Ten Myths About Israel

2024 Preface: Decontextualizing and Dehistoricizing Gaza

The Hamas operation al-Aqsa Flood on October 7 and the brutal Israeli retaliation, the War of Swords, present an appropriate, be it terrible, moment to revisit the Ten Myths about Israel.

What began with a successful military operation to breach the ghetto wall of the Strip, allowing for the occupation of military bases and the capturing of soldiers, deteriorated into a set of atrocities and war crimes committed by the Hamas fighters themselves or by Gazan citizens who followed them. They entered the Jewish settlements near the Strip and killed many revelers at a huge party near the Gaza border. It is estimated that among the 1,200 killed on that day about 300 were IDF soldiers.

Israel retaliated with a genocidal attack on the Gaza Strip that, at the time of writing, has claimed more than 35,000 lives, one third of them children.

In tandem with the battle on the ground, a battle of narrative broke out as well. I would call it a clash of pretext and context. By context, I mean both the historical and moral foundations of the events that unfolded in the last months of 2023. It is this area where the present book will be most helpful for readers.

On October 24, UN secretary-general António Guterres stated that while he condemned in the strongest possible words the massacre committed by Hamas on the morning of October 7, he wished to remind the world that these actions did not take place in a vacuum. He explained that one cannot dissociate fifty-six years of occupation from our understanding of the tragedy that unfolded on that day. The Israeli reaction was instantaneous: the government demanded his resignation and claimed he supported Hamas and condoned the massacre inside Israel.

This Israeli reaction is closely connected to one of the myths described is this book, the equivalence drawn between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. It demonstrates that a new allegation of anti-Semitism is now in play. Until October 7 the most expansive definition of both anti-Semitism and holocaust denial included criticism of the state of Israel and any questioning of its moral basis. Now, the boundaries of the definition are being pushed out even further. Contextualizing and historicizing Palestinian actions, which are what this book is all about, have become evidence of anti-Semitism and, in some countries, a reason to be indicted for justifying terrorism.

The dehistoricization of these events provides a pretext for governments to pursue policies they shunned in the past out of ethical, tactical, or strategic considerations. Thus, the attack on October 7 is used as a pretext for Israel to pursue genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip. It is a pretext for the United States to reassert its presence in the region after years of absence, and it is a pretext for some Western countries to violate and limit democratic freedoms in the name of a new war on terror.

This historical decontextualization also exposed a mismatch between the messages of support and solidarity for Israel coming from Western governments and the way Israel interprets these messages. While they may have been intended to express compassion, they were understood as Western absolution for any past Israeli violations of international law and of basic Palestinian rights, giving carte blanche for the continuation of the massive assault on Gaza.

As this book shows, the historical context goes further back than the one described by the secretary-general of the UN. In fact, we can return to the mid-nineteenth century, when evangelical Christianity turned the idea of the return of the Jews into a religious, millennial imperative and advocated the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as one step on the path to the resurrection of the dead, the return of the Messiah, and the end of time.

Theology became policy toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the years leading to the World War I for two reasons. It suited those in Britain who wanted to dismantle the Ottoman Empire and incorporate parts of it within their empire, and it resonated with those within the British aristocracy—Jews and Christians—who had become enchanted with the idea of Zionism as a remedy for anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe (which had also produced an unwelcome wave of Jewish immigration to Britain). When these two interests fused, they propelled the British government to issue the famous, or infamous, 1917 Balfour Declaration.

The trajectory from an obscure theological vision to a political project matured that year. Jewish thinkers and activists who redefined Judaism as nationalism hoped this definition would protect Jewish communities from existential danger in Europe by honing in on Palestine as the desired space for the rebirth of the Jewish nation.

In the process, the cultural and intellectual Zionist project was transformed into a settler colonial one intent on Judaizing historical Palestine, regardless of the presence of a distinct indigenous population. This myth that Zionism is not colonialism is also an important part of this book, which provides a detailed analysis of the difference between classical colonialism and settler colonial movements such as Zionism.

A close cousin to that myth is the mythical assertion that the Palestinian resistance movement to the settler colonial project of Zionism is terroristic rather than anticolonialist in nature. But Palestinian society—pastoral and in an early stage of modernization and the associated construction of a national identity—produced its own anticolonial movement. Its first significant action against the Zionist colonization project was in 1929, and it has not ceased since.

A more recent historical context, relevant to the present crisis, is the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which included the forced relocation of Palestinians to the Gaza Strip from villages on whose ruins some of the Israeli settlements attacked on October 7 were built. These uprooted Palestinians were among the 750,000 who lost their homes and became refugees and who had until 1948 lived in more than 500 villages and a dozen towns. The myths of the Nakba are also an important part of this book, which compares the mythology with a reality founded on academic and professional research.

The world knew about this ethnic cleansing but did not condemn it. As a result, ethnic cleansing remained part of Israel’s arsenal, utilized to ensure that it retains the land that used to be historical Palestine with as few of the native Palestinians residing there as possible. Evidence of this includes the expulsion of 300,000 Palestinians during and in the aftermath of the 1967 War and the expulsion of more than 600,000 from the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip in the years that followed.

In the last fifty years, the long-term occupation of the West Bank has seen hundreds of thousands of Palestinians imprisoned or interned without trial at one time or another in their lives; they have been exposed to collective punishment and settler harassment, robbed of any say in their future. Since the election of the fundamentalist messianic Israeli government in November 2022, all these harsh policies have reached unprecedented levels in terms of the number of Palestinians killed, wounded, and arrested. To top it all, the new government rolled out an aggressive new policy towards Christian and Muslim holy places in Jerusalem.

And then there is the historical context of the siege of nearly two decades that followed Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005. This was, very much like the Oslo Accords, presented as a generous Israeli gesture, while in practice it was a ploy for a different kind of occupation, as is detailed in this book, which pierces the mythology around Oslo.

In 2020, the UN warned that the siege was neither sustainable nor humane. It is important to remember that the siege was imposed in response to democratic elections among the people of the Strip, who, after the unilateral Israeli withdrawal, preferred Hamas to the Palestinian Authority for its next government. It is even more important to go back to 1994, when Gaza was already encircled by barbed wire and disconnected from the West Bank, denied that organic link to Palestinian territory in a way that defeated the very idea of a future two-state solution. That happened a year after the signing of the Oslo Accords meant to bring peace on that two-state basis. The fence and the increased Judaization of the West Bank were a clear indication that Oslo in the eyes of the Israelis was occupation by other means rather than a genuine gesture toward peace.

Israel controlled the exit and entry points to the Gaza ghetto, monitoring the kind of food (at times even the number of calories), the goods, the medicine, and basic commodities of life allowed inside. Hamas reacted by launching rockets aimed at civilian areas in Israel, a response Israel claimed stemmed from an ideological desire to kill Jews, as if Hamas was an extension of Nazism, disregarding the context of both the Nakba and the inhuman and barbaric siege of 2 million people and the oppression of their compatriots in other parts of historical Palestine.

Hamas in many ways was the only Palestinian group promising to avenge or respond at all to these policies. Although it is clear now its response may bring its own demise, at least in the Gaza Strip, and provide a pretext for further oppression. The savageness of some of Hamas’s actions cannot be justified in any way, but that does not mean they cannot be explained and contextualized.

As horrific as it was and as barbaric as is the Israeli reaction to it, the bad news is it is not a game-changing event despite the huge human cost on both sides. Israel will remain a state established by a settler colonial movement—a history that still influences its political DNA and determines its ideological nature, as the first part of this book illustrates. This means that despite its self-framing as the only democracy in the Middle East, another myth examined in this book, it will remain a democracy only for its Jewish citizens.

There is an internal struggle inside Israel between what one can call the State of Judea (the settler state that would have Israel more theocratic and racist than ever) and the State of Israel (wishing to retain the status quo). This tension preoccupied Israel until October 7 and will erupt again; in fact there are already signs of its return.

Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International that have defined Israel as an apartheid state will find no reason to recategorize the nation, however events unfold in Gaza and elsewhere. The Palestinians will not disappear and will continue their struggle for liberation, with many civil societies in the world siding with them, while their governments continue to back Israel and provide it with an exceptional immunity.

The way out will be the same—a change of regime, with equal rights for everyone from the river to the sea, and the return of the refugees—otherwise the cycle of bloodshed will not end.

It is possible that the events of 2023 have created a new myth: that Iran directed Hamas’s action as part of its mission to destroy Israel, and what was done on October 7 represents another Holocaust committed by an organization that is Nazi in nature and worse than ISIS.

Several things make it clear this is a myth. The Iranian reaction and its instruction to Hezbollah in Lebanon not to join forces with Hamas suggest that Teheran was not consulted. Secondly, nothing would please the Holocaust deniers of the world more than to compare, as horrific as it was, the killing of 1,200 people, hundreds of them soldiers in an army of occupation, to the industrial genocide pursued by the Nazis. Finally, Hamas is not part of that world of Jihadi terror with no clear vision or goals. The Palestinian liberation movement from its very inception had a political Islamic group within it. In fact, all the anticolonialist movements in the Arab and Muslim world included a vein of political Islam.

Historically, the Palestinian liberation movement trended for many years toward the secular and leftist, and always contained a strong Christian component. The failure of secular forces to deliver liberation moved some people toward the political Islamic groups, some Christians as well, not necessarily in support of their dogma but simply in order to try a new approach.

While the ten myths detailed in this book retain their currency, who knows what others might be added to them in the future?

January 2024

2017 Preface

History lies at the core of every conflict. A true and unbiased understanding of the past offers the possibility of peace. The distortion or manipulation of history, in contrast, will only sow disaster. As the example of the Israel–Palestine conflict shows, historical disinformation, even of the most recent past, can do tremendous harm. This willful misunderstanding of history can promote oppression and protect a regime of colonization and occupation. It is not surprising, therefore, that policies of disinformation and distortion continue to the present and play an important part in perpetuating the conflict, leaving very little hope for the future.

Constructed fallacies about the past and the present in Israel and Palestine hinder us from understanding the origins of the conflict. Meanwhile, the constant manipulation of the relevant facts works against the interests of all those victimized by the ongoing bloodshed and violence. What is to be done?

The Zionist historical account of how the disputed land became the state of Israel is based on a cluster of myths that subtly cast doubt on the Palestinians’ moral right to the land. Often, the Western mainstream media and political elites accept this set of myths as a given truth, as well as the justification for Israeli actions across the last sixty or so years. More often than not, the tacit acceptance of these myths serves as an explanation for Western governments’ disinclination to interfere in any meaningful way in a conflict that has been going on since the nation’s foundation.

This book challenges these myths, which appear in the public domain as indisputable truths. These statements are, to my eyes, distortions and fabrications that can—and must—be refuted through a closer examination of the historical record. The common thread that runs through this book is the juxtaposition of popular assumption and historical reality. By placing each myth side by side with the truth, each chapter exposes the weaknesses of the received wisdom through an examination of the latest historical research.

The book covers ten foundational myths, or clusters of myths, which are common and recognizable to anyone engaged in one way or another with the Israel–Palestine question. The myths and the counter arguments follow a chronological order.

The first chapter charts Palestine on the eve of the arrival of Zionism in the late nineteenth century. The myth is the depiction of Palestine as an empty, arid, almost desert-like land that was cultivated by the arriving Zionists. The counter-argument reveals a thriving pre-existing society undergoing accelerated processes of modernization and nationalization.

The myth of Palestine being a land without people has its correlate in the famous myth of the people without a land, the subject of Chapter 2. Were the Jews indeed the original inhabitants of Palestine who deserved to be supported in every way possible in their return to their homeland? The myth insists that the Jews who arrived in 1882 were the descendants of the Jews expelled by the Romans around 70 CE. The counterargument questions this genealogical connection. Quite a hefty scholarly effort has shown that the Jews of Roman Palestine remained on the land and were first converted to Christianity and then to Islam. Who these Jews were is still an open question—maybe the Khazars who converted to Judaism in the ninth century; or maybe the mixture of races across a millennium precludes any answer to such a question. More importantly, I argue in this chapter that in the pre-Zionist period the connection between the Jewish communities in the world and Palestine was religious and spiritual, not political. Associating the return of the Jews with statehood, before the emergence of Zionism, was a Christian project until the sixteenth century, and thereafter a specifically Protestant one (in particular an Anglican one).

Chapter 3 closely examines the myth that equates Zionism with Judaism (so that anti-Zionism can only be depicted as anti-Semitism). I try to refute this equation through an historical assessment of Jewish attitudes to Zionism and an analysis of the Zionist manipulation of Judaism for colonial and, later, strategic reasons.

The fourth chapter engages with the claim that there is no connection between colonialism and Zionism. The myth is that Zionism is a liberal national liberation movement while the counterargument frames it as a colonialist, indeed a settler colonial, project similar to those seen in South Africa, the Americas, and Australia. The significance of this refutation is that it reflects how we think about the Palestinian resistance to Zionism and later to Israel. If Israel is just a democracy defending itself, then Palestinian bodies such as the PLO are purely terrorist outfits. However, if their struggle is against a colonialist project then they are an anticolonialist movement, and their international image will be very different from the one Israel and its supporters try to impose on world public opinion.

Chapter 5 revisits the well-known mythologies of 1948, and in particular aims to remind readers why the claim of voluntary Palestinian flight has been successfully debunked by professional historiography. Other myths associated with the 1948 events are also discussed in this chapter.

The final historical chapter questions whether the 1967 war was forced on Israel and was therefore a no choice war. I claim that this was part of Israel’s desire to complete the takeover of Palestine that had almost been completed in the 1948 war. The planning for the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip began in 1948, and did not cease until the historical opportunity offered by a reckless Egyptian decision in June 1967. I further argue that the Israeli policies immediately after the occupation prove that Israel anticipated the war rather than accidently staggered into it.