to Khalidi, Palestinian national identity can be traced back to Ottoman times, but it arguably started crystallizing in its modern form during the WW1 period. It is important to keep in mind that nationalism as a whole first touched the region around that period. While the mandatory period did see a rise of Palestinians identifying with the idea of a greater Arab nation, this did not preclude regional Palestinian identity and sense of belonging. It is not a contradiction to identify both as an Arab and a Palestinian, as was the case for many.
There are multiple elements that coalesced to create this proto-Palestinian identity, first of which was the significant religious attachment to Palestine as a holy land by the people living there. Of course, Palestine has been an important religious nexus throughout history, but this feeling of attachment was particularly strong among those living there. Another element is the distribution of Ottoman administrative boundaries and the special status afforded to Palestine. According to Khalidi:

“from 1874 onwards, the sanjaq of Jerusalem, including the districts of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Beersheeba, Gaza, and Jaffa, was a separate unit administered independently from any other Ottoman province.“

Previously, Jerusalem was the capital of the larger province (Vilayet) of Palestine (Filastin) which includes the vast majority of what is now considered Palestine.
A third element is the fierce local loyalties and attachments, especially in the larger cities. Khalidi dubbed this “Urban Patriotism”. Nabulsis, Gazans, Jerusalemites, etc. all took pride in their cities and their local histories. Evidence of this can be seen in Palestinian family names, such as “Al-Nabulsi” (of Nablus) or “Al-Khalili” (of Hebron) and many other cities, towns and villages. With modernization and the spread of transport, communication, education, and notions of nationalism throughout the region, this local attachment evolved to include areas outside of the direct city or town and came to resemble what we understand today as nationalism more closely.
It is important to emphasize that all of this preceded any encounter with Zionism. This is important to understand, because there is a common assertion that Palestinian identity grew as a consequence of Zionist colonialism of Palestine, even though no such claim is made for the neighboring countries which all developed identities and nationalisms of their own. It is worth noting, however, that for Palestinians, the Zionists were yet another imperial or colonial force in a history full of such forces, be it the Ottomans who the Palestinians rebelled against, the British, or any other.
However, this does not mean that Palestinian identity was not influenced at all by its encounters with European or Zionist colonialism. For example, Najib ‘Azuri, and in response to Zionist goals in Palestine, wrote in 1908 that the progress of “the land of Palestine” depends on expanding and raising the status of Jerusalem.
Evidence of early Palestinian identification and attachment to the land is abundant. One need not look only at some of the larger indicators, such as the founding of the Filastin (Palestine) newspaper in Jaffa in 1911, but also at the smaller ones, such as a group of Palestinian immigrants to Chile founding a football club and naming it Deportivo Palestino in 1920. That’s pretty impressive for an identity that allegedly did not exist!
This talking point becomes even more egregious when you consider how hard Israel has worked to co-opt and appropriate Palestinian identity and cultural markers, such as the Kuffiyeh, Dabkeh and even Palestinian cuisine [You can read more about this here]. It simultaneously seeks to sever the ties of the indigenous people to the land while stealing indigenous identity markers in an attempt to self-indigenize its settler population. Ultimately, all these claims aim to whitewash the crimes committed against Palestinians by implying that they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, that they do not belong, and that the settlers are more worthy of the land.
But even if you swallow this premise wholly, and come to internalize it. What then? Does the national identification (or lack thereof) of the Palestinians mean that they were legitimate targets for ethnic cleansing? Even if we accept the ridiculous and false premise that the Palestinians were “just Arabs” without a distinct national identity, how does this justify the destruction of hundreds of villages and the subjugation of millions?
It doesn’t, and it can’t.
From the onset, this talking point is not only racist, but highly ineffectual if followed to its logical conclusion. Palestinians exist, and would have existed regardless of Zionism or any other colonial power. No amount of revisionist and ideological twisting of history can erase that.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160229164114/http://blog.palestine-studies.org/2016/02/18/who-was-the-first-palestinian-in-modern-history/

People in Palestine were already calling themselves Palestinians in 1898. So much so, and securely enough, that a geographical area of Palestine existed, and a people called Palestinians existed, for an author to mention them in passing.

“It was here that Baydas realized that “the people of Palestine were in need of a geography book about their country,” in his words. So at age 24 he translated the archeologist A.A. Olesnitskii’s A Description of the Holy Land from Russian to Arabic in 1898. “The current Arabic language geography books on the topic have come up short.” This book is “a description of the land of Palestine.””

https://libgen.fun/book/index.php?md5=B77D107C21937B2B24065B7B11236805

Palestinian national consciousness was so high that in the middle of 1912, there already existed a newspaper with the name “Falastin” (arabic for “Palestine”), calling the people living there Palestinians, and calling for the unity of all Palestinians!

“Falastin, which was on its way to becoming the foremost anti-Zionist paper, informed its readers, in its issue of 28 August 1912, that active immigrants own thirty colonies or villages, that immigration is proceeding at a terrific pace and that Hebrew will become the official language of the country someday. The Zionists have advanced schools and numerous important newspapers and have powerful societies backing them. The article concluded by exhorting the Arabs of Palestine to wake up to prevent a catastrophe before it is too late. Three days later the same paper called for the unity of all Palestinians to combat the Zionist danger.” (pages 28-29)

Later on June 29th 1913, the Newspaper Falastin had this to say:

“On 29 June, Falastin hinted that what Palestine, ‘the beloved nation’, needed was the bliss of independence but that ‘we dare not spell it out’. The same issue carried an article contributed by a reader in which he emphasised that words cannot stand in the face of finance, science, zeal and national solidarity of the Zionists. Only action can stand in the face of action. The writer suggested the establishment of a national Palestinian land company financed by a group of wealthy Palestinians to buy lands that were not under cultivation and to exert pressure on the government to confine cultivated land sales to peasants. He concluded by calling for unity and co-operation to defend the country.” (page 30)

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/the-name-palestine-was-a-roman-invention/

“The UN created Israel!”

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/the-united-nations-created-israel/

Mainstream discourse on the question of Palestine is anything but straightforward. The history has often been portrayed in a selective and deceiving manner, where half-truths and misconceptions reign supreme. This becomes exceedingly clear when discussing the origins of the Palestinian struggle and how Israel came to be established in the first place. A rather persistent myth surrounding this is the claim that the United Nations established the state of Israel.
It is not very difficult to understand why this claim has been so enduring; it would lend legitimacy to the creation of Israel, and frame it as a result of global consensus in full accordance with international law. There are, however, some fairly major flaws with this talking point.
By 1947, partitioning Palestine was not a novel idea. There had already been multiple proposals and plans drafted by various parties going back to at least 1919. Some were more brazen than others in their disregard for Palestinians and their rights, while others made a half-hearted attempt to reconcile the well-being of the Palestinians with the fact that they were about to lose the majority of their country to newly-arrived settlers.
I do not wish to delve into the specifics of the 1947 partition plan, nor analyze it from a practical or moral perspective [You can read more about this here]. Rather, this article is more concerned with the claims surrounding the UN and the persistence of the myth that it established Israel, particularly through UNGA resolution 181.
To be clear, UNGA resolution 181 simply did not partition Palestine. It was in fact, a partition plan, which was to be seen as a recommendation, and that the issue should be transferred to the Security Council. But don’t take our word for it, we encourage you to read the actual resolution and see if you arrive at the same conclusions. The resolution does not in any way obligate the people of Palestine to accept it, especially considering the non-binding nature of UNGA resolutions.
For its part, the Security Council attempted to find a resolution based on the UNGA recommendation, but could not arrive at a consensus. Many arrived at the conclusion that the plan could not be enforced. Israel was unilaterally declared by Zionist leadership by force while the Security Council was still trying to arrive at a conclusion. The plan was never implemented.
However, there is an argument that although the plan never came to fruition, the UNGA recommendation to partition Palestine to establish a Jewish state conferred the legal authority to create such a state. As a matter of fact, this can be seen in the declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel.
This argument falls flat on its face when we take into account that the United Nations, both its General Assembly as well as its Security Council do not have the jurisdiction to impose political solutions, especially without the consent of those it affects. There is nothing in the UN charter that confers such authority to the United Nations. Indeed, this was brought up during discussions on the matter.
Warren Austin, the US representative at the Security Council stated that:

“The Charter of the United Nations does not empower the Security Council to enforce a political settlement whether it is pursuant to a recommendation of the General Assembly or of the Security Council itself […] The Security Council’s action, in other words, is directed to keeping the peace and not to enforcing partition.”

Furthermore, not only would this be outside the scope of the United Nations’ power, it would as a matter of fact run counter to its mandate. This was even brought up by The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine itself:

“With regard to the principle of self-determination, although international recognition was extended to this principle at the end of the First World War and it was adhered to with regard to the other Arab territories, at the time of the creation of the ‘A’ Mandates, it was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there. Actually, it may well be said that the Jewish National Home and the sui generis Mandate for Palestine run counter to that principle.”

This is a direct admission that the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine runs counter to the principle of self-determination for Palestinians already living there. The United Nations needed to twist itself into a knot and make an exception to their own charter to recommend the partition of Palestine. Despite these efforts, the United Nations did not manage to partition Palestine, and even if it did it would be void due to it not being within its powers.
Furthermore, the selective nature of Israeli appeals to the UN are quite well-documented. In this instance, the UN is touted as the supreme arbiter of justice and international consensus, but the moment it decrees anything bearing on Israeli interests, or criticizing its violation of international law, it is suddenly a cowardly, corrupt organization intent on spreading antisemitism. An organization that is framed as a source of legitimacy is instantly discarded when it becomes inconvenient.
So no, Israel was not established through the United Nations. Israel was established through warfare and the creation of facts on the ground. Facts it created through the massacre of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of villages [You can read more about this here]. This is how the modern state of Israel came into the world, and no amount of sophistry or euphemization can lend that any legitimacy.

“Israel was an underdog in 1948!”

https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/israel-was-outnumbered-and-outgunned-in-1948-war/

This shows that it absolutely was not an underdog, and that the myth that it was is founded on nothing but wishful thinking

History of Palestine (work in progress)

Other historiographies:

https://decolonizepalestine.com/introduction-to-palestine/

Prehistory

Palestine has a long and varied history. With the city of Jericho, this settlement is confirmed to go back to 9000 BC. It is the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world.

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/12211496/S0959774300001815a%202.pdf?sequence=2

Bronze age (3000 BC-1200 BC)

By 3000 BC, what we would call Caananite city-states had cropped up in Palestine.

Iron age (1200 BC-600 AD)

Early Islamic Era

Ottoman Rule

British Colonial Rule

Zionist Settler Colonial Rule

Situation Today

Other materials and resources

Table of contents

Explaining Settler Colonialism (Writing in Progress)

Indigeneity (Writing in Progress)

Zionism is a settler colonial project

The ideology itself

Openly settler colonial

Contemporary - nothing has changed

There is no “leftist”/”liberal” zionism

The Kibbutzim are not socialist nor good — they are settler colonial entities

Israel is just like South Africa

Similarity in ideology

Cooperation with South Africa

Israel Helps Genocide Indigenous Groups In Other Places

Nuclear cooperation

Afrikaners becoming Israeli settlers after the end of apartheid

Current South African stance

Zionism is anti-semitic

Zionism and the global far right (contemporary and historical)

Myth of Palestinian “Rejectionism”

Additional resources

Israel never wanted peace

1967 war

Nakba

Overview

Additional resources

The Nakba was pre-planned

Results

The Nakba did not start in 1948, and is still ongoing

The Nakba was not started by war, but by direct expulsion at the hands of zionists

Rebuttals to criticism

Benny Morris

Pappe

Ongoing Colonization

Right of return

Other laws

In all of Historic Palestine

Within 1948 Palestine (Israel)

Overall

Galilee

Naqab (Negev)

1967 Palestine (the officially occupied territories)

Overall

Numbers of settlers and settlements

Annexation

West bank

The legality of settlements

Overall picture

Settlement expansion

Evictions, demolitions and lack of permits

Israeli PR stunts and use of permits against Palestinians

PR for image

It’s a right, not a favor

Ghettos (bantustans)

East Jerusalem

Gaza

Settlements

Gaza is still occupied

Colonization outside of Palestine

Golan heights

Sinai

Apartheid

Apartheid which applies to all of Historic Palestine

Overall

ID cards

Movement

Roads

Anti-miscegenation laws

Family seperation

Within 1948 Palestine

Overall

Naqab (Negev)

1967 Palestine (officially occupied territory)

West Bank

Martial law vs. Civil law

Water

East Jerusalem

Gaza

Effects on Gazans

Rebutting dumb arguments