What Vox Gets Wrong with Its “11 biggest myths about Israel-Palestine”

Introduction

I’ve written an article titled “Top Ten Myths about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” that is among my all-time most popular, so when I learned that Vox has a feature called “The 11 biggest myths about Israel-Palestine”, I naturally took an interest. Unfortunately, while Vox gets some things right, what it gets wrong it gets badly wrong.

So, to set the record straight, here’s a quick examination of each of Vox’s eleven supposed myths and corrective for its egregious misinformation.

“Myth #1: The conflict is too complex to possibly understand”

Although I don’t include it on my own list of myths, I agree this is indeed false. In fact, I’ve written an article titled “The Simplicity of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” that starts with, “There is a general perception that the reason the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has continued for so long is because it is extremely complex. Nothing could be further from the truth. Placed in historical context, understanding the root cause of the conflict is simple, and in doing so, the solution becomes apparent.”

Apart from asserting an opinion as an absolute truth, though, the problem here is that Vox and the feature’s editor, Max Fisher, are feigning to understand the conflict and to be able to help you understand it, too. Unfortunately, Vox only serves to muddy the waters by getting absolutely critical points wrong.

“Myth #2: The conflict is all about religion”

Here, again, Vox gets it right. I would go further, though, and say it's not about religion at all. It's about the rejection of the Palestinians' right to self-determination and the consequences of that rejectionism.

“Myth #3: They've been fighting for centuries”

Again, Vox gets it right. In fact, my own “Myth #1” is that “Jews and Arabs have always been in conflict in the region.”

“Myth #4: Europe created Israel to apologize for the Holocaust”

Here, Vox is certainly correct to say that the belief that the Holocaust was “the only significant impetus for Israel's creation” is false.

However, Vox gets it wrong in a major way by falsely asserting that “Israel was not a creation of European colonialism”.

Yes, it most certainly was!

Zionism Was Absolutely a European Colonialist Project!

Vox tries to sustain this falsehood by arguing, “Israel's creation was in large part the work of Jews who moved to present-day Israel, despite European efforts to stop them, and who dragged the world into accepting them as a state. It is true that in 1917, Britain issued its famous Balfour Declaration promising the Jews a homeland in British-controlled Palestine as long as this did not undercut the rights of non-Jews there. But in the 1930s, as Jewish immigration and Jewish-Arab tension increased, the British tried to sharply limit Jewish immigration into the area, forcing many Jews into refugee camps in Cyprus and elsewhere.”

In other words, Vox is arguing that since the British “tried to sharply limit Jewish immigration into the area”, therefore the Zionist project to reconstitute Palestine into a “Jewish state” was not a European colonialist project.

For starters, this argument overlooks the fact that the Zionist movement originated in Europe. Its leaders were European. And most of the Jewish immigrants who colonized Palestine were also European. It was a European movement promoting a colonization project.

So in what way was it not a European colonization project?

One of the Jewish colonization organizations, incidentally, was literally called the “Palestine Colonization Association” (PICA), established in 1924 by Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, a French member of the famous European banking family.

Plainly, with or without British support, the Zionist project was ipso facto a European colonialist project.

But Vox is also woefully wrong to suggest that European powers by and large “tried to stop” the Zionist project and that the British, too, eventually stepped in to oppose it.

This claim is completely false.

Whereas Vox states that “the British tried to sharply limit Jewish immigration into the area”, a more accurate way to put it is that the British facilitated Jewish immigration to the full extent that it was politically feasible to do so, given the Arab inhabitants’ opposition to the reconstitution of their homeland into a “Jewish state”.

Indeed, while the British government’s support for Jewish immigration was by no means unrestricted, British policy was explicit in its aim of helping the Zionists to increase the proportion of Palestine’s Jewish population!

Moreover, the whole purpose of the League of Nations’ Mandate that the British were operating was to facilitate the Zionist project. While Vox tries to downplay the significance of the Balfour Declaration, the text of it was actually incorporated into the Mandate, which was actually drafted by organized Zionists to serve their interests—as the British themselves observed at the time.

For discussion and documentation of this, see my article “What Was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and Why Is It Significant?”, as well as my book Exposing a Zionist Hoax.

The British were in essence the hired guns of the Zionists. Not literally hired, but there was a quid pro quo, which, again, the British themselves explained, and which was that the Balfour Declaration was a propaganda documented intended to garner Jewish support for its war effort.

The British also promised the Arabs their independence in support for the war effort, but that was a promise they never intended to keep. Instead, the whole purpose of the Mandate was, to put it another way, to establish an occupation regime in Palestine precisely to prevent the majority Arab inhabitants from exercising their right to self-determination. British officials were quite candid about this, emphasizing that for the Arabs to exercise this right would be contrary to the Balfour policy incorporated into the Mandate to facilitate the Zionist project.

So, you see, Vox’s claim that Israel was not a European colonialist project is a whopper. The effect of this outrageous lie, of course, is to completely misinform Vox readers about the fundamental cause of the conflict.

No, the UN Did Not Create Israel!

Next, to the same end, Vox tells another whopper: “The United Nations did come around to creating a Jewish state with its 1947 plan for partitioning Palestine”.

No, no, no, no, NO!

That is absolutely false!

What Vox is referring to is UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which contrary to popular myth, neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for the unilateral declaration of the existence of Israel on May 14, 1948.

This huge lie from Vox once again serves to misinform readers fundamentally about the cause of the conflict by leaving them falsely to believe that Israel was established through some kind of legitimate political process in 1947. It was not.

For more on that, read my article “The Myth of the UN Creation of Israel”.

On the contrary, Israel was established in 1948 through violence and the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab population from their homes in Palestine.

For more on that, read my essay “Benny Morris’s Untenable Denial of the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”, also available as an e-book here.

“Myth #5: Palestinians/Israelis aren't a real nationality”

Here, Vox makes the appropriate point that “the world is organized on an idea called national self-determination, which says people are allowed to determine their own national identity and then organize politically around it. Israelis and Palestinians clearly each see themselves as holding a strong national identity, so the world should respect that.”

In his hoax book “What Justice Demands”, Elan Journo claims that the Palestinian national movement never existed until the 1960s. I debunk that nonsense in Exposing a Zionist Hoax. The point Vox is making here, in addition to pointing out that “Palestinians began developing a distinct national identity in the early 1800s”, also suffices to do so.

The problem is that Vox is implying that the establishment of Israel was nothing more than an exercise of the Jews’ right to self-determination. As we’ve already seen, that is totally false.