Israel’s enemies keep demonizing Israel – and demoralizing Israel’s supporters with an arsenal of Big Lies. More and more, everyone “knows”: that Israel occupies Gaza – despite disengaging from it in 2005: that “From the River to the Sea” envisions a democratic Palestine when it envisions an exterminated Israel; and that hundreds of innocents deserved to be massacred, maimed, raped, and terrorized – because “this is what decolonization looks like.”

This primer refutes some New Big Lies against Israel-sometimes repeating material mentioned earlier.

“From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free”

If Palestine is free – meaning Jew-free – from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea – there is no room for more than seven million Israeli Jews. “From the River to the Sea,” proposes a one-state solution, meaning a no-Jewish state solution. Some Palestinians claim the slogan imagines a secular democratic state with Jews and Arabs living together. If peacefully-inclined protesters use the slogan, it’s their responsibility to distance themselves from the usual exterminationist vision – or find a different slogan.

“From the River to the Sea,” implies that every inch of Palestine is “occupied.” The cry ignores the fact that Israelis didn’t launch a colonial expedition, reaching some exotic locale in pith helmets and safari suits. The protesters reject the Jews’ status as indigenous people, still using their ancient language and ancient texts, rooted in their same ancestral land, culture, Bible. And the charge negates Jews’ deep history in the Promised Land.

The ADL – Anti Defamation League – and many mainstream, left-leaning, organizations consider the phrase “hate speech.” It violates the 1948 Genocide Convention. Article 3(c) prohibits “Direct and public incitement to commit genocide.” And tone counts. Protesters often shout the phrase venomously – while importing a bullying, autocratic, third-world street politics to campuses and city streets.

October 7 and the Iranian rocket swarm of April 13 offer clarity: if your enemy calls for your destruction – your enemy is calling for your destruction. It is bigoted not to take Islamist fundamentalists seriously, rather than condescendingly deciding they can’t really mean that. Palestine from the River to the Sea, leaves no rooms for Jews – or the Jewish State.

“Gaza is Still Occupied (After The Disengagement)”

In 2005, Israel disengaged from Gaza, uprooting over 8,500 Israeli citizens in 21 settlements – and four settlements in Samaria too. Generals lobbied to keep a strip of land for defensive purposes – the Philadelphi corridor. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon claimed that if Israel retained one grain of Gazan sand, critics would claim it was still “occupied.” And the international community promised that once Gaza was no longer occupied, Israel could live in peace as the Gazans prospered.

That word “occupation” is the keystone lie in the fight against Israel’s legitimacy. Some critics of Israel’s actions, but not its very being, use the word to describe the disputed territories since 1967. By contrast, Hamas and many other Palestinian rejectionists look at every inch of Israeli land as occupied. In its updated, supposedly more pragmatic, 2017 charter, Hamas declared “There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity. Whatever had befallen the land of Palestine in terms of occupation, settlement building, judaisation [sic], or changes to its features or falsification of facts is illegitimate… Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

So beware: When some people say “end the occupation,” they mean, “return some or all territories filled with Palestinians, taken in 1967.” When Hamas says “end the occupation” they mean “end Israel.” To some, “occupation” approaches the problem as a border dispute, open to compromise. To Hamas and its rabid supporters, “occupation” treats Israel as the problem and deserving of the death penalty.

This sweeping “occupation” claim overlooks Gaza’s complicated history with Egypt, which “occupied” Gaza in its legal limbo from 1949 until Israel seized the territory in its 1967 war of self-defense. The word “occupation,” evoking the Nazi occupation of Europe, delegitimizes Israel while legitimizing the Palestinians’ all-or-nothing “Nakba Narrative,” claiming that European Jews with no ties to the land displaced the aboriginal people – as Israel’s original sin. To many Palestinians, Israel is “occupied” – all of Israel, from the River to the Sea. All Israelis are “settlers.” The Negev’s plundered kibbutzim and invaded cities are “settlements,” despite lying in pre-1967 Israel, within the “Green Line,” the borders from the 1949 armistice with Jordan (which takes its name from a map on which the demarcation line was hastily drawn in green pencil). This sweeping big lie justify Hamas’s savagery, deeming every Israeli, every Thai volunteer, every tourist, an “occupier” and thus deserving of any violence that befalls them.

Meanwhile, that word “disengagement” explains many Israelis’ frustration with diplomacy-by-slogan. Eighteen years ago, Gaza housed some weapons, few tunnels, and a limited terrorist infrastructure, because Israel retained military control. Yet, almost immediately after disengagement, primitive Kassam rockets continued bombarding Israel as they had before – while critics bombarded Israel with the occupation charge. The violence against Israel – and the criticism – intensified when Hamas violently seized power in Gaza in 2007.

Facing an implacable foe vowing to exterminate the Jews – see the Hamas Charter – Israel blockaded a Hamas-controlled Gaza. That launched a chain-reaction of lies: that Israel “occupies” the territory it left – where Hamas built its deadly arsenal mostly unimpeded despite the “blockade”; that Gaza is the “most densely populated place on earth” – even though it doesn’t compare to Manhattan, and other super-skyscrapered city centers; and that the Zionists made Gaza an “open air prison” or concentration camp – when Egypt controls Gaza’s southern border, and keeps Gazans away from Egyptians.

Words matter. So do facts. Israel kept its promise when it disengaged. Israel betrayed many of its own citizens, who objected strenuously. Nevertheless, Israel ended up with no peace, no peace of mind, and a neighboring piece of territory that became Hamasistan. Today, Israel faces a hostile, seething, lethal multi-leveled, launching pad for thousands of rockets and marauders, exporting misery – run by fanatics who treat fellow Palestinians as cannon fodder.

“Israel is an Apartheid State”

The Jews seem to have magical magnetic powers. Over the centuries, Jews attracted various 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 happy to stand out.

Today’s haters target the Jewish state in addition to the Jews. As countries stand accused of different crimes, Israel keeps being found guilty of the trendiest and most heinous national sins – especially if Westerners committed them. Today, Israel is a Jewish-supremacist state with privilege, a settler-colonialist enterprise. In the 1990s, Israel was racist, colonialist, and imperialist – then guilty of “ethnic cleansing” once the Balkans mess introduced that phrase into the international vocabulary. But since the 1970s, as the international community justifiably denounced Apartheid South Africa, Israel has been called an Apartheid state.

Apartheid created a system of racial differentiation – apartness – based on biological classifications perversely assuming that whites, blacks, and racially mixed people were not equal. The Apartheid Wall in Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum lists 148 laws sifting people into different racial categories calibrating who deserved which privileges – and which restrictions. Israel never passed one law defining people by race.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is national not racial. Israel, like every other country, does make distinctions based on various identifying factors, including religion, national origin, and citizenship. But that’s not what racism means. Moreover, if Israel is racist, and wants Apartheid, it’s doing an awful job. Israeli-Arabs enjoy equal rights – and have served as Supreme Court judges, Knesset members, key members of the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid coalition from 2021 to 2022. With 20 percent of the population, Israeli-Arabs constitute about 20 percent of the doctors, and 40 percent of the nurses, and pharmacists. Finally, if Israelis are anti-Arab, why were so many excited about the Abraham Accords, and why are Hamas and Iran threatened by Saudi Arabia’s potential rapprochement with Israel? Maybe Israelis don’t hate Arabs – but only fight enemies who seek to destroy them. The Apartheid slur soared in popularity after 1994. Israel, seeking a two-state solution under the Oslo Peace Process, withdrew from the most populated Palestinian cities, while approving the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. While not perfect, Israel initiated many attempts at compromise and peace. Palestinians rarely reciprocated, but Israel’s initiatives have repeatedly been used against it militarily, diplomatically, and reputationally.

In 2001, the Durban World Conference against Racism in South Africa turned into an anti-Zionist hatefest. Four years later, spreading the poison, Palestinian activists launched Israeli Apartheid Week on various campuses. Why pivot your calendar around knocking others down rather than building yourselves up, many wondered. All that poison, such hostility to compromise, undergirds the October 7 savagery. As the Hamas charter proclaims, “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement….”

“Zionism is Settler-Colonialism”

The Oxford Dictionary defines colonialism as “the act of taking control of an area or a country that is not your own, especially using force, and sending people from your own country to live there.” Textbooks mention the British colonization of “North America, parts of Africa, and India” to illustrate “colonial domination.” You can dislike how Israelis treat Palestinians. You can denounce the settlements. But calling Israel a “colonialist” or “settler-colonialist” power is like calling chocolate – vanilla.

“De-colonization” has become today’s cause celebre. And Israel-bashing is trending. Naturally, fanatics caricature Israel as a “settler-colonial state.” But it mocks the facts.

Jews put the “in” in “indigenous.” Negating Jews’ historical ties to Israel cancels the Bible and Jesus’s story, dismissing the land of Israel’s centrality to Judaism for 3,500 years.

Nevertheless, many progressives use a “de-colonization” prism caricaturing Zionists as settler-colonialists, forever-oppressing, and Palestinians as the colonized, forever-blameless. This prejudice fuses the Marxist “oppressed-oppressor” binary with the psychiatrist Franz Fanon’s argument that de-colonization is a state of mind, often requiring a cleansing violence.

Rejecting the expansive, ever-growing-pie of Thomas Jefferson’s life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, people pushing the de-colonization ideology frame the world – and America – as caught in a zero-sum power struggle. The oppressive colonizers in this Manichean, black and white world, are always guilty – and the oppressed, forever pure, innocent, trampled.

Those doctrines made the October 7 bloodbath “exhilarating,” justified, or in the perverse words of Prof. Judith Butler, an act of “armed resistance.” The rhetoric suggests the settler-colonialists got what they deserved, as the decolonizers finally rose up. Seeing the world that way requires much fanaticism, many simplifications, and multiple distortions. But those blinders explain the feminists who failed to see the rape culture and child abuse, the liberals who failed to acknowledge the despotism, the humanists who failed to protest, the peace-loving students calling to destroy Tel Aviv, and threatening their dorm-mates and classmates, as Palestinian marauders crossed civilizational red lines.

“Israel is committing Genocide"

Genocide, literally tribe-killing, means a systematic series of violent acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” Yet the Palestinian population has quintupled since 1967, from just over one million to nearly five-and-a half million people. Zionists appear to be as bad at genocide as they are at Apartheid.

Hatred often involves projection – assuming your enemies would do to you what you would do to them. 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 much pro-Palestinian rhetoric.

“Disproportionate Bombing”

Asymmetrical warfare is difficult. When terrorists attack your civilians, then hide behind their own civilians, what can a democratic army do? Inevitably, some of those civilian shields will die. Moreover, when you have an air force, and must choose between bombing an enemy from the air and sending your troops in door-to-door, risking ambush, what’s the moral call? A leader’s primary moral responsibility is to the led – and a defender’s primary moral responsibility to defend those unfairly, viciously attacked.

Similarly, international law prohibits “attacks that are not directed at a specific military objective.” When an aggressor hides in mosques and hospitals and kindergartens and schools, those normally untouchable civilian spaces become legitimate military targets: emphasizing the violation of civilizational norms, call them “Ha-Mosques,” “Hamospitals” and “killergartens.” Complaining about a “disproportionate response” from a regular army when fighting terrorists embedded in a city, is essentially rejecting any military response. Yet when your enemy calls for your annihilation, tries acting on it, then vows to try again and again, it’s unrealistic to expect no collateral damage.

The moral onus for every death, injury, and misfire, falls on Hamas for initiating this round. War involves a clash of powerful, ugly forces. To win, it’s logical – and moral – for your side to mobilize as much force as possible – within the bounds of reason, but not being forever constrained, and immediately criticized, as Israel often is.

Humanitarian Ceasefire

For eighteen years, the world yelled “disproportionate bombing” and called for “humanitarian ceasefires” whenever Israel defended itself against rockets from Gaza. For eighteen years, Hamas stole much humanitarian aid sent to Gaza. After Hamas invaded, shattering so many lives, from an Israeli perspective, what would be “humanitarian” about a premature ceasefire? It’s like calling yourself “pro-peace” while tolerating a terrorist-dictatorship in Gaza that oppresses Gazans and threatens Israelis.

Most calls for “ceasefire” only target Israel. Demand a “ceasefire” from Hezbollah, from the Houthis and other Iranian proxies, and from Hamas – with a release of every hostage.

Israel’s primary obligation is to defend its citizens, and free its hostages, restoring a certain balance of fear that deters its genocidal neighbors, while rearranging the borders so a “clean” buffer zone, with no farming, no human intrusion, distances Gazans from their Israeli neighbors.

Nevertheless, for what some military experts call the first time, Israel created humanitarian corridors and distributed tons of “humanitarian aid,” including fuel which helped keep Hamas’s attack tunnels running. On October 7, Hamas terrorists kidnapped Omar Wenkert a 22-year-old suffering from colitis. His father wonders: “Why do the terrorists get aid from my country when these kidnappers won’t give my son the lifesaving medication he needs?” The dilemmas are agonizing.

Israel has tried easing the burden on innocents stuck between Hamas and the IDF – while refuting the lie that Hamas is a small, marginal group in Gaza. Most Gazans, along with as many as 72 percent of Palestinians, celebrated the carnage, and many zealously participated in it. Still, Israel keeps experimenting with ways to help, to minimize civilian suffering. External military experts acknowledged that Israel’s decision prolonged its campaign, sometimes limited its military successes, and occasionally cost Israeli lives. Unfortunately, the phrase “humanitarian aid” too often means resupplying Hamas, while “ceasefire” sounds like only pressuring Israel and letting the killers regroup.

Palestinian propagandists have developed a language that distorts words, negates history, and obscures Palestinian intentions.

October 7 was a nightmarish wake-up call. Israel must be moral – for its own sake, for its soldiers’ consciences, and its national soul. But the delusion of tolerating Palestinian lies and international gullibility ended when those terrorists swarmed Israel’s peaceful kibbutzim and villages, sowing death and destruction – and Hezbollah’s rockets started landing too. The challenge now is creating a new reality – and a new lexicon to acknowledge that reality, then build a better, fairer, and genuinely safer new Middle East for all.