Let's debunk the myths of Israel

Miko Peled, an American Israeli activist had decided to look into the Israeli army archives as he was interested in the minutes of the meeting leading up to the 1967 war. He saw something he hadn’t seen anywhere else. Israelis attacked the Egyptian army as they were not prepared for war. They had a tremendous opportunity to destroy the Egyptian army once again. This debunks the myth that the Arab countries attacked Israel. It was Israel who had started the war. Once the conquest of the West Bank was complete, forced expulsions of Palestinians and the settlement of Jews were almost immediate. Billions of dollars were invested in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to settle Jews there in contravention of international law. Palestinians are not allowed to live in Jewish-only settlement towns, access significant portions of Palestinian agricultural lands, drive highways reserved for settlers or attend segregated schools that Israel built in the West Bank. Palestinians receive only a fraction of the water allocated to Israelis, and they endure discriminatory laws.

There's a popular view among Americans that Palestinians have rejected nonviolent resistance, and that if only they took up the lessons of nonviolent Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi, then that would bring the conflict to an end. This is wrong because there are lots of Palestinians who have used, and continue to use, nonviolence to organize against the Israeli occupation. They consistently fail, because they are ignored, because they're put down by Israeli security forces, or because they lose momentum against the overwhelming force of the occupation itself. watch a nonviolent Palestinian campaign unfold, and mostly fail, right before your eyes in the award-winning 2011 documentary Five Broken Cameras, filmed by a Palestinian man as his village tried to stop Israel from building a wall that would cut off villagers from their olive groves.

The commonly expressed view among Palestinians is not that they wish to see all Jews driven into the sea; it's that they want just and fair treatment of Palestinians, which they see as requiring that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories end (and, for many, that Palestinian refugees and their descendants be allowed to return to their former homes in what is now Israel). They are outraged about the costs occupation imposes on Palestinians, and have next to no faith that Israel will withdraw or generally do the right thing. They believe Israelis will never voluntarily allow them a state.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is a very modern phenomenon. It didn't formally begin until 1948, or at the earliest, you might say in the early 1900s. That's still a very long conflict, but it's about 100 years at most, significantly less than the 3,000 years you hear people cite.

It is true that Israelis are mostly Jewish and Palestinians are mostly Muslim, but religion is pretty low on the list of direct drivers of the conflict. This is not, despite what your grade school teacher may have suggested, a clash between Judaism and Islam over religious differences. It's a clash between nationalities — Israeli and Palestinian — over secular issues of land and nationhood. This gets to a bigger misconception: that the conflict is between Jews and Muslims over religion. In fact, those two religious groups have been coexisting in the region, for the most part peacefully, since Islam was first born in the seventh century.

What matters is not whether the present Jews in Israel are the authentic descendants of those who lived in the Roman era, but rather the state of Israel’s insistence that it represents all the Jews in the world and that everything it does is for their sake and on their behalf. Until 1967, this claim was very helpful for the state of Israel. Jews around the world, in particular in the United States, became its main supporters whenever its policies were questioned. However, even there, as well as in other Jewish communities, this clear association is nowadays challenged. Zionism was originally a minority opinion among Jews

Palestine was not an empty land. It was part of a rich and fertile eastern Mediterranean world that in the nineteenth century underwent processes of modernization and nationalization. It was not a desert waiting to come into bloom. It was a pastoral country on the verge of entering the twentieth century as a modern society, with all the benefits and ills of such a transformation. Its colonization by the Zionist movement turned this process into a disaster for the majority of the native people living there.