7 Common And Bad Arguments About Israel/Palestine

Over the past two months, I've learned that there isn't much that everybody agrees on regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict. But almost everybody agrees that it’s complicated. 

There’s no way for a 75-year-long conflict, complete with omnipotent deities and millennia-old land claims, to be anything else. 

But I've also learned that a significant portion of that complexity comes from arguments and slogans that are self-contradictory at best, and historically illiterate at worst. And that, at least, we can do something about.

So, without further ado, I present this non-exhaustive selection of the worst offenders.

1. You can call for an intifada or a ceasefire. But not both.

We’ve all seen them. On college campuses and in the streets, on TikTok and Twitter. “There is only one solution! Intifada Revolution,” they cry, as they LARP as freedom fighters from the comfort of their privileged lives.

The problem is, in the next breath, they demand that Israel agree to a ceasefire. And these, for the avoidance of any doubt, are mutually exclusive.

If Hamas launch terrorist attacks against Israel “again, and again and again,” Israel is going to retaliate. And because Hamas launch those attacks from the 25-mile-long strip of land that is Gaza, that retaliation is going to kill a lot of innocent Palestinians. 

This revolution stuff isn’t all fun and games, huh?

2. Your terrorist is my freedom fighter.

There are many ways to fight for freedom. Martin Luther King spoke. Ghandi sat. William Wallace…well, fought. But whichever of these you lean towards, slaughtering and raping innocent civilians is not the move. 

And if the moral argument isn’t convincing enough, there are pragmatic reasons too. 

There was no universe in which Hamas' atrocities weren't going to lead to a counterattack that would kill thousands of innocent Palestinians. Hamas knew this before they carried out their attack. So unless we’re defining freedom as death, Hamas are not, nor have they ever been, fighting for the freedom of Palestinians. 

3. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

No. No, it won’t. 

As Bill Maher noted recently, Israel has a population of over 9 million people, a $500 billion economy, and nuclear weapons. In 1986, Joe Biden stood on the Senate floor and said, “If Israel didn't exist, the US would have to invent one to protect US interests in the Middle East.

Israel will be on that stretch of land between the river and the sea for the foreseeable future.

Of course, people of good conscience all over the world want Israelis and Palestinians to be free. Nobody living there asked for this situation. None of them started it. None of them deserves to die or be driven from their homes. 

But as Netanyahu is ably demonstrating, if you keep insisting that the “only solution” is for one side to be wiped out, you’re not going to like how that story ends. 

Which brings us neatly to...

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4. Israel has a right to exist. 

A few days ago, Margaret Kimberley sparked blistering outrage by tweeting that the U.S. doesn’t have a right to exist. There were the wholly predictable calls for her to leave, a few equally predictable calls for her to kill herself, and only one person correctly pointing out that the U.S. has the power to exist. And that the two shouldn’t be confused. 

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, understood this perfectly well when he said:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country […]

So, it’s simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise, the Arabs will wipe us out.

People have a right to exist. Countries simply do exist. And then, for a variety of reasons, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes their borders shift, sometimes their names change, and sometimes a new country appears in their midst and kills and/or displaces hundreds of thousands of citizens. History is littered with these stories. Just ask yourself what happened to the U.S.S.R.'s or the Republic of Texas' or, topically enough, Palestine's right to exist. 

5. Palestinians don’t want peace.

In some cases, this argument is born from the conflation between Hamas and Palestinians that plagues this issue. It’s certainly true that Hamas don’t want peace.

But according to a 2006 exit poll (the last year Palestinians were allowed to vote), 79.5% of Palestinians wanted a peace agreement with Israel when Hamas took power. 75.2% thought Hamas should change its policies regarding Israel. 78.1% hoped corruption would decrease under Hamas.

The other evidence for this argument is that Palestine has rejected several peace agreements. And this is true. But it’s also true that Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli Foreign Minister and lead member of the Israeli negotiating team, said, he “would have rejected Camp David, as well,” if he were Palestinian.

There are a lot of unknowns regarding what the Palestinian government was offered. But I strongly suspect the Palestinian people would prefer peace to bombs landing on their children’s heads.

6. Israel has killed thousands of civilians because Hamas use them as human shields.

First, let’s point out that this logic is morally shaky at best. If a psychopath murdered my family and I had the opportunity to take revenge by shooting through a child or blowing up an apartment building, I’m pretty confident that I wouldn’t do it. And if I did, I don’t think I’d get much sympathy by saying the murderer was using the child as a human shield. Certainly not from the child’s family. 

Indeed, if that child’s parents decided to kill me for doing so, it wouldn’t be surprising. (And then, presumably, my extended family would kill them, and their extended family would kill mine, and the cycle would repeat for the next 75 years.) 

The people being killed in Gaza aren't human shields, they're hostages. They’re exactly as innocent as the hostages Hamas are currently holding. The failure to see this brings us to our final problem. 

7. The endless, endless double standards.

There are so many of these that I’m just going to do a quick-fire round of some of the most egregious cases.

• Yes, Israel’s responses to Palestinian aggression have often been wildly disproportionate. They’ve made no secret of this strategy. But a foolproof way to avoid these responses is to stop attacking Israel. It’s true that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have legitimate grievances with the Israeli government. But it's equally true that firing rockets at Israel hasn’t ameliorated any of those grievances.

• If you’re going to argue that Hamas committed ethnic cleansing and/or genocide when they killed 1200 Israelis, you can’t argue that Israel is not committing genocide and ethnic cleansing when they kill somewhere approaching 20x that number and displace nearly 2 million more. This becomes even more apparent if you consider those numbers as percentages of their populations.

• Unless you’re going to tell me with a straight face that God, the creator of the entire universe, bequeathed ~10,000 square miles of this one planet to your people in perpetuity (in which case, I have several questions), we have to admit that this strip of land doesn’t belong to anybody. Certainly not by virtue of which God they may or may not believe in.

• If you’re going to talk about rhetoric like, “From the river to the sea” being a call to genocide, what was Bezalel Smotrich calling for when he said that Israel should “wipe out” the Palestinian town of Huwara? What was Benjamin Netanyahu hinting at when he stood on the floor of the UN General Assembly, two weeks before the Hamas attacks, and held up a map of “The New Middle East,” with Palestine completely erased? 

There is no meaningful way to discuss this conflict without admitting both Israeli and Palestinian leadership have committed atrocities in the past 75 years. There's no way to “win” the argument or for “your side” to be blameless.

Both Palestinians and Israelis, Muslims and Jews, are suffering (and being blamed) for actions they had nothing to do with. And the only reason this isn't obvious to all concerned is that they're failing to apply one of the many teachings common to both the Torah and the Quran:

Treat others as you wish to be treated.

The Israelis who took to the streets yesterday after the IDF killed three Israeli hostages (it's worth noting that they were shot despite being shirtless and waving a white flag) must understand the rage Palestinians are feeling after losing well over 2000 times as many children. 

The parents grieving the loss of their loved ones in Gaza know everything they need to know about the pain those who lost loved ones on October 7th are going through.

Because these aren’t Israeli or Palestinian problems. they're not Jewish problems or Muslim problems. These are human problems. If everybody involved kept that in mind, maybe this wouldn't feel so complicated.