Random Facts About Israel You May Have Not Known

(None of this is any surprise for those who are familiar with the facts. This post is intended for the casual observer in the West who just gathered tidbits about the conflict from the prevalent discourse and for Israelis / Zionists who were kept in the dark regarding Israel’s objective history with Zionist mythology and indoctrination, like I was)

1. Israel was created through colonial immigration and the ethnic cleansing (a Crime Against Humanity) of the native Palestinians from their historic land in 1947-1948 and the systematic destruction of hundreds of their villages using dynamite and bulldozers.  This is how Jewish majority was created from what was less than 5% of the population prior to the 20th century. Those who were expelled or fled were not allowed to return and those refugees who tried to return to their homes were shot dead by the thousands. United Nations resolution 194 from 1948 called on Israel to allow the refugees back to their homes, a resolution which has been ignored to this day.

2. A significant percentage of the expelled Palestinians were Christian (estimated 15% – 30%). This fact may come as a surprise to those who were led to believe that it is a struggle between Jews and Muslims for land. If anything, it is an anecdotal evidence that it is a replay of the story of colonial dispossession of the indigenous population.
The Christian Palestinians went on to participate in the armed struggle against their colonial dispossessors and still hold a significant role in the Palestinian leadership.

3. Prior to the colonial immigration of Jews in the 20th century to Palestine, there had been no strife in the land for many centuries, since the demise of the Crusader State. It is a well circulated myth and a misconception that Jews and Muslims had been fighting over that land forever – a complete fallacy without any basis. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze and other religions co-existed harmoniously throughout the ages in Palestine until immigrant Jews from Europe under the auspices of a colonial power set their aim to establish a Jewish State on a land populated by 95% non-Jews.

4. Israel is home to the largest non-citizen, stateless group of people in the world. For any of you it is hard to imagine being born, growing up and dying without citizenship in any country. That is the case with millions of Palestinians under Israel’s rule who have no basic human rights (such as the right to a lawyer and fair trial, let alone citizenship rights) and are subject to Israel’s military rule since 1967. The reason they are not granted citizenship and human rights is because they are not Jewish.

5. The Palestinians are the natives of Palestine since time immemorial. It has been a Zionist propaganda myth to portray them as ‘squatters’ and European Jews as ‘rightful owners’. Israeli DNA research which aimed to prove Jews’ ancient ancestry (hence insinuating  ‘historic right to the land’) found at most tenuous evidence that ‘some’ Jews have some of their ancestry in the Middle East (while the latest research concluded European Jews to be descendents of converted Khazars). However, what they proved beyond shadow of a doubt is that Palestinians are natives of the land, i.e. descendents of Israelites, Canaanites and other indigenous tribes that mixed together over the ages like in most parts of the world. However, even without DNA research, it is quite clear that the Palestinians are semites and part of the region, have lived in Palestine for countless generations and more importantly have land deeds and property deeds (which were revoked and confiscated by the Jewish State), while the European colonialists have nothing but a ludicrous claim about supposed ancestry from 2,000 years ago (no less!). The ancient ancestral claim, even if it had merit to it (it doesn’t), is so absurd that if we adopt this logic, we should all be entitled to claim the continent of Africa to ourselves and to expel the Africans, as we all originate from Africa!

6. There was never any significant expulsion of Jews in the first century A.D. as Professor Shlomo Sand clearly illustrates in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People”. This fact alone destroys the Zionist arch-myth about “expulsion and return of Jews to their historic homeland after 2000 years”. Moreover, Prof. Sand clearly demonstrates that all modern Zionist historians and leaders were well aware of this fact, yet for demagoguery reasons propagated the myth of forced expulsion and return. This myth is so deeply entrenched that it is even referenced in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. So where did the Judeans “disappear”? They did not. Although some may have immigrated over the centuries, most stayed and adopted Christianity and later Islam and mixed with other local tribes. These are the ancestors of current day Palestinians.

7. The arch-myth of expulsion and return has a sub-myth about “Arabs trying to throw Jews into the sea and Jews prevailing”. That myth was busted by modern Israeli historians (as well as Palestinian and foreign historians) who proved that the colonial European Jews in Palestine were by far militarily superior to the essentially defenseless rural native population, which enabled them to carry out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine with little resistance. Moreover, this widely publicized myth tells how fledgling Israel heroically fights the armies of 5 Arab states at once and prevails. Once again, the same Israeli historians proved that (a) the Arab countries sent small auxiliary forces at the pressure of their populace to come to the aid of the Palestinians in reaction to the ethnic cleansing by Jewish forces that was taking place in Palestine for some time (the ethnic cleansing campaign started in November 1947 while the first Arab states’ forces were sent in May 1948) (b) those forces that were sent were hardly a match, both numerically and by quality, to the well organized, armed and trained Jewish forces who had strong backing in the West.

8. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine did not stop in 1948. It continued in the first years after Israel’s establishment and in 1967, under the fog of the six day war, Israel once again expelled well over 200,000 civilians from their homes in the West Bank and the Golan Heights, constituting the second major ethnic cleansing carried out by Israel. In subsequent years, through administrative means Israel deported another 150,000 non-Jews by revoking their residence rights and by preventing the return of Palestinians who were abroad temporarily.

9. Israel was Apartheid S. Africa’s closest ally and trade partner through the boycott years. It even proliferated nuclear weapons technology to the Apartheid regime and was the only country in the world to support the Bantustan solution, which enabled the minority whites to continue controlling the country. You can guess the reason.

10. Israel is the only country in the world where home demolitions are carried out as a collective punitive measure for non-Jews.

11. Israel’s security forces use torture on a regular basis. It was the only country in the world to allow torture by law.

12. Israel is the only country in the world with roads for Jews only and settlements for Jews only and two separate legal systems, one for Jewish settlers and one for non-Jewish Palestinians who sometimes live only a few yards away from each other.

The problems in the Holy Land stem from systematic discrimination, ethnic cleansing and abuse by an exclusionary colonial Apartheid state, not a border dispute or a struggle over land between two nations or two religions as some would have you believe. Realizing and understanding this is the first step that will help pave the way to the desired solution, which is equal rights and one law for all.