10 Zionist Arguments You’ve Encountered, But Didn’t Have Answers To

Introduction

If you're active in the struggle for peace and justice in the Middle East, you've no doubt frequently encountered Zionists who defend Israel's crimes against the Palestinians. You're familiar with many of their talking points, and maybe you know how to answer many or most of them. Here are ten you've likely encountered, but perhaps didn't know quite how to debate effectively--until now!

1. The Palestinian refugee problem is an unfortunate result of the Arab states launching a war of aggression in 1948 to wipe Israel off the map.

There are two principle fallacies in this argument:

One, it was not simply that Palestinians fled war. Many did flee, but this was encouraged by the Zionist forces, which also directly expelled many civilians from their homes and destroyed their villages so they could never return. It was the intent of the Zionists to ethnically cleanse Palestine of most of its Arab population in order for the demographically "Jewish state" of Israel to be established. Indeed, cleansing Palestine of Arabs was a prerequisite for this state to be created. This is why Israel refused to allow those refugees to return.

Two, this argument assumes that the Zionists' unilateral declaration of the existence of Israel on May 14, 1948, was legitimate. It wasn't. The Zionists had neither any legal nor moral authority to declare sovereignty over a land in which they were a minority and of which they owned only about 7 percent. While they cited UN Resolution 181 (the "partition plan" resolution) as granting such authority, in fact, this resolution neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration.

2. Israel has a right to exist.

No state has a "right to exist". This concept is a propaganda device invented by the US and Israel for a reason that will become clear momentarily.

One might be tempted to answer this argument with: "Well, Palestine has a right to exist, too!" But this is not the proper response!

Political entities defined by lines on maps do not have rights, individuals do. The proper framework for discussion is the right to self-determination. And it is manifestly Israel that has denied that right to the Palestinians since its founding (and indeed, by the Zionists even before Israel's founding), and not vice versa.

The necessity of redefining the framework for discussion thus becomes obvious. To say that Israel has a "right to exist" is effectively to assert that the Zionists' unilateral declaration of Israel's existence and the ethnic cleansing by which Israel actually came into being were legitimate. Needless to say, these were not legitimate actions on the part of the Zionists.

3. In 1967, Israel acted in self-defense by launching a preemptive attack on Egypt.

Israel's attack on Egypt on the morning of June 5, 1967 -- the event that started the "Six Day War" -- was not preemptive.

Zionists will argue that Nasser's threats, Egypt's closing of the Straits of Tiran and Suez Canal to Israeli shipping, its movement of troops into the Sinai Peninsula, and its expelling of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) all essentially amounted to acts of war.

However, none of these actions constituted aggression under international law.

Egypt's perspective was that the straits and Suez Canal were its territorial waterways so it had a right to deny passage to an enemy state that had already attacked it once, in 1956 (when Israel conspired with Britain and France to launch a war of aggression against Egypt). While legal scholars may debate the legitimacy of that point of view, the fact is that Israel had peaceful means available to it to seek redress for this grievance against Egypt. It did not, under international law, constitute a casus belli (justification for war).

Nasser wanted the UN peacekeeping force gone because he was being accused by Syria and Jordan of hiding behind it. His bellicose rhetoric was about saving face but was just that: rhetoric. The proposal was made to restation UNEF on Israel's side of the border, but, instructively, Israel rejected this proposal.

Furthermore, the CIA observed that Egypt's troops took up defensive positions in the Sinai, and Israel's own intelligence assessed that Israel was under no threat of attack from Egypt.

In 1982, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin acknowledged, "In June 1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."

Under international law, Israel's attack on Egypt constituted aggression, defined at Nuremberg as "the supreme international crime".

4. UN Resolution 242 did not require Israel to fully withdraw from the territories it occupied in 1967.

This is a lie. Unfortunately, it is very effective Zionist hasbara and is widely believed even by supporters of Palestinians' rights.

There are three main components of the Zionist argument:

1. The absence of the article "the" before the words "territories occupied" in sub-paragraph (i) of the first operative paragraph of this Security Council resolution means only a partial withdrawal was required.
2. Sub-paragraph (ii) requires that "secure and recognized borders" be established before Israel is required to withdraw.
3. Officials responsible for creating and passing Resolution 242, like Lord Caradon (UK) and Arthur Goldberg (US) have said it did not require a full withdrawal.

Briefly, here are the flaws in these arguments:

First of all, this is nonsense even on its face: the resolution does not say Israel must withdraw from "the territories occupied" so we must understand it to mean Israel must withdraw from only "some territories occupied"? This self-defeating Zionist logic is prima facie nonsense.

In truth, the absence of the article has no effect on the meaning of the resolution inasmuch as the extent of withdraw is concerned. It calls for the withdrawal of Israeli forces "from territories occupied", plural. The Syrian Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai, and the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and West Bank are all "territories occupied" during the 1967 war and thus territories from which Israel was required to withdraw under the clear and unambiguous wording of Resolution 242.

In fact, the preambulatory section of the resolution emphasized the principle of international law that the acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible -- and it is in the context of that emphasized principle that the resolution's call for Israeli withdrawal must be understood.

As for sub-paragraph (ii), while it does call for the establishment of "secure and recognized borders", it does not establish this as a precondition for the withdraw of Israeli forces. It says "both" Israeli withdrawal and establishment of such borders are required, conditioning neither one upon the other. It was not the Security Council's intent that a people whose land was occupied be required to negotiate with the occupier over where to draw the border.

Zionists claim otherwise, but to do so, they quote Caradon and Goldberg from years after the resolution's passage. But, first, UN resolutions are not open to unilateral interpretation, but must be understand according to the will of the Security Council as a whole; and, second, the relevant documentary record for understanding the will of the Council is from prior to and up until the resolution's adoption.

And turning to that documentary record, it is absolutely clear that the Security Council was explicit and unanimous that Resolution 242 required Israel to return to the lines it held prior to June 5, 1967.