11 Facts That Will Change the Way You See Israel
To defy the obscene assault on truth by many Palestinians and their morally depraved supporters, let's get back to the lost art of fact-finding, Israeli style.
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Virtually every movement or cause includes at least a little bit of propaganda, embellishment, romanticism, or exaggeration. This makes it easier to sell and in some cases swallow.
But the “pro-Palestinian” crusade is a whole other story. It is rooted so deeply in fake news and intellectual dishonesty that it makes Pinocchio look like the esteemed inventor of the polygraph.
Even in the age of deepfakes and post-truth, as artificial intelligence skyrockets, and as gaslighting becomes basic sociopolitical strategy, facts still matter.
History is not just someone’s opinion. One plus one equals two. The world is round. There never was a Palestinian state. And “anti-Zionism” is antisemitism.
In fact, without an understanding of facts and historical truths, it is not really possible to grasp the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war today.
Here are 11 facts worth considering:
1) The So-Called ‘1967 Borders’
People often talk about the 1967 borders as a plausible solution to the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian saga, but what they do not always mention is that Gaza was under Egyptian control and the West Bank was part of Jordan prior and leading up to the 1967 Six-Day War.
Egypt wanted to create a pan-Arab state (the United Arab Republic) and unite the Arab populations under it, whereas Jordan (illegally) annexed the West Bank. The two countries were at odds.
Had Israel disappeared in 1967, there would not be peace. There would be a conflict between Egypt and Jordan (and perhaps other Arab countries) over what to do with a stretch of land in which Arab sovereignty known as “Palestine” never existed.
Thus, establishing a Palestinian state along the “1967 borders” would not be a “return” to the way things were. It would be the invention of a new regional problem, as if the Middle East needs another one.
2) There has never been a Palestinian state.
It did not exist and never had, despite what “pro-Palestinian” activists want the world to believe. Its creation, proposed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947, was rejected by the Arab world because it also meant the establishment of a Jewish state alongside it.
“Palestine” is the only country in the world that never existed before its so-called occupation. Therefore, the Palestinians have the weakest case among all the world’s conflicts. Yet, because “the Jews” are the Palestinians’ self-professed enemy, “Palestine” receives wildly disproportionate attention.
3) The Arabic Word for Jew
Ironically, the Arabic word for Jew is “yahud” because Jews are the people of Yahuda (Judea), presently called Israel — but acknowledging this fact means acknowledging Jews lived in Judea thousands of years ago, which means acknowledging Jewish indigenousness way before Arabs from Arabia migrated to and Arabicized the Levant, which means acknowledging Jewish rights in this land — a big turn-off for Jew haters, “anti-Zionists” and Islamist sympathizers.
What’s next? Claiming that the Palestinians created the TV show “Seinfeld” which did not truly take place in New York City, but in Gaza City? And that Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer were actually Palestinians? Or that “Palestine” was once a peaceful supercontinent known as Palestengea, until the Zionists divided it up into smaller continents?1
4) Indigenous Rights
Israel is the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name (the Israelites), and with the same faith and same language as it did 3,000 years ago.
Following the death of King Solomon, circa 931 BCE, a civil war divided our ancestors into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. The prophets foretold that, in Messianic times, we would reunite into a single nation again. The Ten Tribes of Israel were “lost” in the Assyrian exile, and we are descended from Judah, which is why we are called Jews. When our modern state was founded in 1948, we did not call it Judah; we called it Israel, representing our spirit of unity.
The name Hebrew is believed to be based on the Semitic root ʕ-b-r (עבר) meaning “beyond,” “other side,” or “across.” Interpretations of the term Hebrew generally render its meaning as roughly “from the other side [of the river/desert]” — an exonym for the inhabitants of the land of Israel and Judah, perhaps from the perspective of Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, or Transjordan (with the river referred to being perhaps the Euphrates, Jordan or Litani, or maybe the northern Arabian Desert between Babylonia and Canaan).
As Rabbi Mitchel Malkus put it:
“Only the Hebrew language links us to the past, present, and future of the Jewish People, and to a specific land. No other language — and Jews have spoken many Jewish languages throughout our history — bonds us to the soul of our history, textual tradition, people and the land of Israel than Hebrew does.”
5) Jordan is unofficially ‘Palestine.’
If Jordan was a democracy, rather than an autocracy, it would be a Palestinian country, since there are approximately three million Palestinians currently living in Jordan.
6) The Palestinian Economy
Israel keeps Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank afloat by allowing it to use the Israeli shekel. There is no other country that would supply the Palestinian economy with its currency because doing so automatically devalues said currency.
On October 6th, 2023, amidst the ceasefire in place, some 18,000 Gazan day-workers were legally employed in Israel, channeling $25 million each month into the Gaza Strip. With Israel’s backing, the Gaza economy experienced a remarkable 20-percent growth, and per capita gross domestic product soared by 19 percent.
But all that changed on October 7th. Hamas opted for war, aided by some of these Gazan employees who helped the terror group target the very places where they worked, and all 18,000 of these individuals immediately became unemployed.
7) A ‘Genocide’ Unlike Any Other
It is kind of weird for a country that is accused of committing genocide to explicitly tell people to evacuate, give them written instructions, and create humanitarian corridors for them to do so, while guarding the corridors with tanks and soldiers to prevent Hamas from firing on their own people trying to escape from combat zones. Wouldn’t this defeat the purpose of Israel’s alleged genocide?
It might just be that Israel cares more about the Palestinians than the Palestinians care about themselves. Throughout this war, Israel has warned Palestinians when and where it is going to attack, facilitates aid to them, helps with evacuations, and established humanitarian corridors so civilians can avoid the battle zones.
Israel has also invented military techniques specifically designed to save Palestinian lives, such as “roof knocking” — a practice of dropping non-explosive or low-yield devices on the roofs of targeted civilian infrastructure that has been hijacked by Hamas operatives, to warn non-combatants of imminent bombing and give them time to leave the buildings.
8) Jewish Immigration
While the Arabs did not welcome the modest immigration of Jews during Ottoman-era and British-era Palestine, from the mid-1800s through the 1930s, Arabs indeed benefitted from Jewish arrival.
Ardent Zionist Dr. Israel Kligler, a microbiologist, is credited with malaria eradication in the region, which ironically resulted in a major share of the Arab’s population increase. Local Arabs said that Zionists made the land “livable,” and as many as 60,000 Arabs subsequently immigrated to British-era Palestine to take advantage of new work opportunities provided by the growing population.
“The Jews’ greatest contribution to history is dissatisfaction,” the great Israeli statesman, Shimon Peres, used to say. “We’re a nation born to be discontented. Whatever exists we believe can be changed for the better.”
9) Zionism
Mainstream, practical Zionists have by and large always been in favor of two states for two peoples (the Jews and the Palestinians), and even agreed to a Special International Regime for the city of Jerusalem and its surroundings.
Now we know that what Golda Meir, Israel’s first and only female prime minister, said decades ago still rings true to this day:
“We’re not the only people in the world who’ve had difficulties with neighbors; that has happened to many. We are the only country in the world whose neighbors do not say, ‘We are going to war because we want a certain piece of land from Israel,’ or waterways or anything of that kind. We’re the only people in the world where our neighbors openly announce they just won’t have us here. And they will not give up fighting and they will not give up war as long as we remain alive. Here.”
And yet, Zionism led to the greatest anti-imperialist, decolonization project on planet Earth, as well as the self-transformation of victims into sovereigns.
Zionism produced a unique form of multiculturalism stemming from European, Middle Eastern, Arab, North African, and Western influences.
Zionism created one of the few countries in the Middle East where Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Catholicism, Baháʼí, Druze, and other religions can truly co-exist in peace.
Zionism manufactured a profoundly humanitarian society, in which Israelis and Israeli organizations routinely offer all types of support to places across the world plagued by conflict and disaster.
Zionism enabled tremendous contributions to a variety of fields, from medicine and agriculture, to technology and archaeology, while accumulating the world’s most museums, engineers, scientists, startups, and R&D investment per capita.
“Zionism is fundamentally a Western movement,” said the late historian Benzion Netanyahu. “It is a movement that lives on the border of the East, but always faces the West. And so it is today, standing against the natural tendencies of the East to penetrate the West and enslave it.”
10) Palestinian Refugees
During the 20th century, as empires collapsed and new states and borders were established, tens of millions of people fled or were expelled during the course of war. Muslims and Hindus, Greeks and Turks, Poles and Ukrainians, Germans and Jews moved on to build new lives, some aided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
None of them, nor their hundreds of millions of descendants, claim to be refugees today — except the Palestinians. Why? Because the Palestinians, propped up by the Arab world and the former Soviet Union, violently rejected the two-state solution already in 1947, and were determined (despite losing war after war) to continue trying to prevent the Jewish People from maintaining self-determination in our indigenous homeland.
Having failed to do so by warfare, terrorism, and economic boycotts, Palestinians have hijacked the United Nations and “social justice” causes to create and sustain a fictitious narrative that they are still somehow all refugees, generation after generation, and all of them possess a right (which does not exist in international law) to settle in a sovereign country (Israel), even though they never lived in and they were never citizens of Israel, so as to ensure that Israel no longer exists as a state for the Jewish People.
11) The Word of Israel
When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, only six percent of the world’s Jews lived there. Today the number is around 45 percent.
The translation of the word Israel is “to struggle with God” or “to wrestle with God.”
Jews are not asked to accept complete faith blindly, but rather we are encouraged intellectually to encounter God within ourselves after studying the struggles and wrestling our sages encountered in their journeys to God. In other words, it is very much possible to be a “good Jew” and have questions about God.
Or, as Steve Stulman, founder of The Julius Stulman Foundation, put it:
“Judaism without Zionism is self-destructive; but Zionism without Judaism is meaningless.”
The Mossad: Satirical, Yet Awesome on X
You could add that 20% of Israeli university students are Israeli Arab, as is the Dean of Undergraduates at the Technion (Professor Hossam Haick). That the Chairman of Bank Leumi, Israel's largest, is an Israeli Arab (Dr. Samer Haj-Yehia). That two Israeli Arabs have risen to the rank of Major Generals in the IDF. And that Israeli Arabs have been represented in the Knesset not only in the Arab parties but also all the secular ones, including Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu.
Because no discussion of Israel would be complete without considering apartheid.
That's how far from reality the discourse has wandered, not that rational argument is of use here. Israel's government really blundered by getting rid of Noa Tishby and Eyal Levy as public advocates.
https://www.eylonalevy.com/
https://www.noatishby.com/
Exceptionally good essay. I always appreciate the history and biblical references which are so important in understanding Israel and all it encompasses, and the ongoing conflict it has faced for so many years. The '67 Border facts that you wrote about brought to mind what Mossab Hassan Yousef had said awhile back, that if Israel didn't exist, the Arabs would be fighting one another and they know it. Each and every fact was spot on. Unfortunately, those who have been indoctrinated cover their ears and close their eyes to facts. It makes them feel good to believe that the people who have committed barbaric acts on Israel are the "victims." To face up to the truth would mean they are wrong and as evil as those they support. A Columbia student, a Jewish student, who led one of the protests in the spring, is a "leader" in the (wait for it) Jews for Jihad. This is what the West has to deal with, but instead chooses to ignore these Jew haters because "free speech" reigns in the West except for Jews.