Debunking ‘The Israeli Palestinian Conflict: 10 Myths Preventing Peace’

Introduction

The above video, titled “The Israeli Palestinian Conflict: 10 Myths Preventing Peace”, was produced by Calev Myers, the founder of the Jerusalem Institute of Justice. This organization passes itself off as a “human rights group”, but in his video, Myers demonstrates that he has no interest in upholding human rights. He purports to debunk ten “myths” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but far from properly informing people about the issue, the video is a disgraceful work of propaganda in which Myers shamelessly and repeatedly lies in order to justify Israel’s perpetual violations of Palestinians’ human rights.

Myers begins by criticizing how most people simply blame one side or the other, suggesting that what’s needed to determine a path to peace is to more objectively clear up misconceptions about the conflict. He then proceeds to hypocritically place the entirety of the blame for the conflict on the Palestinians and to propagate all the same misconceptions that have served to perpetuate the conflict for so long. So let’s do what he falsely claims to do and properly clear up the real misconceptions about the ten issues his video raises.

“Myth” #1: “Israel illegally stole land from the Palestinians”

Myers claims that it isn’t true that Israel stole land from the Palestinians, arguing that in 1947, “the UN voted to give land to both the Jews and the Palestinians”, and that the Jews accepted their partition “and legally formed the state of Israel” while the Arabs rejected their partition and instead attacked Israel.

But Myers is lying. It is true that the UN General Assembly in 1947 passed Resolution 181 recommending that Palestine be partitioned into separate Jewish and Arab states. However, Myer’s claim that the land was the UN’s to give is false. Furthermore, the infamous “partition plan” was just a recommendation that was never implemented. The UN had no authority to partition Palestine against the will of the majority of its inhabitants. The grossly inequitable plan was premised upon the rejection of the majority Arabs’ right to self-determination, essentially calling for Arab lands to be taken away and given to the Jews.

For starters, the plan called for the Jewish state to be comprised of more than half the land in Palestine even though Jews owned less than 7 percent of the land. Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district in Palestine. Arabs owned more land than Jews even within the proposed Jewish state than Jews did. Arabs also constituted a numerical majority within the proposed area of the Jewish state when the Bedouin population was counted.

The plan was reasonably rejected by the Arabs, and violence broke out. Contrary to Myers’ lie, Resolution 181 neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration of Israel’s existence on May 14, 1948. It was after this action that the neighboring Arab states intervened by sending their military forces into Palestine. By that time, more than a quarter million Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed by Zionist military forces. By the time the war was over, more than 700,000 Arabs were ethnically cleansed from their homes in Palestine in order for the “Jewish state” to be established. Hundreds of Arab villages were literally wiped off the map, and Israel has always refused to permit Arab refugees to exercise their internationally recognized right to return to their homeland.

In sum, contrary to Myers’ lying propaganda, the state of Israel was not established through any kind of legitimate political process, but through war and ethnic cleansing. The acquisition of territory by war is prohibited under international law. So it isn’t a myth that Israel illegally stole land from Arabs. It is a fact.