For more detailed information on how to navigate through a debate on Israel, feel free to download and use these files to help. The five files attached are what students feel are the "the most common lies" told on campus about Israel, and how to respond to each claim.
In efforts of withdrawing “land for peace,” Israel left Gaza in 2005. Since then, instead of utilizing the opportunity to build economic growth in the area, Palestinian leaders spent their resources producing thousands of continuous rockets to be fired from Gaza into Israel and several tunnels built to try to infiltrate Israel.
If Israel withdrew from Judea & Samaria, the land would be controlled by terrorists. The current Palestinian Authority leadership in the West Bank provides ongoing funding to President Mahmoud Abbas, who admittedly pays salaries to terrorists, while knowing the extent of the corruption of his regime and its lack of democracy.
Since there has never been a sovereign state of “Palestine” prior to 1948 or 1967, there cannot legally be an “occupation of Palestinian lands” by Israel according to the Hague Convention of 1907.
The narrative Israel commits “genocide against the Palestinians,” “Israel exterminates the Palestinians,” “Israel commits mass murder of the Palestinians,” Israel “ethnically cleanses the Palestinians,” and “Israel is a Nazi state,” (implying Israeli extermination of Palestinians), Israel supporters/Zionists are “genocide-sympathetic," are all false and malicious blood libels, and anti-Semitic statements.
Ma’an News Agency, a Palestinian news agency, reported in 2011 that since Israel’s independence in 1948, the Palestinian population had grown at an average of 3.4% yearly growth rate, - higher than the average world population growth, which varied between 0.8% and 2.1% during the same period.
There are hundreds of groups worldwide that are actively seeking independence and usually under far worse conditions, with far fewer options than the Palestinians. If any of these groups were offered a state, as Palestinians were offered several times already (see Fact #2), it is highly unlikely that they would have turned it down.
Compared to practically any other group that seeks statehood, Palestinians have far less reason to feel desperate, yet they are extensively involved in terrorism. Hamas even admits to targeting civilians while predictably claiming to have excuses to do it. Examples include the killing of American student in Israel, Taylor Force, leading to the Taylor Force Act being enacted in the US in 2018. “Desperation” is not an excuse for MURDER.
Palestinian terrorism continues because Palestinian leadership can afford to put at risk international aid by accepting any solution until they can get what their terrorist organizations have always openly demanded – the destruction of the Jewish state.
There is no evidence to support the expulsion or ethnic cleansing of Arabs.
According to the 1948 acting chairman of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the Arabs living in Palestine willingly chose to leave rather than to submit to a truce.
According to theEncyclopedia of Judaism, as of 1999, the vast minority of Jewish extremists of anti-Zionism ideology is estimated to be 20,000 in Israel (0.004%) and tens of thousands in the United States and in Europe (0.0025%). With the annual growth rate of 2% in Israel, current statistics would conclude 0.0016% anti-Zionist Jews in Israel, and 0.001% in the United States and Europe.
Arabs and Palestinian-Arabs living in and around Israel typically oppose Zionism.
The IDF “Code of Ethics” reads as follows: IDF servicemen will use force of arms only for the purpose of subduing the enemy to the necessary extent and will limit his use of force so as to prevent unnecessary harm to human life and limb, dignity and property.
The IDF servicemen's “Purity of Arms” is their self-control in the use of armed force. They will use their arms only for the purpose of achieving their mission, without inflicting unnecessary injury to human life or limb; dignity or property, of both soldiers and civilians, with special consideration for the defenseless, whether in wartime, or during routine security operations, or in the absence of combat, or times of peace.
A 2010 interview of Hamas leader, Fathi Hamad, confirms that Israel DID kill approximately 700 terrorist combatants, rather than “civilians” - of which the Hamas leader claims Hamas members to be included as.
Hamas fires deadly rockets from schools, hospitals, and densely populated areas knowing that Israel, like any democracy, would have to take whatever military action was necessary to stop the rockets. Hamas also knew the media would broadcast the dead Palestinian children, which Hamas uses as human shields, around the world to cause outrage directed at Israel for the cause of their deaths.
The International Crisis Group interviewed three Hamas fighters in January who said they “often fired [rockets] in close proximity to homes and from alleys, hoping that nearby civilians would deter Israel from responding”
The chronological proximity of the Holocaust and Israel’s establishment has led many people to assume that the two events are connected and that Israel was created because of the Holocaust. Contrary to this popular belief, however, a Jewish state would probably have emerged in the land of “Palestine,” sooner or later, with or without the Holocaust.
The First Zionist Congress took place in 1897, 36 years before the Nazi party came to power in Germany.
In the years before and during World War II, thousands of European Jews fled to “Palestine,” or to other regions to escape hostility. After the Holocaust ended, Zionist leaders actively promoted the idea of an independent Jewish nation.
Jews, not Arabs, are Israel’s indigenous people. Jews are from Judea (Israel). Arabs are from Arabia.
Islam did not exist when the Jewish people made Israel their state and Jerusalem their capital. Palestinian Arabs are descended from Islamic Arabia, not from any long vanished group a la Jebusites. Jews are from Judea (Israel). Arabs are from Arabia. There has never been an established Arab, Islamic, or Palestinian-Arab state in Israel.
Hamas was NOT established in order to defend Palestinian-Arabs. Hamas was established in order to murder Jews and destroy Israel.
The conflict has never been about land but about Arabs rejecting Jewish self-determination in their ancestral homeland.
Beginning in 1919, Grand Mufti and ally to Adolf Hitler, Haj Amin al Husseini, organized, “fedayeen,” (“one who sacrifices himself”), small groups of terrorists who were willing to die while killing Jews.
“The conflict” is often alleged to have begun with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 or as a result of Israel’s capture in 1967 of territories occupied by Jordan. But systematic violence began in early 1920 with murderous assaults by groups of local Arabs and by Muslim nomads against Jews.
The Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel, attacked by 13 combatants, took a significant amount of land. Israel offered to return land for peace, but the Arab world’s response were the “3 No’s”: NO peace, NO negotiations, and NO recognition of Israel.
Israel does not use the fact of any positive element to excuse so-called crimes.
Israel is justified in pride towards their progressive LGBT rights, comparable to other liberal democracies, while in Iran and Arab countries, gay sex is punishable by prison or death in most nations, and none of these countries protect LGBT people against discrimination...except for Israel.
The reality of Israel’s support for the LGBTQ+ minority does not “pinkwash” the large-scale “conflict” amongst Israelis and Palestinian-Arabs.
The term, “pinkwashing,” is used as a weapon of anti-Israel activists to further their agendas, and ultimately utilizing the LGBT community as a prop against Israel.
Surroundingnations, such as Syria and Iran regularly commit human rights travesties and crimes, however, Arab regimes lack the adoption of the supposed, “pinkwashing” strategy Israel is accused of using, to compensate for their own crimes.
The point of a peaceful boycott movement is to harm the entity being boycotted more than harming the ones doing the boycotting. However, the BDS movement achieves the opposite outcome. BDS severely weakens the Palestinian economyand barely puts a dent in the Israeli economy.
Israel, which has a population of 9 million people, has a current GDP of about $307 billion, whereas Palestine (West Bank and Gaza), which has a total population of 4.2 million, has a current GDP of about $12 billion.
In a 2016 article, Bassam Eid, human rights activist and commentator on Palestinian domestic affairs, explained that the objectives of BDS activists abroad would actually increase economic hardships for the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
The BDS movement leaders and activists justify imposing hardships on the Palestinian people by claiming that freedom is somehow worth sufferage.
BDS leader Omar Barghouti, has expressed support for terrorism, promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and regularly demonizes Israel. He opposes the Jewish right to self-determination and Israel’s existence, openly calling for its destruction as a Jewish state.
Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism because it singles out the only Jewish state for denunciation.
It is possible to be a staunch critic of Zionism and not to be anti-Semitic, however the two usually go together. People who don’t like the Netanyahu government, are not anti-Zionist. That is part of the normal democratic debate. It is taken a step further to anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism when it isn’t simply Israeli policy that has to change, but it is Israel, the only Jewish state in the world, that has to go.
Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Many of us are critics of China’s occupation of Tibet, or Turkey’s occupation in northern Cyprus in violation of international law and putting down settlements. But none of those critiques call for the states themselves to be eliminated, but rather to change their policies. The double-standard of self-determination of one country over the Jewish state, falls under the United States State Department definition of anti-Semitism.
Since the Second World War the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has been responsible for the welfare of all refugees in the world and has assisted in their resettlement and relocation – so that nearly all of them are no longer refugees – with one exception: the Arabs from Palestine.
The Palestinian refugee crisis was created by an attack of seven Arab countries against the re-established state of Israel - a defensive war that was won by Israel.During the war, the high Arab committee encouraged Arabs in mandatory Palestine to leave their homes to which they could return following the victory over the Jewish state - a victory that never happened.
One of the greatest obstacles to peace today, and certainly the least acknowledged, is the perpetuation of the Palestinian refugee problem and the inflation of its scale by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). If the descendants of the Arab refugees from the Arab-Israeli war were treated like all other refugees, including the Jewish ones, they would not quality for refugee status because almost all of them (upward of 80%) are either citizens of a third country, such as Jordan, or they live in the places where they were born and expect to have a future such as Gaza and the West Bank.
