By ZACHARY GITTRICH

In an article published in The Community Word titled “Gaza must be free from Hamas” (December, 2023), author Susan Katz provided “Historical context” to the ongoing conflict. Unfortunately, this history was filled with misinformation, facts out of context, or straight-up fictions. Such revisionism supports harmful narratives against Palestinians and makes any long-term solution to the conflict impossible.

1. Jews have lived in Israel for at least 3,000 years

Jews are indigenous to this territory. However, from the first to the fifth century C.E., Jews were increasingly dispersed throughout the world until they became a minority in Palestine by the Muslim conquest in the seventh century. By 1878, under Ottoman rule, Jews in Palestine made up no more than 3% of the population. These Palestinian Jews opposed the efforts of Zionists to create a Jewish ethno-state in Palestine because it caused tensions between Jews and Arabs.

2. There were no people who referred to themselves as Palestinians

This area had been referred to as Palestine since Roman times. After the French revolution, ideas of national identity and nation-states were exported throughout the world including to the Ottoman Empire. The Turks, who ruled the empire, began to develop their own national identity which alienated their Arab subjects in other parts of the empire. While there was a pan-Arabic movement, this was made up of culturally distinct Arab groups that did not see themselves as the same as other Arabs. This is true of Arab Palestinians, who saw themselves as a distinct people by the 1880s. They had their own unique Arabic dialect, customs, rituals, and world maps designated this territory as Palestine long before the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

3. 1947 United Nations Partition plan

• In 1947, only six out of 57 nations in the United Nations were Arab.
•  The Palestinians were never consulted about the Partition Plan.
•  The plan gave 56% of the land to the Jews who made up only 33% of the population;
  the Arabs received 43% of the land while being 67% of the population.
•  David Ben-Gurion and other architects of Israel always planned to take as much land as possible (they even lamented not taking all of it after the 1948 war which gave them 78% of the land).

4. During the 1948 war, Arabs were instructed to leave by Arab leadership

This was a fiction invented by Ben-Gurion in 1967. There’s no evidence this instruction ever occurred. Prior to a single Arab army entering Palestine in May 1948, 300,000 Arab Palestinians had already been expelled from the land, a little less than half of the 750,000 expelled in what is called the Nakba. Ethnically cleansing the land of Arab Palestinians had been the plan of Zionists since 1937 by Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson. They originally hoped the British would help them accomplish this, but the British had no interest in doing so (since the Arab population was the overwhelming majority). Ethnic cleansing of the non-Jewish population was essential to the creation of a Jewish state which is overwhelmingly Jewish. This demographic superiority guides Israeli policy like the North Star guided ships on the high seas. About 150,000 Arab Palestinians remained in Israel after the Nakba; they were kept under military rule with no rights until 1967 and are the ancestors of today’s Arab Israelis.

5. After the 1948 war, 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries for being Jews

It’s undeniable many Jews were expelled during this period from Arab countries in anti-Semitic pogroms. These attacks were unjustifiable as the Jews in these lands were not responsible for the actions of the Zionists in Israel. The difference between the Jewish refugees and Palestinian refugees post-’48 is that Israel paid for Jews to emigrate to Israel and provided them land and homes (Israel offers this welfare program to any Jew in the world to this day); the expelled Palestinians had no such privileges and most were left stateless and landless (with the exception of those in the West Bank who gained Jordanian citizenship). Many Jews did choose to leave Arab countries and make Aliyah to Israel because of the welfare provided by Israel. It’s also said that the Mossad (Israel’s CIA) covertly bombed several synagogues in Iraq to cause panic amongst the Jewish population and increase their emigration.

6. There have been several attempts to destroy Israel by war; Israel has been willing to give back land for peace

In 1956, Israel illegally invaded Egypt at the behest of the United Kingdom and France in order to seize control of the Suez Canal and deny Egypt’s right to control its own ports. The United States had to force Israel to back down, and the crisis was a humiliation for the U.K. and France. In 1967, after a shipping dispute with Israel regarding the Straits of Tiran, Israel attacked Egypt, first destroying its entire air force. Ultimately, Israel annexed East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and Gaza from Egypt while occupying the entire Sinai Peninsula for years. Israel forced out 117,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights after the ’67 war. It wasn’t until the 1973 Yom Kippur war that Egypt regained control of the Sinai. In 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a campaign to reclaim their stolen land. The war was only a month long but began negotiations to return the Sinai which occurred in 1978. By every metric, Israel has been one of the most belligerent nations in the Middle East.

7. In 2005, Israel withdrew its military and Jewish families from Gaza, hoping the withdrawal would lead to peace

This had nothing to do with peace (quite the opposite), but Israel’s age-old obsession: demographic superiority. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s deputy leader Ehud Olmert said publicly in a 2003 interview with Haaretz:

“There is no doubt in my mind that very soon the government of Israel is going to have to address the demographic issue with the utmost seriousness and resolve. This issue above all others will dictate the solution that we must adopt. In the absence of a negotiated agreement — and I do not believe in the realistic prospect of an agreement — we need to implement a unilateral alternative … More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against ‘occupation,’ in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle — and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state … the parameters of a unilateral solution are: To maximize the number of Jews; to minimize the number of Palestinians … [it] would inevitably preclude a dialogue with the Palestinians for at least 25 years.” [emphasis added]

Elections were held in the annexed Palestinian territories in January 2006. The right-wing, theocratic Palestinian-nationalist organization Hamas barely won a plurality of votes 44.5% to Fatah’s 41.4%. Unhappy with the election results, the George W. Bush administration launched a CIA-backed coup to place Fatah in power. It failed, and Hamas gained control of Gaza, while Fatah maintained control of the West Bank. Israel immediately blockaded Gaza. From 2008-2009, Israel destroyed most of Gaza’s industrial capacity and used Palestinians as human shields according to a U.N. investigation. For sixteen years, Israel has occupied the Gazan border, airspace, coastline, access to natural resources, meddled with trade agreements between Gaza and other countries, and largely prevented Palestinians from entering or leaving Gaza. Israel has limited food supplies sent into Gaza, allowing only the minimum amount of food to feed the population.

At the same time, Israel has maintained an apartheid system of discrimination against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Syrians in the Golan Heights. There are currently 8,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. Many are under indefinite detention, the rest “convicted” with no due process.

The Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7th, 2023, by Hamas and other militants was a crime against humanity. But revisionist narratives only serve to galvanize and radicalize factions on both sides. The Nazi Holocaust did not justify the Nakba. The Nakba did not justify Jewish expulsion from the Middle East. Jewish expulsion did not justify system of apartheid. The apartheid system does not justify the murder of 766 civilians in Israel on Oct. 7th. And October 7th does not justify the 20,000 civilian deaths in Gaza since Oct. 7th and the starvation of a population of almost 2 million people.

— Zachary Gittrich is a writer from Peoria