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This is a guest essay written by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
You can’t scroll a comment section these days without tripping over the same lazy anti-Israel talking points, copy-pasted even under posts that have nothing to do with Israel.
Buzzwords like “genocide” and “occupation” get lobbed by people with an evidently shaky grasp of Middle Eastern history, radical Islam, and even basic geopolitics. They’re recited with the glassy-eyed zeal of a first-year undergrad who just discovered “post-colonial theory.”
Repeating these lines might earn likes and applause from the equally clueless, but that doesn’t make them true. If you’re going to weigh in on one of the world’s most complex conflicts, the bare minimum is knowing what you’re talking about.
For the past 18 months, it’s been a loop of pseudo-intellectual déjà vu. The same tired claims, paraded like gotchas. They’re not. And it’s time we stopped pretending they are.
So here they are: four of the most common, most confidently wrong anti-Israel accusations, and why they crumble under the slightest scrutiny.
1) ‘Israel stole Palestinian land.’
This is the most recycled claim, and the most blatantly false.
First, it leans on an old antisemitic trope: the greedy, thieving Jew. That lie has been around for centuries.
Second, it suggests Palestinians were there first, living peacefully, until Jews took over. Also false. The land was ruled by empires: Ottoman, then British. There was never a Palestinian state. “Palestine” was a geographic term, and until the 1940s, Jews in the region — yes, Jews — were commonly called “Palestinians.”
For example, The Palestine Bulletin was founded in 1925 by Jacob Landau of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. (It eventually became The Palestine Post and then today’s version, The Jerusalem Post.)
And Jews never left. They’ve had an unbroken presence in the land for over 3,000 years, long before Islam or Arab nationalism. Cities like Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed (Tzfat), and Tiberias have always had Jewish communities, hence why they are known as Judaism’s Four Holy Cities.
Population movement was common across the region in the early 20th century, and Jewish and Arab immigration to Mandatory Palestine surged in parallel. In fact, Arab immigration to the area was among the highest globally in the early 1930s, driven largely by the economic boom sparked by Zionist development: jobs, farms, infrastructure, even the eradication of malaria.
Jews didn’t invade. They bought land, legally, and often at extortionate prices. As King Abdullah I of Jordan wrote in 1950: “The Arabs... sold all the lands to the Jews. They did not merely sell, but they took high prices... And the Jews, knowing they were paying twice and three times the price of the land, continued to buy it because of their desire to return to their homeland.”
In 1947, the United Nations proposed a two-state solution. The Jews said yes. Arab states declined, launched a genocidal war, and lost. Gaza and the West Bank were then absorbed by Egypt and Jordan, respectively. Still no Palestinian state.
Even if Jews had stolen land (they didn’t), they’d be late to the party. Nearly every modern country was built on colonial conquest or displacement: America, Canada, Australia, Brazil.
Yet, somehow, people living comfortably on actual stolen land seem eager to offload their guilt onto the world’s only Jewish state, rather than reckon with the ground beneath their feet.
But Jews didn’t cross an ocean to seize someone else’s territory. They returned home to where their faith, language, and history were born. Their temples stood there. Their prophets walked there.
This wasn’t colonisation. It was decolonisation. No empire. No mother country. No resource grab. Just a people returning after exile. Even Fayez Sayegh, the Arab scholar who coined the “settler-colonial” smear, admitted Zionism was unlike any other colonial project in history.
The Jews didn’t displace an indigenous population. They are the indigenous population. And today, nearly 2 million Arabs live as citizens of Israel.
Jews have accepted living alongside Arabs time and again. It’s the other side that keeps saying no.
They didn’t steal the land. They bought it. They built it. And they paid for it — in wildly inflated prices, in defensive wars, and in blood.
If you’re upset the Arabs didn’t end up with more land (despite controlling 99.8 percent of the region), take it up with Egypt and Jordan, who never offered a Palestinian state. Or take it up with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, or every Palestinian leader since who’s chosen war over peaceful coexistence.
2) ‘Israel must be the aggressor because more Palestinians are dying.’
Right behind the land theft myth is this gem, and its moral bankruptcy is truly something to behold. As if wars are judged by body counts. As if fewer Israeli deaths prove injustice, rather than better defence systems.
One side deliberately maximises civilian casualties, launching rockets from hospitals, schools, and densely populated areas. Fighters are embedded among civilians, not despite the risk, but because every retaliatory strike is a photo-op waiting to happen.
The other side spends billions trying to minimise civilian deaths, not just Israeli lives, but Palestinian ones too. Israel drops leaflets, sends text alerts, and makes phone calls before targeting a strike zone. Do they do it perfectly? No, but show me another military that goes to those lengths.
Meanwhile, Hamas hides underground while civilians are left exposed above, without a single bomb shelter, despite receiving more aid per capita than any region on earth. They don’t just accept civilian casualties, they depend on them. Dead civilians aren’t a tragedy to Hamas. They’re a strategy, leveraged for foreign pressure.
Yes, the death toll is lopsided. Because one side builds defence systems like the Iron Dome, while the other builds tunnels under kindergartens and holds civilians in an active war zone at gunpoint. One side funds civilian shelters, while the other funds propaganda videos filmed in sugar-coated rubble.
This isn’t a measure of justice. It’s a mirror of values. And if your moral compass is guided by body counts rather than the reasons behind them, it’s probably broken. If it weren’t for Israel’s defence systems, every single Israeli Jew, Christian, Arab, and Druze would have been dead a long time ago. And that’s not an exaggeration.
If we can’t acknowledge that Israel has fewer casualties because it invests in protecting civilians, then we’re punishing a country for doing what every country should do, while giving a free pass to regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran to attack with impunity. By this morally inverted logic, Iran launching the largest ballistic missile barrage in history is fine — because Israel stopped it.
Intent doesn’t matter, apparently; just how little you value your own civilians. That’s how you win international sympathy. Bravo, progressives. You’ve just incentivised using human shields as a PR strategy.
3) ‘It didn’t start on October 7th.’
Of course it didn’t start on October 7th.
But the people parroting that line seem to have only discovered the conflict after October 7th, and act like history began the moment it suited their narrative.
It didn’t start in 1948 either. If we’re playing the “who started it” game, you’ll need to scroll much further back. Try 1938, when Jews were massacred in Jaffa. Or 1931, when Jews of Kibbutz Yagur were massacred by the Islamist group, Black Hand. Or 1929, when Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Hebron, and Safed were attacked, tortured, raped, and murdered while their homes and synagogues were desecrated.
Or 1917, when over 10,000 Jews were expelled from Tel Aviv and Jaffa, with around 1,500 dying of starvation. Or 1834, when Jews in Hebron and Safed were raped and their homes looted. Or 1660, when Jews were attacked in Safed and Tiberias and fled for their lives. Or 1517, when entire Jewish communities in Hebron and Safed were massacred. Or how about 637, when the Arab Empire conquered the Land of Israel, then under Byzantine rule, where Jews and Samaritans still formed the majority.
And it didn’t end in 1948 either. I haven’t even touched the Palestinians’ post-State of Israel terror campaign: the kidnapping and murder of Israeli Olympic athletes, hijacked planes, synagogue shootings, school shootings, suicide bombings in public venues — anywhere civilians gathered. Families blown apart over falafel. Teenagers dismembered on dancefloors. Mothers and babies murdered in their homes. And of course, the endless hostage-taking that defined decades of so-called “resistance.”
I could go on. But they’re right about one thing: It didn’t start on October 7th. And it sure as hell didn’t start in 1948.
Yes, Jews fought back. Especially in the years leading up to the creation of the modern State of Israel, when survival was the only option. To reduce the entire conflict to “it didn’t start on October 7th” is to erase centuries of persecution and to imply, quite absurdly, that Jews just showed up 70 years ago and started killing the locals for fun.
4) ‘You can’t blame them — they’re under occupation!’
Occupation.
The word that makes everyone feel informed and turns Palestinians into eternal victims, no matter the atrocity.
Here’s a basic question: How do you “occupy” a country that never existed?
There was no Palestinian state. After the 1948 war, the West Bank was annexed by Jordan, and Gaza became part of Egypt. No one called that an occupation. Funny.
In 1967, Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza in a defensive war — after surrounding Arab states launched yet another campaign of annihilation. Israel didn’t start it. But they won. And they offered land for peace. The Arab response was the famous “Three No’s” of Khartoum: no peace, no recognition, no negotiations.
Then, in 2005, Israel fully and unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. It was recognised internationally, including by the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority. They pulled out every last soldier, settler, and synagogue. What came next? Over 20,000 rockets. Hamas rule. And eventually, October 7th.
October 7th didn’t happen because Gaza was “occupied.” It happened because it wasn’t.
So when activists shout “end the occupation” as if that’s the magic solution, they ignore the evidence that the last time Israel did exactly that, things went in the complete opposite direction of peace.
Even if Gaza were occupied (which it wasn’t), no legal definition of occupation justifies mass rape, child murder, or terrorists broadcasting their atrocities live.
Tibet is occupied. Northern Cyprus is occupied. You don’t see Tibetans or Cypriots butchering civilians in their homes or burning families alive, nor would the international community indulge it. There is no “context” that makes what happened on October 7th anything but evil.
As for the West Bank, it’s disputed. And Palestinian leaders have been offered a state multiple times — 2000, 2008, 2014 — each time, including over 90 percent of the West Bank. They rejected every offer because they refused one condition: recognising a Jewish state. You can’t continuously reject a state and then complain about “occupation.”
The dreaded Israeli checkpoints were implemented as a response to terrorism during the Second Intifada. After they were introduced, Palestinian suicide bombings dropped by more than 90 percent. Tragically, even Palestinian children and pregnant women were used as carriers, sent through checkpoints with explosives strapped to their bodies. Checkpoints didn’t cause the violence. They were a grim necessity to stop it.
Of course, they’re a daily hardship for Palestinians just trying to live their lives. But the blame doesn’t rest solely with Israel’s security measures; it rests with those who made such measures necessary in the first place.
So, if by “occupation” you mean Israel retains security control in areas to stop terror attacks from a population whose leaders have rejected peace again and again, then call it that.
But be honest about why it exists.
Chaos is a ladder and at the top of the ladder you'll find Qatar and the Al-thanis who have bought and paid their way to sow fear confusion and...chaos.
Thank you so much for your brilliant and accurate essay......of course didn't started October 7th, 2023, the worst part is that lots of people sided with terrorists murderers, rapists, kidnnappers.....and after 600+ days still holding the hostages!!!!......