Israel’s detractors have accused the country and its people of a variety of unforgivable sins, but none of these accusations can withstand scrutiny. The charges leveled against Israel smack of antisemitism and reveal more about the accusers than the accused.
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The first such accusation: “Jews are colonizers in the Land of Israel.”
When Britain and France colonized Africa, they had no historical or cultural connection to the continent or its people. Their main purpose was to exploit the continent’s mineral riches and its strategic value. Similarly, the Arab-Muslim slavers who came from Asia (the Near East) had commercial and religious motives in their sights. Under the flag of Islam, the Arabs colonized North Africa, Egypt, and the wider Middle East in the 7th century, including the land of Israel in 638, under the caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab.
The Arabian invaders settled their officers and their families in the land of Israel and in time, either by the sword or by economic pressure, Islamized much of the existing Jewish and Christian population.
The indigeneity of the Jews (whose name derives from the province of Judea and the word Yehudi) to the land dates back to the second millennium before the Common Era as recounted in the Bible and archaeological findings. During the first and second centuries, Roman conquerors changed the name of Judea to Palestina in order to erase the existence of the indigenous Jewish people. Jewish rebellions continued but were thwarted. Rome changed the name of the Jewish people’s holy city of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina.
Jews returned to the land of Israel from their Roman exile in Europe throughout the centuries. By the mid-19th century, Jerusalem had a Jewish majority. The San Remo Declaration of April 1920 endorsed the November 1917 Balfour Declaration, which recognized the land of Israel as the ancestral home of the Jewish people. In 1922, the international community, as represented by the League of Nations, approved the British Mandate for Palestine and conferred full legitimacy to the establishment of the Jewish state.
The United Nations Partition Plan of November 1947 divided the Palestine Mandate into two states: a Jewish state, established in May 1948, and an Arab state, which the Palestinian-Arab leadership declined to establish. They, along with Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and military contingents from other Arab states, chose instead to go to war against the nascent Jewish state.
The second accusation: “Israel’s founding was illegitimate.”
The detractors of Israel neglect to acknowledge that the United Nations Partition Plan gave the Palestinian-Arabs an opportunity to assert their self-determination. However, perceiving the Palestinian-Jews as weak, they and the other Arab armies opted for war in an attempt to wipe out Jewish sovereignty by force of arms. They lost.
They then undermined the Oslo Accords, premised on two states, by waging the terror of the Second Intifada.
In July 2000, Yasser Arafat, given the opportunity to facilitate statehood for the Palestinian Arabs, walked out of President Clinton’s summit at Camp David, choosing violence instead of ending the conflict.
A bizarre accusation: “Israel prevented the establishment of a Palestinian State.” The above cited facts addressed that charge.
Another accusation: “Israel occupied Gaza and made it into an ‘open-air prison.’”
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The ignorance of Israel’s critics here is astounding. In August-September 2005, Israel disengaged from Gaza and pulled out close to 10,000 Jewish residents, leaving behind an agricultural infrastructure that could have served Muslim Gazans well economically. The Palestinian chose instead to destroy the ready-for-export greenhouses.
Prior to 2005, Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, had received full authority for the Gaza Strip and Jericho — a prelude to the establishment of a Palestinian state. In 2006, Hamas took over the Strip, murdered their Fatah rivals, and subjected the people to their autocratic rule.
One of the most common charges by the anti-Israel crowd (funded in part by the Emirate of Qatar): “Israel is an Apartheid state.”
The word apartheid comes from the Dutch Afrikaans language, meaning “separateness.” It was a system of institutionalized racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to 1994.
Israel is an open democratic society, where all citizens — Arab and Jews — are equal under the law. Arabs occupy high positions in Israel, including on Israel’s Supreme Court. There are two Arab political parties in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament), the Joint List comprising three parties and Ra’am (an Islamic Arab party). The Jewish population includes black Ethiopians and other non-Europeans. To characterize Israel as an apartheid state is to turn reality upside down.
Finally, the grievous false accusation: “Israel committed genocide in Gaza.”
According to the U.N. Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, genocide is defined by proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention simply to disperse a group. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique.
In fact, the term genocide was invented in 1944 by a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, who coined it in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The term was applied to Nazi Germany, which was deliberately and intentionally seeking to wipe out the Jews of Europe. It was a policy Adolf Hitler announced, and its technical details were discussed and activated following the Wannsee Conference, held on January 20, 1942, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee.
Six million European Jews, including a million and a half children — representing two thirds of Europe’s Jews — were intentionally murdered by the Nazis and those who supported them.
Israel does not intentionally target Palestinian civilians; rather, the Israelis have sought to protect them by dropping leaflets and making calls to warn them to move to safe zones. Hamas deliberately keeps civilians as human shields, including children, in order to increase the body count.
These accusations and charges against Israel constitute a vicious blood libel against the Jewish state. Israel’s detractors are fueling the flames of hatred by invoking them.
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