Where to Begin?
A Ten Minute Explanation of the Palestinian Issue
I engaged with someone on social media today who knows me from another sphere of my life; he was repeating the usual Israeli lies (mass rapes, headless babies in ovens, etc.) about October 7th, “How can you condone such a thing…” We had a pretty fraught public exchange but then I messaged him directly and said if he was really open-minded I was happy to give him a call sometime and share a basic outline: I just need about ten minutes.
He ended up responding positively and we have a call tomorrow. So this article will be an attempt to outline what I’d like to tell him in that time frame. It may also serve as a model for you to engage with people who are genuinely open-minded and don’t know anything beyond what the Zionist-controlled press allows them to hear.
Herzl
I’m going to explain what Zionism is and how it started in relation to the inability of Jews to integrate into Europe. I’ll note that Herzl was not tied to the idea of Palestine, and even specifically mentions Argentina in The Jewish State. But he died and the majority of Zionists wanted Palestine, so that’s where they concentrated their energies.
England
The Zionists knew they could not do this on their own, so they need a great power patron. They cultivated Great Britain via Chaim Weizmann and through American Zionism (as noted by Alison Weir in Against Our Better Judgment) a backdoor deal was made that American Zionists would push for America to intervene in WWI on the side of the Allies in exchange for something like the Balfour Declaration. I’ll note that the Balfour Declaration is absurd on its face, promising one group of people a land that belongs to another group of people, by the “authority” of a group of people that didn’t live there.
The Mandate
The British consistently favor the Zionist program throughout the Mandate for Palestine, which leads to an Arab Revolt (1936-1939) and a White Paper in which the British government are advised to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine. This White Paper (1939) is suppressed just like the King-Crane Report (1919) of a previous generation.
The War
In 1947 the UN, without any authority to do so, and in contravention of its own charter, which ostensibly upholds the rights of the majority population, offers 55% of Palestine to 30% of the population which owned only 7% of the land. This doesn’t make any sense, mathematically or morally. The Zionists are happy, as they see this merely as a transitional step. The Palestinians and the greater Arab population refuse this as unjust. Not waiting for the Mandate to end in May of the following year, the Haganah, the predecessor of the IDF, begins ethnically cleansing ostensible Palestinian citizens of the alleged new Jewish state out of their boundaries. Benny Morris estimates that 300,000 people were expelled during this time. Israeli hasbara will always tell you that “six Arab armies invaded” but firstly that’s not even true, as the Arab Legion (Jordan) and the Iraqis (commanded by the Jordanians) stayed in the West Bank as part of a previous secret deal struck with the Israelis, but even if it were true, that invasion was in response to the ethnic cleansing started by the Israelis against defenseless Palestinian civilians.
The Occupation
I figure I’ll be in my last minute here so I’ll simply note that over time Israel continues to expand its borders. To this day it has no written constitution and no declaration of its borders because it has pretensions to all the land they can grab (witness the Sinai occupation post-1967). They have brutally and immorally occupied the Palestinians, who possess a moral and legal right to resist their occupiers, by force if needs be.
The Palestinians have tried nonviolent resistance (The First Intifada, the Great March of Return) and have been ignored or murdered. The great blessing of October 7th was putting the Palestinian agenda back firmly on the world agenda, and social media has delivered the crimes of the Israelis for everyone to see. Their former stronghold on the press no longer applies.
I’ll report back on the results of this conversation with a random interlocutor from the Internet. But I hope it’s a reminder that this is how we can share Palestine’s story: one person at a time, leading with facts, turning out the lies.
#EndTheOccupation