Well, the Palestinians started all this with the October 7th attacks, right?

No! While the tragic events of October 7th may have sparked the most recent and vicious escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it did not happen out of nowhere. For the past 75+ years Palestinians have struggled to retain their identity and fight for their land. The story goes all the way back to the end of World War I when Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, was conquered by the British. A year before the British took control their, they made clear their intentions in the infamous Balfour Declaration for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object…”

Since then, Palestinian land has been systematically taken and its people ethnically cleansed from it. Check back here soon for our “News and Thoughts” page, which is under construction, where you will find a full history of the conflict with sources and citations dating back from this declaration to today.

The Palestinians in Gaza brought this on themselves when they elected Hamas as their government.

Hamas was elected yes, but in 2006. There has been no other election since 2006— that’s 17 years ago. Then remember that today, about half the population of Gaza is under the age of 18(1). The 2006 election was heavily pushed upon the Palestinian people by Israel and the United States, even as Palestinian officials warned they were not ready for an election. Hamas was only able to organize and participate in the election because the Israeli government helped fund and prop them up in the years before, in a hope that they would challenge the Yasser Arafat’s PLO(2).

In that election, Hamas did not even win by a majority, but a plurality, getting just 44% of the popular vote(3). They then proceeded to purge the Gaza Strip of rival faction members and solidified their control. So are the Palestinians currently suffering in Gaza responsible for Hamas? Absolutely not! Remember, Hamas only won 44% of the vote in an election that happened 17 years ago in a place where the majority of Palestinians living there were not even alive or old enough to vote for them.

The ‘Palestinians’ didn’t exist as a people before 1948. They were invented as a reaction to the creation of Israel.

This has been a Zionist talking point since the modern movement’s creation in the late 1800s. It stems from their famously inaccurate marketing tagline for the creation of Israel which called Palestine “A land without a people for a people without a land.” This statement has been one of the most egregious lies of the Zionist movement. They would have people believe that Palestinians are actually an invented people; a cocktail of other Arab people’s who moved to the region in opposition of the creation of Israel. I hope it goes without saying, that this is completely untrue.

Since their time under Ottoman rule and Mamluk rule before that, Palestinians have been developing a distinct national or ethnic identity of their own. Palestinian culture has its own unique clothing, customs, food, art and even their own dialect of the Arabic language. The land of Palestine has been known as such since the 12th century BCE when both Greek and Egyptian records refer to it as Philistia, modernized over the centuries to Palestine(1). The Arabic pronunciation of it, “Falasteen” even more closely resembles the ancient name of the land.

While it is true that Palestinians have never had an independent nation of their own, that’s simply because they never needed one. Under Roman and Muslim rule for the last 2,000 years, with the exception of around a hundred years of being a Crusader State, Palestine was a part of these larger empires but recognized as its own region with its own people. The idea of having or needing a “national identity” is a relatively modern one in history. For a much longer time people identified themselves by the actual land they came from, not by the borders drawn around that land by men. So yes, Palestinians did very much exist before the year 1948.

Is Israel an Apartheid State?

According to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and many other reputable human rights organizations have agreed that Israel is in fact an apartheid state. The most well known documentation of this apartheid is Amnesty International’s report titled, “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestine” published in 2022. The report gives the definition of apartheid according to Apartheid Convention, the Rome Statue and customary international law as:

“when any inhuman or inhumane act (essentially a serious human rights violation) is perpetrated in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with the intention to maintain that system.” -Amnesty International

The report outlines the four main ways Israel institutes its apartheid against the Palestinians as: fragmentation into domains of control, dispossession of land and property, segregation and control, and deprivation of economic and social rights. You can view the entire report with details on the four categories here. The reports conclusion states,

“The organization has concluded that Israel has perpetrated the international wrong of apartheid, as a human rights violation and a violation of public international law wherever it imposes this system. It has assessed that almost all of Israel’s civilian administration and military authorities, as well as governmental and quasigovernmental institutions, are involved in the enforcement of the system of apartheid against Palestinians across Israel and the OPT and against Palestinian refugees and their descendants outside the territory.”