Debunking nonsense Zionist claims on the history of Palestine

reading time ~21 mins

Related article: Nonsense Zionist claims on Gaza

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1. Children of Israel are God’s chosen people❌ 
2. We are the natives – our ancestors lived in Israel 2,000 years ago❌
3. Palestine never existed or was empty before 20th century❌
4. If there is no Israel then Jews will have existential crisis – no other place is safe❌
5. UK gifted Palestine to Israel❌
6. United Nations gifted us Israel❌
7. Israel has the right to defend itself❌
8. The Arabs started the 1948 war with Israel (Naqba)❌
9. The Arabs started the 6 day war in 1967 or Israel had existential crisis before 1967 war❌
10. Palestinians do not want a Two-State solution & live with us peacefully❌
11. Resources on Palestine
    1. Books
    2. Videos
       1. Short (up to ~5 mins)
       2. Medium (up to ~20 mins)
       3. Long (~20 mins+)
    3. Humanitarian Organization Views on Israel Palestine

Children of Israel are God’s chosen people❌ 

1. The modern Zionists claim that they are chosen by God based on ethnicity or ancestry either because they have ancestry from Prophet Israel (Yaqub عَلَیهِ‌السَّلام) or they are the ethnic natives of the kingdom of Israel or Judea 
2. This claim is incorrect and invalid
3. Ancestry does not make anyone special, rather good deeds & piety do
4. The children of Israel were chosen in the past as those who were given revelation and Prophets (again and again)
5. The only way they can be chosen today is by submitting to the will of God. After the appearance of the final messenger (Muhammad ﷺ), they must accept him as the final messenger (Quran 2:89) (Quran 5:68) (Quran 48:13)
6. If they disobey, rebel, commit injustice and oppression they are no longer chosen people (Quran 2:122-124) (Quran 3:110)
7. Additionally, many Zionists including the founder Theodor Herzl are Atheists. Isn’t it ridiculous that  Atheists (who do not believe in God) believe that God chose them & Palestine is promised to them by God?

We are the natives – our ancestors lived in Israel 2,000 years ago❌

1. This claim is illogical, illegal and invalid
2. Scientists believe that all humans originated from Africa anthropologically, does that mean we can all go to Africa now & claim to be natives there?
3. NO other people have made this claim. No one can claim to be from a land 2,000 years ago. How can one prove this? 
4. With this logic, all white people from America, Canada, South Africa and Australia need to return to Europe because they are not the natives of those lands
5. No court of law will accept this claim in today’s secular world
6. How many Israeli occupiers and settlers have had DNA tests tracing their ancestry back to ancient Israel and how many are actually European?
   1. The DNA of most of the European settlers is from the Caucus and not Canaanite
   2. Even if they are from the Palestinian lands, the Arabs living there are their cousins. What gives them the right to oppress, mass murder and displace the locals? 
   3. It’s ironic that White Europeans from the Caucas call descendants of semitic people from Canaan “anti-semite”
   4. Majority of Palestinians are of Jewish descent (their ancestors converted to Christianity/Islam) ethnically they are more Jewish than the Europeans / Americans who created Israel (if being Jew is about ethnicity & not religion)
7. Israel claims legitimacy to Palestinian land based on the historic existence of the Kingdom of Israel which lasted only 120 years, over 3,000 years ago. The Romans ruled ancient Britain for almost 400 years, 2,000 years ago. Does that give Italians a greater right to lay claim to the UK?
8. Jews inhabited the area as a majority from 1250 BC till 129 AD (when Hadrian expelled them) (Total of ~1380 years). They didn’t become a majority again until after 1948. 129 till 1948 is ~1820 years. Thus, historically Jews spent more time OUT than IN Palestinian land as a majority (X) 

Palestine never existed or was empty before 20th century❌

1. Palestinian people have inhabited the region of Palestine over the millennia
2. There are books written about this e.g.
   1. “Palestinians are the descendants of all the indigenous peoples who lived in Palestine over the centuries; since the seventh century, they have been predominantly Muslim in religion and almost completely Arab in language and culture” Dowty, Alan (2008). Israel/Palestine. London, UK: Polity. p. 221. ISBN 978-0-7456-4243-7. Archived from the original on 29 November 2023. Retrieved 29 November 2023 
   2. “People know who they are, where they live, and where their families have lived for centuries or millennia” Wilmer, Franke (15 January 2021). Breaking Cycles of Violence in Israel and Palestine: Empathy and Peacemaking in the Middle East which quotes about them
3. There have been articles published about this e.g.
   1. “The Palestinians are an Arab people, largely Moslem but with important numbers of Christians, who live in, once lived in, or trace their descent through parents or grandparents to the land once known as Palestine, which came under a British mandate in 1922 and now is the land of Israel, the West Bank of the Jordan and the Gaza Strip.” “Palestine Nationalism: A. Search for Roots”. The New York Times. 19 February 1978. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived
4. There are videos of Jerusalem from 1900s e.g.
   1. Palestine Jerusalem 1897
   2. Palestine Jerusalem 1900-1918
   3. Palestine 1920
   4. https://x.com/ammar_h_hamdan/status/1747042974695837854?s=46 
5. There are coins, passports, human testimonies in video, etc
6. For Population figures on Palestine in late 19th and early 20th century, the best source is Justin McCarthy, “The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate”

If there is no Israel then Jews will have existential crisis – no other place is safe❌

1. a claim to have own land is legitimate but not at the cost of displacing and killing others 
2. Jews have lived without a land for ~2,000 years already 
3. ~50% Jews even today do NOT live in Israel (timeofisrael) (jewish agency)
4. Isn’t it insulting for the rest of the world when Jews say that they are not safe outside Israel? Are they accusing the entire globe of anti-semitism?
5. They have always lived with Muslims peacefully until Zionism started
6. Muslims did not have problems with the Jews in Palestine. The unrest started with the arrival of Zionists with settler colonial agenda
7. Jews have lived in Turkish lands (Anatolia) since at least the beginning of the common era
8. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, many Sephardic Jews from Spain, Portugal and South Italy expelled by the Alhambra Decree found refuge across the Ottoman Empire, including in regions now part of Turkey
9. In early 1900 there were ~3% Arabic speaking Jews in Palestine. There was no case of massacre or murder at this time 

UK gifted Palestine to Israel❌

1. What right does the UK have to give Palestine to anyone?
2. If France invaded Germany in World War II. Can they give it to the British because they are allies? 
3. Will Germans accept that they are second class citizens in their own country? 
4. Historically, England did three simultaneous agreements
   1. 1915-16 Hussein-McMahon Correspondence: England openly promised the Arabs (Sharif of Makkah) independence from the Ottomans. If he fought against the Ottomans, he would have the entire land from Iraq to Tunisia. The Arabs started fighting against Ottomans (starting the attack in Madina). (Hussein-McMahon correspondence)
   2. 1916 Sykes Picot: England also secretly agreed to Sykes Picot (England, French and Russian division of the muslim land). This was a hidden agreement where they divided the lands amongst each other. This was after world war 1. According to Sykes Picot agreement, Palestine would have had been under independent mandate and no single nation from UK, FR, RU would have complete control over it. (Sykes Picot)
   3. 1917 Balfour Declaration: England did another even more secret agreement called the Balfour declaration. The foreign minister of England, promised Zionists that we will give Palestine to them (Balfour declaration)
5. The Balfour declaration was racist because Europeans (and British) did not want Jews in Europe. And they did not see Arabs as equal humans. Zionism was a double advantage for Europeans (to stop Jewish refugees from Russia, and to remove Jewish people from Europe and send them to Palestine)
6. Arthur Balfour was a Christian Zionist. He did not want Jews in Europe, this is why he supported the Zionist project. The British saw a double advantage first to stop Russian Jewish refugees from coming to Europe by legislating aliens act in 1905 in British parliament. Second, to remove jews in Europe and send them to Palestine with Balfour Declaration in 1917
7. Christian Zionism can be defined as Christian support for the Zionist cause — the return of the Jewish people to its biblical homeland in Israel. It is a belief among some Christians that the return of Jews to Israel is in line with a biblical prophecy, and is necessary for Jesus to return to Earth as its king

United Nations gifted us Israel❌

1. The UN has NO right to give land to another population when natives are already living there for centuries. This goes against the inalienable right of self determination of the native people
2. After WWI, Palestine was placed under a League of Nations mandate. In normal circumstances, Palestine’s indigenous population, as in all other League mandates, should have attained independence.  But—exceptionally—the mandate also validated a Jewish claim to Palestine. After WWII, the U.N. General Assembly endorsed the division of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state (Article by Norman Finkelstein)
3. After two years of existence on 29 Nov 1947 with Resolution 181 the United Nations without consulting the local Arabs divided the land into three separate areas.
   1. 56% (14,100 square kilometres) given to European Zionists
   2. 42% (11,100 square kilometres) given to Arabs
   3. 2% as independent cities of Jerusalem
   4. (Galina Nikitina, The State of Israel: A Historical, Economic and Political Study / By Galina Nikitina / 1973, Progress Publishers / p. 56.)
4. The Arab delegates at the UN challenged this. They said this goes against your own constitution. The UN constitution itself says that the right of determination cannot be taken away from any nation. UN said we will stop colonisation but this never happened
5. In the ensuing 1948 war (which Israel started), the Israeli army conquered 78% of Palestine and effectively expelled the overwhelming majority of the indigenous Palestinian population from the territory under its rule. The West Bank and Gaza fell outside Israeli jurisdiction. A Jewish state came into being, the Arab state did not (Article by Norman Finkelstein)
6. US keeps doing colonisation even with the existence of UN just indirectly with their vetoes and proxy nations like Israel

Israel has the right to defend itself❌

1. NO one has the right defend what they have stolen
2. Israel has stolen enormous land after 1948 & 1967 against UN defined borders (which are questionable already as shown earlier)
3. You cannot steal someone else’s house or car, and when they try to get it back, say that you have a right to defend yourself
4. The occupier does NOT have a right to defend his occupying position
5. Where is this right codified in law? Does international law allow this?
6. This is lawlessness or law of the jungle – to steal with force then defend with more force
7. In fact, Palestinians have a legal right to armed resistance. According to UN General Assembly Resolution 45/130 quote “2. Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle;”

The Arabs started the 1948 war with Israel (Naqba)❌

1. The Zionists before the formation of Israel wanted as much of Palestinian land as possible with as little Palestinians in it as possible 
2. Palestine had been governed by Great Britain since 1922. Since that time, Jewish immigration to the region had increased (rose from 11% in 1922 to ~32% in 1947), and tensions between Arabs and Jews had grown. 
3. In April 1947, exhausted by World War II and increasingly intent upon withdrawing from the Middle East region, Britain referred the issue of Palestine to the UN. (Britannica) 
4. The UN on (29 Nov 1947 with Resolution 181) decided to give the majority (56%) of the land to the Jewish people (even though they were a minority 32%).  The UN was a newly formed 2 year old organisation at the time (formed in Oct 1945). This decision was unfair on the native population, whose inalienable right to self determination was stolen from them (population figures)
5. By 1947, only ~7% land was owned by migrant Zionists (Palestine Remembered)
6. The Zionists accepted the UN resolution but wanted more land
7. Even in the land that was wrongfully given to the Zionists by UN the Jews were a minority (32% population in 1947 owning ~7% of the land of Palestine)
8. They wanted to form a Jewish state with democracy but this was impossible in a short period of time – the only solution they had was ethnic cleansing, mass displacement and massacres
9. The Zionist politicians and militias were already contemplating & planning mass displacements after the mid 1930s, and especially after World War II in 1940’s 
10. In March 1948 they decided to start mass expulsions (this is 2 months before the May 1948 war when Arabs entered). The massacres lead up to the Naqba 
11. The Palestinians started gathering in neighbouring Arab lands sharing horrible experiences of massacres & mass displacement. The Deir Yassin massacre from 9. April 1948 was broadcasted across the Arab world. Arab governments were pressured by their people to stop the massacres & mass displacements and refugees being pushed into their countries
12. Jaffa and Haifa were de-Arabised in April 1948 (long before Arab armies entered Palestine)
    • Haifa had 75,000 Palestinians – within 2 days on 2,000 were left in April
    • Jaffa had 45,000 Palestinians – within 10 hours only 3,000 were left after the expulsions in April
13. Before 15 May 1948 Israeli Jews poisoned the water of Akka (Acre) to make the locals surrender, and red cross reported this to UN (British doctors were infected)
14. It was a strategic and intentional effort to get rid of the natives of Palestine. This was not something that the local Arabs started
15. The Arabs were reluctant to participate in the war (Egypt only agreed in parliament two days before 15 May 1948 to participate and sent weak soldiers from the muslim brotherhood prisoners). Jordan had agreements to have limited participation due to annexation of West Bank
16. Eventually Arabs entered to help the Palestinians however they were weak
17. There were more Israeli soldiers than Arab soldiers. Israeli army was far better equipped and trained
18. After the war, the Zionists took over 78% of the land (since they wanted more land to begin with anyway after the UN resolution) & stole everything in it
19. They stole money, land, machinery, crops & properties of the natives
20. Hundreds of villages were displaced and between 700,000- 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed outside from their homes
21. The Zionists went from owning 7% land in 1947 to 78% in May 1948

Jewish Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe has spent his life studying the events of 1948. 

His PhD from Oxford university is on the topic which started in 1980. He has studied the British, American, Israeli & UN archives with meticulous detail

• Under secrecy law documents are declassified after 30 years. They were only available after 1978
• Ilan Pappé (2006), The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld Oxford. ISBN 978-1-85168-555-4 

The Arabs started the 6 day war in 1967 or Israel had existential crisis before 1967 war❌

1. The Arabs did NOT start the 6 day war in 1967
2. Israel had NO existential threat in 1967
3. Miko Peled is an Israeli author who is the son of the Israeli General Mattityahu Peled, who was an Army General in the 1967 war 
4. Miko has Meeting Minutes from the discussion between the Generals before the war
5. They started the war because they knew that Arab armies were weak and they wanted to take more land
6. The meeting minutes are cited in the book “The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine”
7. There is an article in LA Times on this or you can watch a video about it here
8. This lie has also been debunked by other historians e.g. Ilan Pappe

Palestinians do not want a Two-State solution & live with us peacefully❌

1. This is false. It is Israel that keeps rejecting the two-state solution 
2. UN Security Council Resolution 242 in 1967, Resolution 338 in 1973 & dozens other resolutions since then have been promoting a two-state solution. Israel has repeatedly rejected them
3. The manifesto of Likud party says “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty” (Likud Party Original Party Platform 1977)
4. Israeli politicians regularly use the phrase “Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea there will be only one state, which is Israel” e.g. Menachem Begin, Uri Ariel, Netenyahu (Source)
5. 1976: The PLO supported a UN security council resolution which called for a two-state solution. Israel was furious. Israel refused to even attend the meetings. Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin said we would never negotiate with Palestinians. The USA vetoed the resolution
6. 1988: Palestinian national council formally proposed a two-state settlement. Yitzhak Shamir said there can be no additional Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan (they considered Jordan Palestine and nothing more will be Palestine. The USA endorsed this 
7. 1993: Oslo accords were a great defeat for Palestinians. They gave up everything. The final outcome at the end of the process will be based on security resolutions 242 and 338. Palestinians get nothing. Arafat was losing internal support and did this to get more support. The USA welcomed it. Israel PM Yitzhak Rabin said that this will not affect settlement project and they never stopped building settlements in West Bank

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