I've been working on preparing a shorter version of my "Dear Humanities Students" letter, stripped down to the basic facts that I think are necessary to address the awful misinformation and twisted lies that have been circulating about Israel since long before October 7th, and have now been cemented into truths. This is a result of my promise to provide my NECA (Network of Engaged Canadian Academics) colleagues with something that could help "arm" students who want to argue against prevailing ideologies (I think we should coin the new term "idiotologies") on campuses and social media that paint Israelis as white colonialist settlers intent on a genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians on land that was never theirs. My sense is that many students -- Jewish or not -- simply don't know enough to feel comfortable putting forth some basic facts when the other side speaks so loudly and confidently. I think that's true of many non-students as well. I've talked to a lot of Jewish people who just never learned this stuff and when the rest of the world, from the politicians to the media to the so-called intelligentsia, consistently and constantly say that you're wrong, it is hard to keep standing up and insisting that you're not. So if you're among those who would like to have a better sense of how to respond to new truths with some actual truths and stop feeling like you need to agree that 2+2=5, read on -- and feel free to disseminate this as you see fit. (Also: if you've been reading my blog consistently for the past few months, most of this will look pretty familiar; apologies, I'm into recycling. There will be a new post tomorrow.)
Some important things to know about the war between Israel and Gaza
Note 1: You will be accused of bias for raising these points. Two things about this:
1) Many of the people shouting accusations at Jews and at Israel don’t understand the difference between their assumptions and opinions, and your evidence and arguments. Scholarship, and proper history-writing, is based on arguments that rest on hard evidence, and that seek to accommodate all of the evidence available, rather than only data that support a particular biased position. Opinions are based on assumptions, and don’t require proof or evidence.
2) You are biased. Everyone is. There are always multiple narratives to describe any event or idea, and everyone brings different life experiences toward their understanding of these events or ideas. Hence, everyone is biased, and there is no such thing as pure objectivity. But this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive toward the best, most balanced way of understanding ideas or events. And the way to do that is to take all available evidence into account when formulating arguments.
Note 2: What follows is NOT in ANY WAY intended as a complete overview of anything -- it is not a complete history, a complete sociology, or a complete political analysis. There is a lot more that could (and should) be said! But what follows tries to be brief and to form the core of responses one might use to address the erroneous ideas and allegations in the tidal wave of misinformation about Jews and Israel that has been unleashed following October 7th.
Definitions & Contexts
Judaism: Usually defined as a religion, Jews think of being Jewish rather as being a member of a community across space and time (going back 3000 years – some will say 4000, but as an historian I would say 2500-3000). Judaism is not a race (although the Nazis argued that Jews constitute a race, Jews are found among every race on earth), and although the basis of the shared community is usually religious, many Jews identify as such without any religious affiliation or beliefs. There is also not a single Jewish culture, though there are shared cultural characteristics among many Jewish communities historically. Three things all Jewish communities across time and space share are (a) a common set of texts that inform their ideas about how to live; (b) a sense of common ancestry and history; and (c) a belief in their origin from the land of Israel and a longing to return to it.
Zionism is a longing for a return to Zion among Jewish people historically. Not all Jews today are Zionists, but Jews have been Zionists throughout their history; meaning that they understand their origins to have been in the ancient lands of Israel and Judea (hence “Jew”), a.k.a. “Zion,” between 2500 and 3000 years ago and structure their belief system around a desire to return. Jews have lived in Israel continuously since before there was such a thing as Christianity, or such a thing as Islam. A longing for return to Zion is in the later parts of the Hebrew Bible and the theme runs through all Jewish liturgy. Modern political Zionism began as a movement in the 19th century, as Jews came to feel betrayed by broken Enlightenment promises of acceptance and equality throughout Western Europe and were under increased persecution in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The movement advocated for a return to the place of their origins, the land of Israel, and Jews began to move back there to create a haven for themselves where they could live in full equality and be safe from persecution and massacres. The Holocaust (Shoah), during which 6 million Jews were systematically executed in Europe, brought home the point to the rest of the world that the Jews needed a state of their own that would serve as a refuge from persistent Jew-hatred that has been part of the fabric of world history for as long as there have been Jews.
Zionism is not racism. In fact, if you ever travel to Israel you would see in two seconds how ludicrous that notion is. Unlike the Jews you may have met in North America, Jews in Israel reflect all the races among whom Jews have lived for the past 3000 years. Jews come in black, brown, beige, and white. There are Asian Jews, Indian Jews, and African Jews. There are also a great many Jews who lived in Arab lands for thousands of years (before they were persecuted or expelled particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries, and immigrated to Israel) who look just like other Arabs. And the non-Jewish Arabs who currently live in Israel (they make up 21% of the population) are full citizens with equal rights and privileges (more on this below).
Zionism is not colonialism. Colonialism is an outgrowth of imperialism that characterizes movements over the past 500 years, particularly by empires like Britain, France, and Spain, to colonize the new lands that they discovered and displace the indigenous inhabitants. White North Americans are likely descendants of colonialist Europeans; this is why they recite land acknowledgments at the start of every meeting or public lecture. Over the past 2800 years, Jews in Israel were colonized by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantine Christians, Roman/European Christians, Arabian Muslims, African Muslims, Ottoman Muslims, and British Christians. If Jews were ever colonizers, it was thousands of years ago when they first developed as a people. The Hebrew Bible says they came from Mesopotamia and grew as a people in the promised land. The archaeology tells a different story, and since stronger evidence is on the side of archaeology, that argument is more compelling. The archaeological evidence and the DNA evidence both point to the people of Israel actually developing out of the Canaanite peoples who lived there, who the Bible claims that they conquered. In other words, the Bible is not entirely accurate here, and Jews are originally indigenous to ancient Canaan, later known as Israel.
The land in question was called Palestine from the 2nd century CE Roman period until the 20th century British Mandate. It was named thus by the Romans as an insult to the Jews; when they expelled them, the Romans renamed the land after the ancient Jews’ biblical enemies, the Philistines – who were themselves Indo-European settler colonialists from the regions of Greece and Turkey.
Jews living in Israel are not settlers. Not only are they indigenous, but in 1947 the British occupiers of Palestine along with the newly formed United Nations (UN), divided the land between Jews and Arabs (they were all called Palestinians because they all lived in British “Palestine”) before the British withdrew. The Jews accepted this partition plan and proclaimed a new state of Israel in 1948. The Arabs did not, and waged war on the Jews to expel them. (They had tried to do this many times during the previous century, not only with the Jews who had been living there for centuries, but also because many Jews were fleeing persecution and massacres in their host countries in Europe and the Middle East and had moved to Israel under the Zionist dream. This peaked during the Nazi persecutions, although the British severely limited Jewish immigration to Palestine during this time.) The loss of the 1948 war by the Arabs came to be known as the “Nakba” meaning “disaster."
Jews living today in areas designated as Palestinian, like the West Bank, are settlers. The West Bank (i.e., west of the Jordan river) belonged to Jordan until 1967, when another attempt at eradicating the state of Israel by surrounding Arab nations failed and Israel captured the West Bank. Under previous Jordanian rule, Palestinians in the West Bank were not entitled to Jordanian citizenship but were kept in the area known as the West Bank, with the idea that when Israel was annihilated, these refugees from the 1948 war would be able to return home. But Israel remained, and thus so did the refugee cities that had been built in the West Bank. Similarly, Palestinians living in the Gaza strip prior to 1967 were under Egyptian rule. Egypt had no interest in allowing them citizenship either, and kept them in Gaza for similar reasons. Gaza was captured by Israel in the 1967 war, and when they tried to give it back to Egypt, Egypt refused to take it. Israel withdrew from Gaza completely in 2005 so that the Palestinians in Gaza could rule themselves and create the basis of a thriving, self-sustaining Palestinian state. Instead, Hamas, a government controlled by Iran, took over, appropriated billions in international aid for the creation of this state, and used it to arm themselves. They have been launching rockets on Israeli civilians continuously since 2006, and have brutally eliminated all Palestinian opposition to their totalitarian rule there.
Since 1967, many religious Jews began to settle in the area of the West Bank asserting that it was their God-given right, because this area is the heart of Judea and Samaria that the Bible says God promised to Abraham and his descendants. The majority of Israelis disagree with the policy of the current government in encouraging and protecting these settlers. You can criticize the government and the settlers, and still agree that Israel has the right to exist as a state. The religious Jews who have settled in the West Bank territories are settlers. The rest of the people in the state of Israel live on sovereign Israeli territory, granted to them by the UN under international law Resolution 242 in 1947.
Except: according to Hamas and its sympathizers, all Israelis are settlers, or settler-colonialists, because as far as they are concerned, the state of Israel has no right to exist. They believe that the entire region belongs to Islam and should remain exclusively Muslim. This is because the Muslims conquered it in the 7th century CE, and built a shrine and a mosque on the Temple Mount, on the site where the Jewish Temple stood from the 10th century BCE until the 6th century BCE, and then was rebuilt and stood until the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE.
It is important to recognize that this is the crux of the current war. Hamas and its supporters (Iran and its proxies) believe that Israel does not have the right to exist. When they talk about “the occupation” they don’t mean the area of Gaza, or the area of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). They mean the state of Israel is being “occupied” illegally – according to them – by Jews who have established a sovereign state. That’s why when people chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” most Jews take it as a call to eliminate the state of Israel and all the Jews (and Arabs and others – see below) who are citizens there. They want “Palestine” – as designated pre-1947 – to be “free” of Jews. And that’s why Jews take that as a call to kill them. Because that is in fact what it is.
Hamas is an Islamist organization. This means that it believes in a God-given mandate to govern all Muslims according to a fundamentalist interpretation of the Qur’an that requires for example that men rule over women and that homosexuals be executed. They also seek to exterminate all Jews, and to take over the world by violent force. Evidence of their genocidal mission is published in their charters online, which you can find readily and read for yourselves.
Jews and Israel are accused of “genocide.”
According to Article 6 of the Geneva Convention, genocide refers to any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, including:
Killing them; causing serious bodily or mental harm to them; deliberately inflicting on them conditions of life that will bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part; trying to prevent births within the group (e.g. forced sterilization); forcibly removing children from that group to another group.
There is simply no evidence that Israelis have ever intended to destroy Palestinians by any of these means. Israelis do not always treat Palestinians well, but that is not the same thing. And the current war in Gaza is not being waged with intent to destroy Palestinians. If Israel wanted to do that, they could have bombed all of Gaza within a few days and the Gazans would all be dead. Israel is trying to eliminate Hamas, which is why they are being as careful as possible. Collateral damage in a war of defense in which the enemy intentionally hides among civilians is unfortunately inevitable. Key to an accusation of “genocide” is the intent to destroy an entire group of people (e.g. Palestinians), not the terror organization that runs it (i.e. Hamas); as a fact of international law, collateral damage is not genocide.
A further note: Hamas has been known for decades to hide behind schools and hospitals so that as much damage can be inflicted on civilian populations as possible – this is in fact a war crime. They do this so that the world will sympathize with the Palestinians. They play on anti-Jewish sentiment that they know is alive and well in every part of the world in order to further their genocidal agenda of killing Jews because they are Jews. And when you march alongside people who chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” you are letting them know that you are perfectly ok with that agenda.
Jews and Israel are accused of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is genocide against a particular ethnic group with the goal of eliminating that group from the region (or the world) that is being “cleansed.” A good example of ethnic cleansing is Hamas’ stated mission, which is to kill Jews wherever they are found. Defending the borders of one’s sovereign state from terrorist incursions is not ethnic cleansing. Nor is it genocide.
Israel is accused of being an apartheid state. The word “apartheid” comes from the South African Afrikaans language and means “separating, setting apart.” It is a legal policy that developed in white-ruled South Africa for the purpose of separating people based on their race; in that particular case, to limit the rights and freedoms of Blacks under white rule. There are just over 7 million Jews in Israel (note: these “Jews” come in all colors and from all backgrounds, from North African to African American, from Moroccan and Yemenite to Asian and Caucasian). The other 2.5 million people who live in Israel consist of a variety of other ethnic and religious groups, with Arabs (both Christian and Muslim) comprising about 21% of the total population. These Arabs – unlike those in the Palestinian Territories or in Gaza – are full citizens of Israel. They are part of every fabric and class of Israeli society. An Arab-led party is one of the largest parties in the Israeli parliament. They serve in the army and are part of the justice system, all the way to the Supreme Court. There is nothing “apartheid” about any of this – and to label it as such denies and whitewashes the horrific suffering of Blacks under an actual apartheid South African regime that enforced racist, discriminatory laws and segregation and deprived Black people of all rights. Israeli Arabs have the same legal rights as any other citizens in Israel. Are there problems here? Are there racial tensions? Of course. We live in a world fraught with concern about the colour of people's skin and fear of those who are different from us. Look at where you live - are there problems there? Are there racial tensions? I'm willing to bet the answer is a definite yes. And just like where you live, there are good people working very hard -- many devoting their entire lives -- to enforce the equality for all that is guaranteed under the law of the land. (A law, by the way, that does not exist under Hamas rule in Gaza.)
In fact, when polled, 77.4% of Arab Israeli citizens claimed they would not move to a Palestinian state should one be formed. In other words, they feel that things are better for them in Israel than they would be in a self-governing Palestinian state if a 2-state solution were to be pursued. I often wonder how supporters of the “Free Palestine” movement around the world might feel about that fact.
A quick FYI about the creation of Israel and the rest of the modern Middle East:
Like Israel, all of the states of the modern Middle East are 20th century creations of the British and French. After World War I, Syria came under French rule and they split Lebanon off as a separate entity. Iraq became a kingdom and incorporated previously smaller states that included populations of Kurds, Assyrians, and Turkmens. Palestine was under British control, along with what would later become Trans-Jordan and then Jordan. Most of the Arabian peninsula, previously divided among a variety of tribes, was given to British ally Ibn Saud who founded the new kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The kingdom of Egypt was created and granted independence from Britain in 1922, although the British occupied it right through World War II. It wasn’t until during and after World War II that the modern states of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Israel became independent self-ruling entities.
Basic message I try to get across to people:
If you are ok with the way that the allied nations/UN divided up and created the states in the Middle East in the 20th century, and you therefore agree that Israel has a right to exist as a democratic Jewish state on the tiny sliver of land (check a map) allocated to them by the UN in the midst of vastly larger mostly theocratic Muslim states (22 nations), and you also believe that Palestinians should live free lives with equal rights and human dignity, then you and I agree. Supporting Hamas, or defending what they did on October 7th as justified resistance against occupation is an erroneous conflation of the idea of freeing Palestinians, with misinformation about what Zionism is, what Israel is, and the basic political realities of the region. Instead you should be fighting for the Palestinians to be freed from oppression by Hamas and for Israelis and Palestinians to sit down together – after Hamas has been eliminated – and work out a viable two-state solution that guarantees both Israel’s security and Palestinian rights and freedoms.
Some sites for further information:
https://www.ajc.org/news/7-ways-hamas-has-conned-americans-and-spread-hatred-of-jews
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/
Good centrist news site for info on what’s going on in Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/
Instagram accounts my daughter finds helpful:
@rootsmetals — She posts educational articles on Jewish history and Israel and cites her sources. For non-followers of hers who need to unlearn their antizionism and antisemitism before being exposed to Jewish and Israeli history, I would suggest you first look at her posts on the UNRWA, Al Jazeera, the @/feminist instagram account, and Ilhan Omar.
@realbassemeid — Palestinian peace activist, political analyst, and journalist in East Jerusalem. He has some great insights into the realities of being a Palestinian in Israel.
@muhammadzoabi98 — queer Arab-Israeli who speaks out against both the current Israeli government and the propaganda being spread on social media re the conflict
@levantine_gay — queer Palestinian living in a refugee camp in Lebanon
@politicaljew — Jewish & Armenian, advocates for various causes
@peacecomms — their series “Whispered in Gaza” allows Gazans to speak about life under Hamas, despite Hamas’s communications blockade. For those (rightly) wary of its authenticity, check out @rootsmetals’ post “Whispered in Gaza part two”
@jvparody — exposes antisemitic “Jewish” organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as popular antisemitic “woke” social media counts
@lanimekeel — Native American & Jewish woman with an interesting perspective on Jewish indigeneity to Israel and the hypocrisy of antizionist Native Americans & other Indigenous peoples
@lalshareef — a Muslim advocate in the UAE for peace between Jews and Muslims, educator on history
@blackjewishmagic — Ethiopian Israeli Jewish woman fighting in Israel right now
@awiderframe — sharing and boosting content related to the war and antisemitism around the world
@evebarlow — Jewish journalist of music and culture who speaks out on antisemitism around the world, and the antisemitic biases of popular journalism
@unitednationswatch —fact-checks the UN and calls out its problems
@matthiewnouriel — queer Jewish Iranian, activist
@henmazzig — activist, founder of @telavivinstitute
@elianajolkovsky — Jewish & Korean social activist
@adielofisrael — Israeli creator with a background in middle eastern history
@elicalebon — Iranian activist who talks about western performative activism and reminds both sides of the conflict to keep humanity at the forefront of all thoughts