Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 19 

Israel is the most pro-Palestinian country in the world

Remember this little ditty?

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

I learned it as a schoolboy. It prefaced breathless classroom accounts of the great explorer’s exciting exploits in discovering America. The date of his departure from Spain was accurate but the rest of the narrative was either false or missing (especially with regard to his brutality towards the indigenous inhabitants). But I believed what I was told. I was a child after all. 

Many of today’s children believe things that aren’t true. They grow into adults who cling, limpet-like, to those untruths throughout their lives. One of the most egregious myths that every schoolchild “knows” is that the state of Israel is and always has been irredeemably anti-Palestinian. It appears, after all, to be “common sense.”

According to Einstein (allegedly): Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

In this case, the truth is the opposite of common sense: Israel is and always has been the most pro-Palestinian country in the world. This may appear a literally nonsensical statement, so let’s review the evidence.

I propose three indicators that, taken together, most reasonable people would agree reflect a genuinely a pro-Palestinian position: a consistent commitment to workable Palestinian self-determination, a profound concern for Palestinian welfare, and the taking of significant risks to achieve a peaceful resolution of the conflict. 

First, self-determination: realising this universal principle for both Israelis and Palestinians need not be a zero-sum game [1]. Only Israel has taken concrete steps on this path towards, in today’s jargon, Two States for Two Peoples (2S2P). 

The Zionist push for self-determination for the Arabs of Palestine began in 1919 with the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement. Both Jews and Arabs were outraged by the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement that had been struck between Britain and France in 1916 to divide up between them the spoils of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. Although the Balfour Declaration the following year boosted Zionist hopes of Jewish statehood, Weizmann understood that the Arabs were equally deserving of sovereignty and strained every sinew to generate a mutually supportive united Jewish-Arab front in the face of Great Power perfidy. Faisal initially agreed but inexplicably got cold feet before his signature had dried and the agreement collapsed.

That didn’t deter Weizmann, who accepted (reluctantly) the lopping off of 78% of the Jewish National Home (Mandatory Palestine) to create an Arab state, Transjordan, in 1922. A further partition of the remainder of Palestine, as proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937, would have reduced the Jewish state to an even tinier rump but the Zionist leadership acquiesced in the interests of 2S2P. Ten years later, they accepted the UN partition plan that deprived the Jewish people of Zion (Jerusalem) and their historical heartlands of Judea and Samaria (annexed by Jordan and renamed the West Bank). So it continued to the present day – attempt after attempt to apply the magic 2S2P formula was frustrated by violent Arab rejectionism.  

Second, what about Israel’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Palestinians? It is impossible to do justice to the enormous energy and resources that Israel has expended to this end. 

At the conclusion of the War of Independence of 1947-49 (that had been launched by local Arab militias), Israel passed a Basic Law guaranteeing full and equal rights for all Arabs who remained in the country. She then offered to accept 100,000 Arab refugees unconditionally to kickstart peace negotiations despite having to absorb huge numbers of Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from Arab countries. (Though that offer was rejected, Israel nevertheless subsequently permitted thousands of Palestinians to return via the family reunification programme).  

After the defensive Six Day War of 1967, Israel engineered massive improvements in Palestinian health, education, housing and employment in the West Bank and Gaza [2,3] right up until the vast majority of the residents of those territories became the responsibility of the newly created Palestinian Authority in 1994. In the recurrent wars triggered by the Hamas rulers of Gaza from 2008 onwards, the IDF made unprecedented efforts, validated be external military experts [4], to avoid Palestinian civilian casualties while defending Israelis against rocket attacks, tunnelling and other terrorist incursions. Israel has also provided near-daily humanitarian aid to Gazans even during periods of intense fighting. 

Third, Israel's risk-taking to accommodate Palestinian aspirations has been mind-boggling. Here’s a sample of her territorial concessions: in 1978 at Camp David, Menachem (“not an inch”) Begin agreed to withdraw not only from all of Sinai but also from the West Bank to permit a five-year period of Palestinian autonomy that would undoubtedly have led to statehood had Arafat deigned to join the party. Following the 1993-95 Oslo Accords with the PLO (that refused to amend its charter calling for Israel’s destruction), Israel withdrew from large swathes of the West Bank while simultaneously agreeing to the arming the PA security forces. That was followed five years later not by negotiations, as promised by all sides, but by the terrorist war that Arafat unleashed against Israeli civilians in response to further ultra-generous Israeli land-for-peace offers. 

In 2005, the hawkish Ariel Sharon ordered a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza to try to stimulate progress towards peace; instead, it led to an upsurge of attacks against Israelis. Undeterred, Israeli PM Olmert stunned his people with his 2008 offer to Mahmoud Abbas of close to 100% (including land swops) of the West Bank.  

As for the other side, what have “moderate” Palestinian leaders done to resolve the conflict? The PA incites violence and incentivises terrorism through its Pay-To-Slay policy, orchestrates a stream of one-sided condemnations of Israel at the UN, opposes “normalisation” with Israel in any circumstances (including a global coronavirus pandemic), brainwashes Palestinian children into hating Jews, glorifies Jihadist violence [5] and refuses to negotiate an end to the conflict. Most damagingly, it maintains the fiction of a Two State Solution (note - not 2S2P) that requires implementation of the Right of Return, a mantra with no basis in international law, for the millions of descendants of the Palestinian refugees. Since Israel has no intention of committing national suicide, this insane demand guarantees ongoing conflict and perpetuates the absence of a Palestinian state [6]. 

Instead of being challenged on their delusional and self-defeating intransigence, Abbas and his colleagues are cheered to the rafters by the Arab League, UN, EU, NGOs, academics, clerics and journalists. How can a posture that leads up a political cul-de-sac be interpreted as “pro-Palestinian”?

And what have “pro-Palestinian” governments and activists around the world actually done to alleviate the plight of the Palestinians? Here’s a sample of their contribution: goading the Arabs into an unnecessary war against Israel in 1947-49 that caused the Naqba [7]; hijacking UNRWA to weaponise the refugees as a permanent incubator of Jew-hating terrorists; turning a blind eye to the denial of civil rights for Palestinians living in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere; expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Kuwait after the Gulf War in 1991; ignoring Assad’s murder of around 4,000 Palestinians during the Syrian civil war; enabling the fanatical Iranian mullahs to pour billions of dollars into the coffers of the genocidal twins, Hamas and Hezbollah; and promoting the antisemitic BDS (boycotts, divestments, sanctions) movement in a futile addendum to the failed military and terrorists campaigns. In what parallel universe can any of that be viewed as “pro-Palestinian”? 

An objective reading of the evidence points to one unavoidable conclusion: only Israel has consistently promoted the real interests of the Palestinians. Her leaders have not merely consented on multiple occasions to the proposed establishment of a Palestinian state but have initiated, time and again, constructive, risk-laden and often domestically unpopular measures to achieve Palestinian self-determination, to improve the daily lives of Palestinians, and to promote peace. 

The corollary is equally clear: most so-called “pro-Palestinians” have done absolutely nothing to meet the needs of the Palestinians – and have instead exploited them, wittingly or otherwise, as a front for anti-Israelism and antisemitism. The Palestinian leadership, along with their so-called friends in the Arab League and the international community, have repeatedly betrayed the Palestinians by espousing violent rejectionism and trumpeting a fictional and unattainable Right of Return.

“Common sense” insists that Israel is, always was, and always will be anti-Palestinian. That calumny has become so ubiquitous that it is rarely discussed and never disputed. It’s one of those prejudices about Israel that have become axiomatic. It will take a genius of Einsteinian stature to remove it. 

Meanwhile, those of us who know the truth will just have to keep repeating it until the world listens. 

1       Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel: 4 Israel does not (and never has) opposed freedom for the Palestinians

https://isra-prof.blogspot.com/2019/07/astounding-facts-most-people-dont-know.html

2      Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel: 6 The impact of Israel on the health of Palestinian Arabs has been overwhelmingly positive https://isra-prof.blogspot.com/2019/09/astounding-facts-most-people-dont-know.html

3     Stone D. Has Israel damaged Palestinian health? London, Fathom, 2014 https://fathomjournal.org/has-israel-damaged-palestinian-health/

4      High Level Military Group. An assessment of the 2014 Gaza conflict. Friends of Israel Initiative, 2015  http://www.high-level-military-group.org/pdf/hlmg-assessment-2014-gaza-conflict.pdf

5       IMPACT-se (Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education). The 2020-21 Palestinian School Curriculum https://www.impact-se.org/reports/palestinian-territories/palestinian-authority/

6      Schwartz A, Wilf E.  The War of Return - How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace. New York, All Points Books, 2020

7       Karsh E. Palestine Betrayed. London, Yale University Press, 2011