MYTH Moving the UK embassy to Jerusalem would undermine peace, provoke violence, and damage relations with the Muslim world. FACT The Guardian painted an apocalyptic picture of the future if British Prime Minister Liz Truss decides to relocate the British embassy to Jerusalem. “Moving the embassy would tear up the …
Read More »Mitchell Bard.
MYTH: Israel is responsible for blockading Gaza.
FACT: Israel cannot impose a blockade on its own. Egypt controls the southern border of the Gaza Strip and has maintained its own blockade to prevent Hamas from obtaining weapons from Iran and materials it can use to manufacture rockets to fire at Israeli cities. Egypt has demolished dozens of …
Read More »MYTH: Palestinians and their supporters care about Palestinian refugees.
FACT: Palestinians and their supporters like to express their concern for Palestinian refugees and yet are silent when it comes to the treatment of refugees living in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. They even ignore the welfare of refugees who are confined to camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip …
Read More »MYTH: A Jewish terrorist tried to burn down the al-Aqsa Mosque.
FACT Palestinian propaganda is not very original and easily disproven yet smears are repeated, like Hitler’s big lies, to incite the population against the Jews. The al-Aqsa Mosque is in danger libel is one of the most popular and persistent going back to the days of the Mufti of Jerusalem …
Read More »MYTH: Women’s rights are protected by the Palestinian Authority.
FACT Not surprisingly, Israel’s demonizers used International Women’s Day as an opportunity to attack Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. It was equally unremarkable that none of the groups that claim to be concerned with Palestinian welfare would say a word about the appalling treatment of women by the Palestinian …
Read More »BDS Continues to Fizzle Out.
The antisemitic BDS movement never had a serious impact on Israel; it had no impact whatsoever on Israeli policy, and has failed to accomplish its objectives of isolating Israel, turning it into a South Africa-like pariah state and denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination in their homeland. Last …
Read More »Who First Said Anti-Zionism Isn’t Antisemitism?
The answer to the question posed in the title to this article is — I’m not sure. I don’t know if anyone has the answer, and it’s often speculative to try to identify a “first.” So let me say the first instance I have found was in a lecture given …
Read More »Origins of the Name “Palestine”.
Though the definite origins of the word Palestine have been debated for years and are still not known for sure, the name is believed to be derived from the Egyptian and Hebrew word peleshet. Roughly translated to mean rolling or migratory, the term was used to describe the inhabitants of …
Read More »MYTH: UN blacklist of companies operating in the disputed territories will promote peace.
FACT: Acceding to pressure from BDS-supporting organizations, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) published a database of 112 companies operating in Judaea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem on February 12, 2020. The intention was to create a blacklist that would identify companies that Israel’s detractors could target for boycotting because their …
Read More »Losing the Semantic War on ‘Palestine’.
I have written before about the importance of semantics in the discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how frustrated many people are about losing various battles over nomenclature, such as references to the disputed territories as “occupied,” and “Judaea and Samaria” as the West Bank. An arguably more important semantic …
Read More »Myth: Palestine was heavily populated with Arabs before the Zionists arrived.
FACT: For many centuries, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated, and widely neglected expanse of eroded hills, sandy deserts, and malarial marshes. This was Mark Twain’s description when he visited in 1867: A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent mournful …
Read More »MYTH … Jews stole Arab land.
FACT … Despite the growth in their population, the Arabs continued to assert they were being displaced. From the beginning of World War I, how-ever, part of Palestine’s land was owned by absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut. About 80 percent of the Palestinian Arabs were debt-ridden …
Read More »MYTH – “Palestine was always an Arab country.”
MYTH Palestine was always an Arab country. FACT The term “Palestine” is believed to be derived from the Philistines, an Aegean people who, in the twelfth century BCE, settled along the Mediterranean coastal plain — now Israel and the Gaza Strip. In the second century CE, after crushing the last …
Read More »What’s Really Behind Israel’s Nation State Law?
Israel’s new Nation State Law has provoked controversy both inside and outside Israel. Both critics and supporters have misinterpreted the text and its implications. They have also missed what may be the most important motive for the legislation – fear of the demographic threat to Israel’s future. First, we can …
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