{"id":12308,"date":"2023-11-09T08:45:34","date_gmt":"2023-11-09T06:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/?p=12308"},"modified":"2024-02-24T21:45:19","modified_gmt":"2024-02-24T19:45:19","slug":"a-primer-for-the-perplexed-the-nine-big-lies-against-israel-and-what-they-really-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/a-primer-for-the-perplexed-the-nine-big-lies-against-israel-and-what-they-really-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"The Nine Big Lies Against Israel and What They Really Mean"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-63f1c6f0 elementor-widget elementor-widget-theme-post-title elementor-page-title elementor-widget-heading\" data-id=\"63f1c6f0\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"theme-post-title.default\">\n<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n<h3 class=\"elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default\" dir=\"ltr\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 16px;\">learly, the Palestinians and their propagandists have developed a whole lexicon, a series of talking points and slogans that distorts words, negates history, and obscures Palestinian intentions. Israel went along with these lies for too long<\/span><\/h3>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">In 1917, California\u2019s isolationist senator Hiram W. Johnson captured the cynicism of politics \u2013 especially during wartime. \u201cThe first casualty when war comes is truth,\u201d he said, echoing earlier sages, as America embarked on a \u201cwar to end all wars,\u201d which we now call World War I.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">While fabricating here and there may be every general\u2019s pastime, Palestinian terrorists and their enablers have taken lying to a whole other level. Yet, despite building so much of their case on a foundation of falsehoods, they keep conning the world. Everyone \u201cknows\u201d that Israel occupies Gaza \u2013 despite disengaging from it in 2005; that \u201cFrom the River to the Sea\u201d envisions a democratic Palestine \u2014 when it envisions an exterminated Israel; and, most outrageously, that hundreds of innocent Israelis, young and old alike, deserved to be massacred, maimed, raped, and terrorized \u2013 while others denied all the evidence that the atrocities happened.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">This primer picks nine of the most popular New Big Lies Palestinians and their enablers propagate. Let\u2019s leave the number ten for more godly commandments, while stressing that despite being debunked repeatedly, these lies have countless lives.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>\u201cFrom the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0Give the Palestinians credit here: at least they are honest. But I have to ask: If Palestine is free \u2013 meaning Jew-free \u2013 from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea \u2013 where is there room for me and 9 million other Israelis? \u201cFrom the River to the Sea\u201d is a one-state solution, meaning a no-Jewish state solution \u2013 and no Jews anywhere else, either.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Some Palestinians prevaricate. They claim the slogan imagines a secular democratic state with Jews and Arabs living together. In fact, the phrase\u2019s history is exclusionary and exterminationist.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">In 1964, three years before the Six-Day War, the slogan was popularized by the Palestinian activists and terrorists who founded the Palestine Liberation Organization.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Their war aims were not to liberate the \u201coccupied territories,\u201d which Israel only secured three years later. They wanted \u2013 and want \u2014 to liberate the world from Israel itself. Similarly, since Hamas emerged in the late 1980s, the slogan has been a Hamas and Islamic Jihad mainstay.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">October 7 offered at least one clear lesson: If your enemy calls for your destruction \u2013 your enemy is calling for your destruction. Jews should take the Palestinian death cries seriously, and Americans must start taking the Iranian mullahs\u2019 death cries seriously. It\u2019s actually bigoted not to take them at their word and decide they can\u2019t really mean that. \u201cPalestine from the River to the Sea\u201d leaves no rooms for Jews \u2013 or the Jewish State.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>\u201cThis is what decolonization looks like.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0The world is a tough place. Over the centuries, powerful countries have colonized other places, sending explorers, then groups of settlers, away from the mother country to establish settlements, usually in order to extract resources. Inevitably, especially as national self-determination became a virtue, colonization led to decolonization.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">On one level, decolonization is simply an historical process, whereby people in the colonies rebel, or the empire collapses. Over the decades, scholars defined decolonization as a state of mind, too. Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), born in Martinique, helped make decolonization trendy among some of the most settled and privileged people in the world\u2019s richest and most expensive universities.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">As a psychiatrist, Fanon observed that colonized people often internalized a sense of inferiority. As a revolutionary, he wanted those colonies to break free \u2013 even violently. Considering violence cleansing, restoring some balance, some dignity to the powerless, he called violence \u201cman recreating himself.\u201d<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Fanon built on Marx\u2019s binary dividing the world between the oppressing ruling class and the oppressed proletariat. For Fanon, the forever-guilty oppressor was the colonizer, the forever-innocent oppressed was the decolonizer. For the colonized, Fanon preached, \u201cthere is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization is simply a question of strength.\u201d<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Fanon remains remarkably influential today. Call them woke. Call them postmodern. Call them identitarians. Today\u2019s campus commissars have forged Marx\u2019s seesaw between the oppressor and the oppressed with Fanon\u2019s colonizer-decolonizer dynamic and deification of violence. These people frame the world \u2013 and America \u2013 as caught in a zero-sum power struggle. The oppressive colonizers in this Manichean, black-and-white world are always guilty, while the oppressed are forever pure and innocent, no matter what they do.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Viewing the world through this distorting prism, Israel is always guilty, the Palestinians forever innocent. As a result, the October 7 barbarian bloodbath was exhilarating, joyous, justified. One influencer even injected the Hamas-romanticizing term \u201csettler-babies\u201d into the mix.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">To see the world this way requires much fanaticism, many simplifications, multiple distortions, and, at the end of the day, a very, very bruised soul. But those blinders explain how so many feminists failed to see Hamas\u2019s rape culture and child abuse, how so many liberals failed to acknowledge the despotism, how so many humanists failed to cry out in shame and horror as Palestinian marauders crossed every civilizational red line.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>\u201cIsrael is practicing apartheid.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0The Jews seem to have magical powers. Over the centuries, Jews attracted all kinds of labels: Jews were too rich and too poor, too capitalist and too socialist, too traditional and too modern, too anxious to fit in and too eager to stand out.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Today, the Jewish state has similar plastic powers. As trends change, Israel is deemed guilty of the most heinous of national sins. Today Israel is a white-supremacist or, even better, Jewish-supremacist state, and a settler-colonialist enterprise. In the 1990s, Israel was racist, colonialist, and imperialist, as well as guilty of \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d once the Balkan mess introduced that phrase into the international vocabulary.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>But since the 1970s, as the international community justifiably turned away in disgust from apartheid South Africa, Israel has been called an apartheid state.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Apartheid was a system of racial differentiation \u2013 apartness \u2013 based on all kinds of racial classifications and perverse beliefs that whites and blacks and colored people were not equal. The Apartheid Wall in Johannesburg\u2019s Apartheid Museum lists 148 laws sifting people into different racial categories to keep them apart and calibrate who deserved which privileges \u2013 and which restrictions.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Israel has never passed one law defining people by racial categories. In fact, Israelis and Palestinians are involved in a national conflict, not a race war.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Moreover, if Israel wants to be racist, and create an apartheid state, it\u2019s doing an awful job. Israeli-Arabs enjoy equal rights and have served as Supreme Court judges, Knesset members, key members of the last coalition. With about 20% of the population, Israeli-Arabs are overly represented in Israel\u2019s medical system: About 20% of the doctors, as much as 40% of the nurses, and 43% of the pharmacists are Israeli-Arab. Finally, if Israelis hate Arabs so much and see them as inferior, why was there so much excitement about the Abraham Accords, and why are Hamas and Iran trying to subvert a Saudi Arabian deal with Israel?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Maybe Israelis don\u2019t hate Arabs \u2013 but only pass laws protecting themselves against enemies who seek to destroy them?<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>\u201cIsrael is carrying out genocide.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0Genocide, literally tribe-killing, is defined as a systematic series of violent acts \u201ccommitted with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.\u201d For decades, Palestinians have been crying \u201cgenocide,\u201d claiming Israel seeks to wipe them out. Yet the Palestinian population has at least quintupled since 1967, from just over 1 million to nearly 5-and-a-half million people. Zionists are even worse at genocide than they are at apartheid.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Pure hatred often involves projection: You hate in others what you hate in yourself, you imagine your enemies would do to you what you would do to them if you had a chance. These false cries that Israelis are targeting Palestinians for genocide reflect the sweeping, categorical, and thus genocidal tendencies in the Hamas charter, in the October 7 sadism, and in too many twisted corners of the Palestinian national soul.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>\u201cIsrael is engaged in disproportionate bombing.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0The phrase \u201cdisproportionate bombing\u201d is in many ways redundant, like fattening fudge \u2013 one goes with the other. When terrorists attack your civilians, then hide behind their civilians, what can a serious army do? Inevitably, some of those human shields will die.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Moreover, when you have an air force, and you have a choice between bombing an enemy from the air and sending your troops in door-to-door, what\u2019s the moral call? A leader\u2019s primary moral responsibility is to the led \u2013 and a defender\u2019s primary moral responsibility is to defend those unfairly and viciously attacked. In April, 2002, Israel chose to send reservists into Jenin to apprehend terrorists instead of bombing from the air, U.S.-style. The result was a Palestinian ambush that killed 23 Israelis. Israel\u2019s supporters may have felt momentarily pure \u2013 but 23 families were scarred for life that day.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">When an enemy attacks, then cowers in mosques and hospitals and kindergartens and schools, those protected places become military objectives. Complaining about a \u201cdisproportionate response\u201d from a regular army when fighting terrorists embedded in a city is in essence complaining about any response from the army. When your enemy calls for your annihilation, tries acting on it, then vows to try again and again, it\u2019s unrealistic to expect no collateral damage.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Let\u2019s be clear: the moral onus for every death, every injury, every misfire, remains on Hamas for initiating this round. It\u2019s unfair to forget that ultimately war is a clash of powerful, ugly forces. If you want to win, it\u2019s logical \u2013 and moral \u2013 for your own side to mobilize as much force as you can \u2013 within the bounds of reason of course, but not being immediately criticized, as Israel is.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>\u201cIsrael has occupied the West Bank and Gaza since 1967.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0In June, 1967, threatened by three Arab armies, Israel fought for its life and more than tripled its size. It won the Golan Heights in the north from Syria. It took over Gaza and the Sinai in the South from Egypt. And it reunited Jerusalem, while securing the Biblical lands of Judaea and Samaria from Jordan \u2013 which had, ahem, occupied what it called its \u201cWest Bank\u201d territories, with no international authorization, since the Jordanian Legion invaded to its west during the 1948-1949 Israel War of Independence.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">While Israeli governments over the years wavered, using different legal theories including the laws of occupation to define Israel\u2019s relationship to all the territories, calling them \u201coccupied\u201d was triply problematic \u2013 especially to historians.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u2022 First, in defending itself legitimately, Israel seized territory from a hostile neighbor \u2013 when those Jordanian-administered territories languished in a legal no-man\u2019s-land. From 1949 to 1967, the Jordanian conquerors ignored the U.N. 1947 Partition Plan to make those areas an independent Arab state. The U.N. never recognized Jordanian sovereignty there, making the territories truly disputed, not occupied.\u00a0<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u2022 Second, this was no colonial expedition, going to some exotic locale in pith helmets and safari suits. Jews had international rights to the territories and a deep history there, especially the Biblical territories of Judaea and Samaria, which were deemed Jewish and open for Jewish settlement under the 1920 (often overlooked) San Remo conference and, subsequently, the British Mandate.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u2022 Third, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan presciently noted in 1980, calling Israel an \u201coccupier\u201d implicitly compared Israel\u2019s far more benign, legitimate, and rooted policies \u201cto the Nazi practice of deporting or murdering vast numbers of persons in Western Poland \u2013 as at Auschwitz \u2013 and plans for settling the territory with Germans.\u201d This false comparison, Moynihan noted, played \u201cperfectly into the Soviet propaganda position\u201d and the Palestinian projection that \u201cZionism is present-day fascism.\u201d<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Today, alas, the occupation preoccupation has become the main launching pad not only for the Bash Israel Firsters, but those hyper-critical Jews who habitually doubt Israel.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Moreover, Palestinians use the words \u201coccupation\u201d and \u201csettlements\u201d promiscuously, to delegitimize anything Zionist. Israel is \u201coccupied,\u201d all of Israel. Every Israeli is a \u201csettler.\u201d The plundered kibbutzim of the southwest Negev are \u201csettlements,\u201d despite lying in pre-1967 Israel, within the \u201cGreen Line,\u201d the borders from the 1949 armistice with Jordan, hastily drawn in green pencil. This sweeping Big Lie helped legitimize Hamas\u2019s savagery, deeming every Israeli, every Thai volunteer, every tourist an \u201coccupier,\u201d and deserving of any violence Hamas and the other Palestinian murderers could mete out.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>\u201cIsrael\u2019s so-called disengagement from Gaza just turned it into an open-air prison.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0In 2005, Israel disengaged from Gaza, uprooting over 9,000 Israeli citizens living in 25 settlements scattered through Gaza and northern Samaria. Amid the anguish, military strategists lobbied intensely to keep a strip of land for defensive purposes \u2013 the Philadelphi corridor. The Duke of Disengagement, Ariel Sharon, resisted. He claimed that if Israel even retained one grain of Gazan sand, critics would claim it was still \u201coccupied.\u201d And he was confident that once Gaza was no longer occupied, Israel could live in peace as the Gazans prospered.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">If there is one word that best explains Israelis\u2019 current frustration and fury, it is \u201cdisengagement.\u201d Eighteen years ago, there were some weapons in Gaza, no tunnels, and a limited terrorist infrastructure, because Israel still retained some control. Yet, almost immediately after withdrawing from Gaza, primitive Qassam rockets started bombarding Israel \u2013 while critics kept bombarding Israel with the o-word, the occupation charge. The violence against Israel \u2013 and the criticism \u2014 intensified when Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, killing fellow Palestinians brutally.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Under the gun, now facing an implacable foe vowing to exterminate the Jewish state and the Jews \u2013 see the Hamas charter \u2013 Israel tried blockading Hamas. As a result, a whole series of lies burst forth: that Israel is occupying the territory it withdrew from completely (in fact, note how little control it had and how ineffectual its blockade was as Hamas built its deadly arsenal); that Gaza is the \u201cmost densely populated place on earth\u201d (it doesn\u2019t compare to Manhattan, Hong Kong, and other super-skyscrapered city centers); and that the Zionists have made it an \u201copen air prison\u201d or concentration camp (when you can see on a map that Egypt controls Gaza\u2019s southern border, and know it keeps Gazans far, far away from Egyptians).<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">In short, Israel did everything it said it would when it disengaged. In doing so, Israel betrayed many of its own citizens. Nevertheless, Israel ended up with no peace, no peace of mind, and a piece of territory that became Hamasistan rather than the Mediterranean resort it could have been if its governing body had put its generous international aid to good use. Today, Israel has on its border a hostile, seething launching pad for tens of thousands of rockets and marauders, exporting so much trauma and misery \u2013 while those responsible treat their own people as cannon fodder, too.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>\u201cIsrael must agree to a humanitarian ceasefire.\u201d<\/strong><span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>In the Middle East today, that phrase may be the ultimate oxymoron \u2013 like a moral terrorist, a pragmatic Hamasnik, a feminist Islamic Jihadist, a liberal-democratic Palestinian Authority member, a healthy cancer. For 18 years the world has yelled \u201cdisproportionate bombing\u201d and keeps demanding \u201chumanitarian ceasefires\u201d whenever Israel tries defending itself. For 18 years, much humanitarian aid has been diverted to Hamas itself. After Hamas invaded and raided and shattered so many lives, from an Israeli perspective, what would be \u201chumanitarian\u201d about a premature ceasefire?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Diplomats and pro-Palestinian demonstrators say \u201chumanitarian ceasefire.\u201d Israelis hear \u201ca chance for Hamas to regroup\u201d and \u201cmore of the same.\u201d Many Israelis wonder: \u201cWhen do the hostages get such a pause, especially those who might be tortured or enduring the agony of sexual slavery?\u201d Until the hostages are released, Israel cannot relent.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Israel can move to ease the burden of the truly innocent stuck between Hamas and the IDF. Israel could set up field hospitals or temporary refuges in empty parts of Gaza, in Egypt, or even in isolated parts of the Negev. But let\u2019s not kid ourselves. Hamas will take advantage of any break or kindness: at least one-third of the first wave of what was supposed to be foreign nationals evacuated to Egypt were wounded Hamas terrorists, trying to sneak away. Fuel delivered by international organizations has long been hijacked by Hamas for its war machine.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Some claim Hamas is a small group holding the peace-loving Gazans hostage. But if Hamas is abusing people, a humanitarian pause giving the terrorists a break increases Palestinian misery, too. It delays the liberation they need. In fact, most Gazans, like most Palestinians, celebrated the carnage on October 7, and many zealously participated.\u00a0<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">So, yes, try improvising ways to help, to minimize civilian suffering. But the phrase \u201chumanitarian aid\u201d sounds like resupplying Hamas, and \u201cceasefire\u201d sounds like letting the killers regroup.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>\u201cIsrael must pursue a two-state solution.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181. It was epic, recognizing the Jewish right to a national home \u2013 a right rooted in the Bible, promised in the Balfour Declaration and San Remo redeemed through the blood, sweat, and tears of Zionist pioneers who had already built an impressive infrastructure for the state that would be declared in May, 1948. To treat \u2013 in the parlance of the time \u2014 the Palestinian Jews and the Palestinian Arabs fairly, the U.N. partitioned the area, envisioning a Jewish state and an Arab entity, while internationalizing Jerusalem, the Jewish people\u2019s forever-capital.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The Jews found this compromise devastating. But Palestinian Jewry\u2019s leadership, pushed by David Ben-Gurion, decided that half a loaf was better than none. Two years after the Holocaust ended, Ben-Gurion feared more bloodshed. The Jews needed a state. The day after the U.N. Resolution passed, as Jews finished singing and dancing, Arab rejectionists rioted, trashing Jerusalem\u2019s commercial district.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">That started an historic pattern. Again and again, the Jews \u2013 and after 1948 what became the State of Israel \u2014 offered compromises, were willing to split territory, to cede territory. Yet again and again, the Palestinian leadership rejected it. No wonder the leading historian Efraim Karsh titled his book about the era, \u201cPalestine Betrayed,\u201d emphasizing that Hitlerian extremists like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem betrayed their own Palestinian Arab people.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">In 1974, the U.N. passed a resolution endorsing \u201ctwo States, Israel and Palestine \u2026 side by side within secure and recognized borders.\u201d Thus began this diplomatic Holy Grail, pursuing a \u201ctwo-state solution.\u201d The most dramatic attempt to achieve it \u2013 the Oslo Peace Process of the 1990s \u2013 ended in bloodshed, when after the Camp David Peace Talks in 2000 Yasir Arafat rejected any compromise and led his people from negotiation right back to terror.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">So yes, for decades there has been talk of a \u201ctwo-state solution,\u201d and many Israelis would love to see a territorial split. But, especially after October 7, the phrase stings. It reeks of three lies \u2013 the lies they tell us, the lies the world buys, and the lies we tell ourselves.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u2022 First, when Palestinian diplomats and propagandists play the two-state game, they imply that once they have their territorial share, one of two states, the conflict will be solved. But the Palestinian leadership consistently refuses even to adjust its sweeping, all-or-nothing rhetoric promising to wipe Israel off the map. The Americans worked so hard in the 1990s to get Yasir Arafat to change the PLO charter calling for Israel\u2019s destruction \u2013 and were so desperate to succeed \u2014 they overlooked what Arafat kept saying in Arabic, when he thought Bill Clinton and company weren\u2019t paying attention. Again and again, especially Arafat in 2000, Mahmoud Abbas when he rejected Ehud Olmert\u2019s compromise in 2008 and, most dramatically, Hamas in Gaza, showed no interest in a true \u201csolution\u201d that leaves Israel intact. Hamas\u2019s charter is explicit about that.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u2022 Today, the phrase is even more misleading and infuriating because it\u2019s usually used as code in the international community and certain parts of the Jewish community for \u201cIsrael, just do the right thing, give them their territory \u2018back\u2019 and we will have peace.\u201d<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>But, especially after October 7, most Israelis know that the call on the Palestinian side is a ruse. Gazans had the potential to make a state. Israel and the international community would have showered peaceful, constructive Palestinians with money. Instead, they turned their strip of land into a multi-layered stationary warship \u2013 and the international community still showered them with money.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u2022 Most upsetting, \u201cthe two-state solution\u201d represents the lies we told ourselves. Admittedly under great international pressure (don\u2019t just throw Bibi under the bus) Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel\u2019s military, diplomatic, and intelligence establishment decided that Hamas was \u201cpragmatic,\u201d Hamas could be contained. After all, no credible person could really believe the rantings in Hamas\u2019s charter using the Quaran to justify destroying Israel and killing the Jews.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">This is not to say that the problem is insoluble. At certain moments, no one imagined peace with Egypt or Jordan or the UAE. But that particular slogan is too compromised, and too associated with the lives and limbs and love and faith Israelis just lost.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Clearly, the Palestinians and their propagandists have developed a whole lexicon, a series of talking points and slogans that distorts words, negates history, and obscures Palestinian intentions. Israel went along with these lies for too long, often bullied into guilelessness by a gullible international community. October 7 was a nightmarish wake-up call. Israel must be moral \u2013 for its own sake, for its soldiers\u2019 consciences and its national soul. But the game of buying into Palestinian lies and international niceties ended when those terrorists swarmed the peaceful kibbutzim and villages, sowing death and destruction. The challenge now is creating a new reality \u2013 and a new lexicon to acknowledge that reality\u2014and build a better, fairer and genuinely safer new Middle East from there.<\/p>\n<hr dir=\"ltr\" \/>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><em><b>Professor Gil Troy<\/b>, a Senior Fellow in Zionist Thought at the JPPI, the Global Think Tank of the Jewish People, is an American presidential historian, and, most recently, the editor of the three-volume set, Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings, the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People.<\/em><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><a href=\"https:\/\/jewishjournal.com\/cover_story\/364934\/the-nine-big-lies-9-deceitful-phrases-used-against-israel-and-what-they-really-mean\/\">Published on Jewish Journal<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12299,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"tags":[380,377],"class_list":["post-12308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-gaza-war","tag-hamas","topics-middle-east","library-op-ed","library-publications"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12308"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13040,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12308\/revisions\/13040"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}