The ‘genocide,’ ‘colonialist’ and ‘racist’ lies

by Eric Rozenman

Shortly after Hamas’s sadistic slaughter of 1,400 Israelis on Oct. 7, an IDF spokesman pronounced the organization’s leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, a “dead man walking.” Given that Israel resurrected Sinwar once, it would be not only justice but poetic for it to show him the door now.

The Hamas leader served 22 years in prison for organizing a 1988 kidnapping and murder of two Israeli soldiers. While jailed, Sinwar’s life was reportedly saved by Israeli surgeons who removed a brain tumor.

In 2011, Israel exchanged Sinwar and more than 1,000 other imprisoned terrorists and suspected terrorists for one Israeli soldier.

This is how the Jewish state conducts its alleged “genocide” against Palestinian Arabs.

The Zionists’ supposed extermination of Palestinian Arabs has been remarkably ineffective, except by the standards applied at U.S. colleges, where students and professors rage against Israeli—that is Jewish—self-defense rather than against Hamas’s human shields/CNN strategy.

For example, after Israel ousted Egypt and Jordan from their respective occupations of the Gaza Strip and Judea/Samaria in the 1967 Six-Day War, Palestinian Arab infant mortality decreased and electrification, access to clean water and education all surged.

By 2020, according to the United Nations’ annual Human Development Report, of 188 countries listed plus the non-existent “State of Palestine,” Norway ranked first, the United States 17, Israel 19, the United Arab Emirates first among Arab countries at 31, Jordan 105, “Palestine” 115, Egypt 116, Morocco 121, Iraq 123, Syria (during its devastating civil war) 151, and Yemen (also during civil war) 179. Apparently, Israel’s “genocide” of Palestinian Arabs is not as bad as the “genocide” Egyptians, Moroccans, Iraqis, Syrians and Yemenis inflict on themselves.

Israel is also charged with being a “settler-colonialist” interloper in the Arab Middle East. Never mind that the Middle East contains many non-Arab peoples. It is curious that as late as 1878 the Arab population of the land that became Israel in 1948 numbered somewhere around 160,000. This small population had not been there “since time immemorial” but arrived beginning in the late 1400s from the Arabian Peninsula and what are now Transjordan, Egypt and Syria.

The late Saeb Erekat, for a time the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator with Israel, claimed in 2014 that Palestinians, as descendants of the Canaanites, preceded the biblical Israelites in the land.

“Absurd,” replied Prof. Raphael Israeli of Hebrew University. “The Palestinians don’t really have roots here. They know this very well, so they are trying to invent origins for themselves.”

In 1939, both U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted that Arab migration to British Mandatory Palestine, stimulated by two decades of Zionist development, exceeded that of the Jews (who were impeded by the British).

Rather than foreign occupiers, Jewish immigrants to Palestine in the 19th and 20th centuries represented an unprecedented, if not miraculous, return of an ancient, indigenous people to a portion of its ancestral land.

Then there are the claims of “Zionist racism” and “Israeli apartheid.” The Soviet-inspired, Arab League-promoted 1975 U.N. General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism furthered a Kremlin psychological warfare campaign. The smear was necessitated by Israel’s U.S.-backed defeat of Moscow’s Egyptian and Syrian clients in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Despite its repeal in 1991, the resolution poisoned much of the Western left and resounds loudly today, embraced by such intersectional icons as Black Lives Matter.

Israel is so racist that, in June 2022, while waiting at a smoothie stand in downtown Jerusalem, I found myself behind two young black men in T-shirts, one with an automatic rifle slung across his back. He was almost certainly an IDF soldier a bit out of uniform.

In the “apartheid” Jewish state, a Christian Arab woman was Miss Israel in 1999. Arabs comprise about 21% of the Israeli population but 35% of its pharmacists. As for life expectancy, it’s 79 years for an Arab Israeli born in 2015, the same as an American born in 2017 and higher than anywhere in the Arab-Islamic world.

So, if the facts are that Israel isn’t committing genocide against Palestinian Arabs, isn’t colonialist and isn’t racist, why do so many have so much fun hating it? Because if you resent the Jews’ success (0.20% of the world’s population, 20% of its Nobel Prizes); if you reject their insistence on ethical monotheism; and if Israel as the Middle East’s sole diverse democracy with equal rights for minorities embarrasses you—you have nothing else left.

First published in JNS.