1.  There is no such country as Palestine.

The sources mentioned below demonstrate that Palestine was known by its name as far back as the Pharos and continued to be known by that name throughout history.

Herodotus

Aristotle

St. Jerome (4th century monk)

Shakespeare Othello

1852 Biblical Researches of Palestine

Monticello, Thomas Jefferson estate, a map showing Palestine.

Palestine pictorial Bible, 1906

Palestine, A Four-Thousand-Year History, Nur Masalha

2.  Israel Has a right to exist

The concept of a state's "right to exist" is not recognized in international law. Legally speaking, states do not have rights; people do. States are institutions that often change, evolve and even disappear.

3.  Israel has a right to defend itself

A state which is also an occupying power’s right to self-defense is heavily constrained under international humanitarian law. The primary duty of any state is to protect its population and particularly an occupied population.

4.  Israel is the only safe haven for Jewish people.

Israel is not safe for Jewish people any more than other countries. The connection of Jewish people to the Holy Land is one of worship, not sovereignty, and when the claims for sovereignty began with the advent of Zionism, violence erupted.

For thousands of years, Jewish people have been citizens of the countries in which they lived and thrived.  Today Jewish people are safe even in places like Iran, even when attacked by Israel. Israeli Jews, however, constantly need to worry about their own safety. Rabbi Elhonon Beck who lives in London said recently in an interview: “I have never seen a British soldier. My children have never seen a gun. Our neighbors are Muslims and Arabs, and we never had any problem, in fact we live as neighbors in harmony.” That cannot be said about Israeli Jews. Currently, tens of thousands Jewish citizens of Israel beaten and arresting for refusing to serve in the Israeli military.

5.  Hamas and Hezbollah use civilian infrastructure to operate their terrorist attacks.

The Israeli army headquarters, Rabin Military Compound, is in the heart of downtown Tel-Aviv, surrounded by civilians and civilian infrastructure. This is true for many of its large military bases. The US largest navy and Marines bases are right in the heart of the city of San Diego, surrounded by civilian infrastructure.

6.  The Israeli army is the most moral army in the world

The Israeli army was founded in 1948 when the Zionist militias united as an official army of the State of Israel. From their inception the Zionist militia were engaged in killing and displacing Palestinian civilians. There has never been a Palestinian army, and Palestinian civilians have been targeted by the militias and then the army for close to one hundred years.

7.  Israel gave Gaza back and got missiles from Hamas.

The 2005 disengagement from Gaza was a unilateral action taken by the Israeli government in order to get the Israeli settlers out of the Gaza Strip. This allowed the military and intelligence services to tighten the stranglehold on the millions of Palestinian civilians who reside there. It allowed the army to attack civilians and impose collective punishment on them.

8.  Israel offered to make peace many times and the Palestinians refused

There is no record to substantiate this claim. There is no “Israeli peace plan.”

9.  Israel warns civilians before it attacks and takes great care to avoid harming civilians.

In some cases, the military will drop flyers, send an SMS or call people prior to attacks. These messages allow for a few minutes to leave their homes. However, there is nowhere for people to go. There are no bomb shelters or safe zones for Palestinians. The fact is that Israeli attacks always include large numbers of civilian casualties.

10. If the Palestinians laid down their arms there would be peace, if Israel laid down its arms there would be no Israel.

Palestinians never had an army. No tanks, war planes, no artillery. Ever! They started to arm themselves and created guerilla groups because their lands were stolen and their people killed and forced into exile.

11. Palestine was an empty land - The Jews were a people without a land

That slogan was and still is a rhetorical tool. It first emerged among 19th-century Christian Restorationists in Britain who believed that Jewish migration to the Holy Land would bring them salvation. Later, this phrase was adopted by European Jewish Zionists to provide some kind of logic to their desire to colonize and settle in Palestine.

The Jewish people never sought a sovereign territory. The yearning for Jerusalem in the diaspora was about worship, and the desire to go to the Holy Land for worship. In fact, Jewish law prohibits Jewish people from sovereignty in the Holy Land.  Palestine was inhabited by Palestinian Muslim, Christian and Jewish populations who had lived, farmed, and cultivated the land, and had built cities and towns for centuries. Zionism is not Judaism

12. The June 1967 war was a war of “No Choice.”

There is abundant evidence proving that this statement is false. The memoirs of Moshe Sharet, Israel’s second Prime Minister show that as early as 1953, the Israeli military had been planning to add the West Bank to the rest of the State of Israel. In 1953, in a speech he gave in front of the top Zionist leadership and a visiting delegation of Zionist leaders from the US, Lt. Colonel Matti Peled said, “The army is preparing for war in order to complete the conquest of the Land of Israel and to push Israel's eastern border to its natural location, the banks of the Jordan River.” His remarks were met with enthusiastic applause.

Furthermore, minutes from the meetings of the Israeli army high command prior to the attack of June 1967 show clearly that this was a war of choice. The statements made by these same generals once they retired confirm this. They stated clearly that it was a good time to attack their Arab neighbors because the Arab armies were weak and unprepared. The whole thing lasted 5 days, Arab armies were demolished and the Israeli State occupied the lands it had wanted: The Syrian Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula and the coveted West Bank and east Jerusalem. Close to 18,000 Arab soldiers were killed by Israel, while Israel lost 700 soldiers in the war.

13. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.

When the Zionist leaders in Palestine established their state, they declared it a Jewish State and immediately began to destroy Palestinian towns and villages and forcibly exiled close to one million Palestinians. This campaign included numerous massacres and other atrocities. About two hundred thousand Palestinian remained in what became the “Jewish State.” They were placed under military rule and denied their rights. Palestinians became stateless in their own land. In 1966 the military rule ended and was replaced by a de-facto rule of the Israeli security service, or secret police.

Today, almost eight decades later, the Palestinian citizens of Israel number close to two million. They are the Palestinians who still live in the communities of pre 1967 boundaries. Besides them, Israel governs the lives of two million Palestinian in the Gaza concentration camp, and close to three and a half million Palestinians living in ghettos throughout what used to be the West Bank. These Palestinian have no rights and they live under military law.

This means that the State of “Israel” governs close to seven and a half million Palestinians under different sets of laws that range between no rights to limited rights, and about six and a half million Israeli Jews who enjoy all rights as if living in a Western Democracy. In 2018 Israel passed a law called “The nation State Law,” which states that only Jewish people have a right to self-determination in the land governed by the State. Does this qualify as democracy?

14. “Israel has no partner for peace.”

Peace has never been a strategic objective for Israel. For decades, Israel has delayed or obstructed constructive peace talks, while continuing to expand settlement building, by claiming it had no partner for peace. Zionists often claim that Palestinians have repeatedly rejected opportunities to have their own state, but to frame those moments as ‘opportunities’ is disingenuous. At every point, Palestinians have been asked to give up their rights to freedom and equality on their land, in order for Israel to maintain an exclusivist Zionist state.

Despite the fact that consecutive Israeli Prime Ministers occasionally paid lip-service to the two-state solution, there are approximately one million Israelis living in what used to be the West Bank. Israel has demonstrated that its only interest is in maintaining control over the most amount of land with the fewest number of Palestinians.

15.“This is a religious conflict that has been going on for centuries.”

The violence between Israelis and Palestinians is often falsely presented as a conflict between two equal sides with irreconcilable claims to one piece of land. In reality, this is a conflict over territory between a nation-state with one of the world’s most powerful and well-funded militaries, and an indigenous population that has been occupied, displaced, and exiled for nearly a century. Although religion plays a role in defining the identity of one of the parties to the conflict in justifying their claims to the land, the conflict is not, fundamentally, a religious one.

This is not a centuries-old conflict, but a relatively recent one which escalated with European support for Jewish settlement of Palestine in the late 19th century and with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. At its root, what is happening in Israel/Palestine is not a religious conflict, nor should it be understood merely as two competing national struggles. This is, and has always been, a case of anti-colonial resistance to violence, displacement, and racism