The most common arguments Zionists use to justify colonizing Palestine, & how to debunk them

The poster above reads “Gaza will triumph over the annihilation”

This is a relatively short version of an essay that’s over 4000 words long. I wrote that essay in response to the recent newspaper letter from Shalom Humboldt, the Zionist group which has sought to defend Palestine’s colonization to my local community. To make my arguments more accessible, I’ve put together a concise list of the assertions this letter makes, next to summaries of why these assertions are false. This can serve as a handy guide to countering many of the narratives Zionists use to try to discredit the Palestinian liberation cause.

“Zionism is nothing but the belief that Jews deserve to live in that part of the world”

The problem with this idea is that in practice, Zionism has never looked like simply a peaceful project to have Jews live in Palestine. Theodore Herzl, Zionism’s founder, stated that “The Jews who wish for a State will have it. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes.” The minds behind Zionism envisioned a Jewish state, and in order to get this state there would need to be an effort at pushing out the Palestinians. This is what David Ben-Gurion concluded when he said that “There can be no stable and strong Jewish State so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 percent.”

“Israel gives its Arab citizens full and equal rights”

There are dozens of discriminatory laws within the Zionist state, which limit the Palestinian citizens in terms of housing options, land rights, political speech, and other aspects of life. There’s also a normalization of individual discriminatory behavior towards Arabs, which restricts them when in areas like employment. It parallels the United States of the Jim Crow era, where even when discrimination wasn’t officially part of the laws, the system enabled whites to target Black people.

“The Arab states invaded Israel in 1948 just because a Jewish state had been formed”

The Arab countries that participated in the intervention never crossed into the territories which the U.N. had designated as Jewish land. They only got militarily involved within the lands that were designated for the Palestinians, but that the Zionist state had decided to take for itself anyway. As part of this effort to seize more than it was supposed to have, the Zionist state was forcibly relocating the Palestinian residents, as well as crossing into the borders of its neighbors. Its neighbors responded by defending themselves, as well as the Palestinians who the Zionist state was making into refugees.

“The Palestinian side has rejected all offers for having a state of its own”

There wasn’t a real breakthrough on negotiations towards a two-state solution until 1995, with the second Oslo Accords. The Zionist state promised a Palestinian state after five years, but it didn’t fulfill this promise, so in 2000 new negotiations were arranged. Then these negotiations fell apart, because the Palestinians weren’t actually offered a state; they were asked to accept a “state” that didn’t control its own airspace, didn’t have its own military, and could be invaded by the Zionist state at any time. These are among the many other unreasonable demands that the Israelis placed upon the Palestinians, who weren’t going to accept a “state” that wasn’t sovereign.

“‘From the river to the sea’ is a call for murdering Jews”

Shalom Humboldt doesn’t try to provide evidence for this assertion, because there is no evidence to point to. It’s a claim that’s lacking in any historical or current basis, so there’s no concrete example one can point to in which “From the river to the sea” has served as a call for genocide. And Hamas, the leading Palestinian resistance organization, has stated that its “conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.” Which means that when protesters borrow Palestinian resistance slogans like this one, they aren’t borrowing from a political force that’s motivated by anti-Jewish hate.

“Hamas steals aid, uses Gaza’s people as human shields, & tortures hostages”

Like with the last claim, none of these assertions have any real evidence behind them. And we know this because of how thoroughly Hamas and the Gaza strip have been investigated by the globe’s human rights organizations. Gaza has been more extensively scrutinized by these groups than any other place on earth, and the investigators have consistently found that the Zionist state is the one responsible for Gaza’s desperate conditions. They’ve also been unable to find proof of Hamas strategically placing civilians in between itself and the IDF, or proof that Hamas has committed sexual violence. Entities like the United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch lack any real incentive for covering up evidence of Hamas abuses, because these entities largely exist as extensions of American soft power. Yet they can’t confirm the atrocity stories that the U.S. is using to justify its support for the Zionist state.

These arguments that Shalom Humboldt has put forth are the ones which Zionists most commonly use. The effect they have is to distract from the extermination effort that our government is facilitating in Gaza, and now increasingly the West Bank as well. In Humboldt and all other areas, we must work to spread the real story about Palestine, and not let Zionism’s falsehoods go unchallenged.

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