Behind the Memes: When Facts Lie.
These maps are all 100% accurate. They’re also lying to you.
I’ve seen this image shared repeatedly on social media sites without any context, inviting the viewer whose only education on this topic comes from Facebook memes to assume the following narrative must be true:
“The current group calling themselves Palestinians controlled this entire region in 1920 and those nasty Israelis colonized them into the tiny green dots in the 2008 map. That’s why it’s okay to cheer for Hamas terrorists who raped and killed music festival attendees and murdered babies in their cribs. #bothsides #freepalestine.”
That narrative is, by any objective measure, a lie. On a subjective level it’s a malicious lie.
Many sharing it don’t know any better and their compassion leads them to think they’re doing something other than helping spread a destructive, racist PR campaign against Jews, but that is unfortunately what’s happening.
For anyone who is interested, I’m going to go era by era here using these maps as a guide.
It’s lengthy, but none of the facts I’m going to state here are disputed by any serious historian or reputable group. I make no claims that this is the full story, but it’s the one the meme invites.
If you don’t want to take the time to read all of this that’s fine, but I’d ask if you choose to take a pass on reading it to please also take a pass on sharing memes and viewpoints you haven’t taken the time to understand.
Doing otherwise is basically saying “Yeah, what he said!” without really listening. Take a good look at who “He” is in this case too. It isn’t pretty.
Full disclosure: I’m Jewish, though I don’t practice the religion at all, nor do I consider Israel my homeland. I’ve visited there, but I’m an American first and only.
Like literally any other author, I have a bias and a point of view and I make no claims otherwise.
The earliest map is in 1920, but this story starts before that.
For about 400–500 years prior to WW1 Palestine was a territory in the Ottoman Empire kind of like a US state vs an actual country.
It actually wasn’t even quite at the state level, and was considered part of “Greater Syria” by the Ottomans. It wasn’t even officially called “Palestine” by the Ottomans during that period but it remained an unofficial name like “New England.”
Here’s a map of the land included in the Ottoman territory of Palestine from 1851.
You’ll note it’s entirely different from any of the maps in the meme above. No one on any side of the conflict seems to want to return to the Ottoman version of the map.
If it’s hard to get your bearings it’s because this map includes much of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. You can find the modern cities of Jaffa, Ashkalon, and Gaza along the coast if you look closely.
There’s a narrative that prior to the Zionist movement everyone lived in peace in the region, but there’s never really been a time where that was true. There was some Game of Thrones-level intrigue and battles between various Ottoman sects, the Egyptians under Ali, and others such as Napoleon in the 1700’s and 1800’s that left the land scarred and many villages empty.
The Ottoman Empire was gone after WW1, so it became a British territory due to a League of Nations “Mandate.” The British had defeated the Ottomans in the region during the World War, so the League of Nations basically said “You broke it, you bought it.”
It was mandatory as in: the British didn’t particularly want or care about the land, they took it because that’s how the various international agreements from the League worked things out.
Yes, Britain was a colonial power, but the situation was not quite like India or America where they colonized by showing up, planting a Union Jack, and saying “This is ours now, God save the King.”
Also, an important part of the mandate was specifically to decolonize the region and set it up for self government, including a homeland for the Jews. That last part seems to get left out a lot of the time.
The British in this role were kind of like the UN Peacekeepers of their day, unwanted by the locals and often corrupt and ineffective. That said, unlike the UN they were indeed in charge of the region in a practical sense (through force and wealth) and no one back home complained on CNN if they emptied a clip into some of the locals.
Mid 1919 is considered the end date of the Ottoman Empire, just prior to this first map.
Mandatory Palestine, as it was known under the British, had never a been sovereign self governing nation at any point in the time between the 1500’s when the Ottomans took over and World War I.
What remnants of a national government or shared services had been largely dismantled during the conflicts in the Ottman decline period and completely destroyed during World War 1.
By 1920 in practice the status quo was something closer to Medieval Feudalism or the American Wild West with a distant central government, large tracts of empty land and farms, bands of outlaws and brigands roaming the land, an often corrupt police force and militia supposedly keeping the peace, and the reality being that most people and settlements had to look out for themselves most of the time.
This wasn’t new. The Ottomans had been in decline for quite some time before the empire formally ended, and the folks in the capital weren’t too worried about what was going on day to day in what they considered to be the backwater of their territory as long as the feudal tributes and taxes kept coming.
The local Arabs were known as “Fellaheen” who tended to be, for lack of a better term, peasants who worked the land for rich owners in other countries. The Fellaheen didn’t own much of the land at all, less than 1%.
The Arabs also didn’t really care to go along with the Ottoman’s land title system that came around in the mid 1800’s. Prior to that they had various traditions of personal and communal ownership under Sharia Law that they wanted to keep practicing, and they definitely didn’t want to pay more taxes.
So… they cooked the books. As far as official records showed, lots of land that was effectively owned and lived on by families and individuals ended up listed as state or community property.
This was well and good when it was the Ottomans, but when the British came in and checked the land titles, they said “Oh, this is state land or unowned land we can sell without issue.”
That last bit comes into play a little later.
In 1917 the British had issued what was called the Balfour Declaration inviting and encouraging European Jews to immigrate to Palestine to form a homeland. Many Jews answered that call. Many Arabs were PISSED.
The Arabs convened a congress in Jerusalem that would meet periodically through the 1920’s mainly to discuss this “problem with the Jews” that they had. They didn’t actually recognize the British as the legal authority to administer the region, but didn’t press that issue too hard at this early date as they also had no ability to administer it themselves and, perhaps more importantly, notably fewer guns and tanks at their disposal.
It’s important to note that there was no Palestinian national identity in this period. That’s something the map doesn’t make at all clear.
The residents of Mandatory Palestine had considered themselves Ottoman subjects until the empire fell, and had far more allegiance to whatever town or settlement they lived in than any existing country.
The Arab Congress actually wanted Palestine to be part of Syria under the Hashemite King Faisal at this point. To be fair, the British had promised Faisal’s father that there would be a large Arab state, except they’d also promised Syria to the French in a secret agreement called Sykes-Picot.
As such, making Palestine into South Syria was a um… complicated… ask. Thanks to that secret agreement, Syria was a French mandate during this period, there were some border disputes on what specific land would be covered under the French vs British mandates, and of course every ethnic, political, religious, and obscenely wealthy group in the region (Zionist, Arab, Hashemite, etc) were sending delegates to London and Paris to work their respective agendas who met with different officials who all tended to promise them different things at different times. Keep in mind this was all done by boat, rail and telegraph as Zoom calls were not yet a thing. Diplomacy moved a bit slower back then.
In any case, the Jews immigrating during this period arrived not as colonizers, but as refugees and invited guests, often with little more than the clothes on their back.
For roughly 50 years before the Balfour Declaration, there had been Jewish groups run by wealthy Europeans who provided monetary assistance to this process, paying their way and purchasing or leasing property for them to live on when they arrived. These were/are the “Zionists” you hear so much about today, at least after 1896 when the term was coined.
These groups existed because of the problems with rampant antisemitism in Eastern Europe (Google “Pogrom” to find out more about this) and Western Europe too. (Googling “Dreyfus Affair” is a good place to start on that topic. The Middle East was no better, as you’ll find if you Google “Damascus Affair” or read up on what the Nazis and Italian Fascists were up to in the 1930’s in Eastern Europe and Northern Africa.)
It’s important to note the property the Zionists were buying was purchased legally and much of the land was uninhabited desert, swampland, or state owned property. (At least the land titles SAID it was state owned property... turns out cooking the books on land titles to save on taxes can backfire.)
Things like war, famine and a changing global economy had also drastically reduced the monetary value of the land and those foreign owners were keen to exit by selling to Zionists or the British. Sometimes they told the buyer the land had people on it, sometimes they told the people living there the land had been sold. Other times, not so much.
You can see where this might have caused problems. People who had legally bought the land showed up and expected to be able to live on it or use it how they wished, and the people living there didn’t always get a heads up.
Neither had an unreasonable position, but they were mutually exclusive.
Things like probate courts and arbitration also didn’t exist and the British had their own agenda, so those disputes could get nasty and the British were often, let’s call it “insensitive” to the needs of poor people and natives, as you may have read elsewhere.
This process was awful and painful for refugees and natives alike and the fact of the matter is that the conflict at this point wasn’t really either of their faults per se. That said, the two cultures did choose to handle the situation rather differently.
Regardless of the conflict and confusion, the fact remains that much if not most of the land the Jews purchased was considered nonviable or even worthless.
For example, Tel Aviv was just sand dunes north of Jaffa prior to 1909. Here’s a picture of the city’s founding: No White City or disco in sight.
Confusion over land ownership was not the only problem. A few years before the Balfour Declaration the British had also promised the Arabs in Mecca their own state if they rebelled against the Ottomans in what was called the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. The Arabs did live up to their end of the deal.
There’s disagreement over whether the specific land that was designated “Palestine” in 1923 was included in that promise, but what’s not in question is that the entire rest of the former Ottoman Empire ended up as multiple Arab run states save for the tiny stretch of land that’s Israel today.
What’s also left out just looking at the map is that the Arabs terrorized and abused the Jews as they arrived and settled on land they’d legally purchased, as they’d done for hundred of years before the concept of Zionism even existed.
The Ottomans did similarly. For example in 1917 they rounded up all the Jews in Tel Aviv and told them to find somewhere else to be. They marched them through the desert Trail of Tears style and had the British not come in, the Jews likely never would have been able to return to the city they had built from scratch on empty desert.
In this period the Jaffa Riots in 1921 also sound remarkably like what just happened near Gaza on 10/7 in that Arabs went into Jewish homes and businesses and raped and murdered indiscriminately, including children and the elderly.
Even a century before social media there’s documentation of Arabs raping underage girls and violently killing babies in their cribs. They also firebombed a youth hostel with teenage residents.
In 1921 there was no Gaza blockade and no illegal settlements in the West Bank, just old fashioned antisemitism and violence, the same behavior we saw out of Gaza in October, 2023.
So now the 1923 map is up.
Across the Jordan River was an area called Transjordan, meaning literally “Across the Jordan.” The area was a battlefield in WW1 and ended up largely lawless and ungoverned after that.
The British established an Arab kingdom based out of Amman, and it later declared independence and started becoming modern Jordan in 1946.
So to be clear, all that happened between these two maps is that the British partitioned a piece of territory they‘d been told by the international community was their mandate, and renamed part of it.
Not for nothing, they’d also established one of several Arab kingdoms they would set up following the McMahon-Hussein correspondence. The King of Transjordan was Abdullah bin Al-Hussein, Hussein Bin Ali’s son and brother of Faisal, who had not ended up as King of Syria after the French expelled him, so the British installed him in Iraq instead.
The Arabs didn’t see it that way though, they expected to be granted all the land from Syria to Yemen. The Jews were also upset that the British were apparently handing out states and they didn’t get one.
In any case, this means that no Palestinian “ceded” land in that 1923 map. Nothing got conquered, the British just drew new lines. “Palestinian” also meant something very different than today. It referred to anyone living in Mandatory Palestine. There were Palestinian Arabs, also Christians, Jews, Druze, and others.
Transjordan stayed a British mandate for over two more decades, but it wasn’t part of Palestine anymore. They also stopped selling land to Jews there and forbade Jewish immigration once the partition happened.
The Arabs got more pissed with each passing year after the Balfour Declaration, not that they were exactly mellow and content prior to that.
Here’s a place that gets glossed over a lot:
The Jews, particularly the immigrants from Western Europe, were modern Western citizens who spoke English, understood how paperwork and Western legal frameworks functioned, and, notably, did in fact recognize the British Mandate as the legal government.
The Arabs did not. They saw the British as interlopers, didn’t care much for their legal system or processes, and didn’t participate in the process of setting up a modern nation like the Jews did. This meant the Jews were far more effective in securing rights to land and resources from the British than the Arabs.
The British Mandate and Army worked with the Jews a fair amount as a result, except when they worked with the Arabs if they felt the Jews were getting too uppity, or maybe someone didn’t pay their protection bribe or look the other way when the captain wanted quality time with a farmer’s daughter.
The end result was that for quite some time in the 20’s and early 30’s, the Jews were far more effective in getting favorable policies made and land granted or sold to them than the Arabs.
The Arabs regarded the situation something like Southerners dealing with Carpetbaggers after the Civil War. They didn’t quite understand the legal implications of what the fast talking city folk were saying, but they’d respond violently if someone tried to remove them from their homes regardless of whether they actually owned the land said home was on.
As this went on, the problems and violence between Jews and Arabs grew. As the violence ramped up the British both stopped allowing Jews to immigrate into Palestine at all and at the same time also prevented the Jews who had arrived from leaving.
Part of the latter policy had to do with the fact that there wasn’t even a clear place for them to go. Any semblance of alliance between the British and Jewish settlers ended here.
In 1937 following years of some really nasty violence which, while not one sided, was largely characterized by Arab on Jew attacks, the British took swift decisive action to end it and in their proper splendid British way boldly… appointed a commission to figure out what to do.
It only took about a year for the “Peel Commission” to conclude the following:
“Jews and Arabs F’ing hate each other, fight a lot, and the only thing they agree on is that they both hate us. There are a lot of them, they both need a state, and we should leave.”
(I hope they didn’t spend too much money on that.)
I do have to note that the Jews had multiple paramilitary groups at this point.
The largest was called the Haganah, which is Hebrew for “defense.” It had been founded to protect Jewish settlements in the 1920’s after violence towards Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron and Tel Hai.
Their philosophy and policy in the 20’s was to only defend from aggression and not proactively attack anyone… but they weren’t the only armed paramilitary group around.
In the 20’s the British partition of Transjordan had inspired a new faction within the Zionist movement called “Revisionist Zionism” which was a right wing sect pushing for a more aggressive posture. In 1929, Arabs rioted around the Western Wall in Jerusalem and injured and killed hundreds of Jews there. At that point the Revisionists felt that a peaceful solution was no longer possible.
Among other things, they founded their own paramilitary group called the Irgun which took aggressive action and disproportionate reprisals when they felt it necessary.
Many of the criticisms of the Zionist movement in general are actually specifically the policies and actions of the Revisionists vs. the larger Zionist movement, but to most Westerners who don’t know anything about this conflict they’re all just Zionists, or even just Jews to them.
The Irgun also had started an insurgency against the British who they felt had not only caused many of their problems and restricted immigration, but as I mentioned previously, sometimes even joined pogroms with the Arabs against them.
The Revisionists, Irgun and their philosophy of aggressive strikes and massive reprisals will be important later, so make a mental note.
The Jews as a group were definitely just not passive and innocent victims by this time, but their agenda was still to form a state and end the fighting. Even the most violent radicals did often take steps to warn Arab civilians in advance of their attacks and generally try to keep their fighting to military targets.
When there were awful massacres caused by these groups (and there were sadly many to note) Jewish leadership would generally acknowledge it and in many cases punish the perpetrators.
The Peel Commission drew a map that gave the Jews about 20–30% of what is now Israel and left the rest to the Arabs.
That map isn’t part of this meme, but I’ll put it in. The green part is the proposed Jewish homeland, an the yellow part is Arab.
The British would keep a corridor from the sea to the region around Jerusalem. Even then the idea of any of the ethnic groups controlling the seat of all 3 of the largest Abrahamic religions was a non-starter, so the Brits figured they’d hang on to it for everyone’s sake.
The Jews were pretty unhappy with this plan but ultimately agreed to it, but the Arabs insisted there could be no Jewish state, the British had no right to decide anything, and furthermore, death to the Jews. (That particular tune comes up in this story more often than Taylor Swift on KISS FM.)
No really, they were VERY serious about the Death to the Jews thing. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem even went to Germany and had a heart to heart with Hitler.
They didn’t shake hands as Hitler regarded the Mufti as genetically inferior, but the bromance was cemented.
Hitler thanked him for his time and made a note to look up the Mufti again when it was time to expand the Final Solution to the Middle East.
He gave him a budget to start a Jihad and the Mufti helped recruit about 20,000 Muslim volunteers for the SS who got to help with Hitler’s genocide in Europe.
You can maybe see where some of the Jews might have thought the Irgun had a point.
Of course… there was also an even more radical Jewish group called the Lehi that split off from the Irgun during World War II and actually tried to form an alliance with the Nazis and Italians to fight the British. As you can imagine, this concept didn’t go well in practice nor were they well thought of by the Jewish population.
To sum up the period between the mid 30’s and the mid 40's… Jews and Arabs fought each other, and they both made a side hobby of killing and blowing up as many of the British as they could. No one really came out looking great during this period.
Less than five years after that the British Empire was over, The League of Nations was over, World War 2 was over, and the Holocaust had happened.
So now we’re to this map. It’s obvious where the Peel Commission got their ideas from.
With this context it’s also easy to understand why a group that had openly allied itself with a genocidal madman who tried to take over the world because their ideologies were so compatible had less negotiating clout than the group that had been nearly exterminated.
Even this map doesn’t tell the whole story though.
As often as we hear the “Why would Arabs agree to split their country with Jews,” as the above map shows the reality was quite different.
You can’t go start buying land in France and expect to form your own country because the French government claims sovereignty over that land.
In Mandatory Palestine there was no central government doing that. If you don’t believe me, just tell me who the king or president or prime minister of Palestine was in 1945.
You can’t because there wasn’t one. Also no army, no courts, no elected representatives, and no currency other than what the British provided. Almost like “Palestine” was just what the British called it and never an actual country.
You can actually find coins from Mandatory Palestine on Ebay for not much money if you want, they look like this:
https://www.ebay.com/b/Palestine-Coins/173615/bn_16565341
They have English, Hebrew, and Arabic on them to denote the languages spoken locally and the British who were administering the region.
As you can see, it’s definitely not what you’d expect from a sovereign Arab state, because it was no such thing. The Hebrew in the parenthesis actually stands for Eretz Yisrael, which translates to: “The Land of Israel.”
The reality is that even thought the Arabs certainly WANTED to control 100% of the region, they didn’t have legitimate claim on anything close to that, as this zoomed in version of the map illustrates pretty clearly.
In the absence of a sovereign state and different ethnic groups controlling different parts, a partition plan made sense.
Also, the majority of the land was empty. The problem was never that there wasn’t enough space for everyone, almost like this issue wasn’t ever really about land at all.
By 1945 the British were DONE with the whole thing. The Brits were set to head back home for some tea and crumpets, sorry bout the mess. It was very much the US withdrawing from Iraq or Afghanistan kind of vibe, but with less care taken or hope for the future. (Not like say, the British partition of India and Pakistan. I’m told that went much better with barely a snag.)
More Jews had immigrated from Europe, literally having nowhere else to go what with the fun new quota system America put together to stem the tide of Jewish and other Eastern European refugees into Ellis Island. (That system still forms the basis of the super fair and effective and not at all racist immigration system we have today!) Again though, they were not colonizers, but refugees fleeing discrimination and death.
There had been ten more years of sectarian violence which had a neverending chain of atrocities and reprisals. I won’t pretend the Israeli hands were clean. They most assuredly were not.
So… in 1947 the newly formed United Nations proposed a new two state plan, this map.
The Jews said yes to this plan.
The Arabs said there could be no Jewish state, they didn’t recognize the authority of the UN, and also, in case anyone forgot: death to the Jews.
And yeah, they were still quite serious about the Death to the Jews thing, as the logo of the Arab Liberation Army so clearly illustrates.
Whatever else you want to say about it, this was a solid piece of branding that very clearly communicates the values and agenda of the organization it represents without a single word being necessary.
The UN proposal triggered an escalation in violence, to the degree that was even possible.
Fighters from the neighboring Arab countries started streaming in under flags using the logo above and arraying themselves in strategic positions all over the region.
It began with Arabs attacking Jewish busses and killing and injuring the occupants, unless you ask the Arabs who would tell you those attacks were just a reprisal for some Lehi violence towards Arabs suspected of being Jewish informants. Suffice it to say there’s not much point trying to figure out “who started it” at this late date.
During 1947 there’s a lot of disagreement among historians about who did what and when as far as the violence is concerned. The environment would have been a civil war had Palestine been a country, and the British made clear they were no longer interested in doing anything but packing their stuff and leaving. They abstained from voting on passing the UN Resolution on the partition plan and stated they would make no effort to enforce its implementation. The Jews and Arabs were on their own and no one had any illusions about how the two sides would “work out” the particulars of the plan.
A lot is said among Israel’s detractors on “Plan Dalet” in particular, as it involved proactive attacks to sieze control of the the Jewish portion of the partition plan, regardless of who lived where. It included expelling population or destroying villages and settlements that had been hostile to the Jewish cause.
What tends to get left out is that Plan Dalet was implemented in April and May of 1948, but the aforementioned Arab Liberation Army and a separate group called the Army of the Jihad had effectively blockaded Jewish settlements in places like Jerusalem and Safed starting in January, with the intention of simply starving the Jews out.
Plan Dalet went into effect to lift the blockade and to establish territorial integrity for a state with contiguous, defensible borders. It wasn’t anyone’s first choice.
In any event, the more radical groups absolutely did perpetrate a massacre at Deir Yassin, though accounts make it sound like a raid gone wrong than a planned attack like on 10/7. It’s also important to know there were multiple armed bands of thousands of Arabs flying the flag with the Arab Liberation Army above, so it isn’t like the Jews didn’t have a reason to suspect their very existence was threatened.
Israel declared independence in 1948. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, and the local Palestinian Arabs immediately attacked en masse.
The justification here was that the Jews were wiping out and dispossessing the Arabs. It’s hard to argue that wasn’t happening in the course of the war, but the reverse was also true in the Arab portions of the partition, notably in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank where the literally entire Jewish population was killed or expelled. “Nakba” narratives tend to leave this out.
The Arab countries had warned Arabs living near the Israeli border… sorry, illegitimate partition line of the Zionist Entity, of the coming attack and told them to evacuate, and they could return after they’d pushed the Jews into the sea.
The Arab war plan was absolutely something between ethnic cleansing and genocide as, had been the case since they started arriving in the late 1800’s, none of the Israelis had anywhere else to go. It’s also worth noting that while Arabs who stayed behind Jewish lines without making war were kept alive and ultimately made full citizens of Israel, no Jew remained alive in the areas the Arabs controlled or conquered during the war.
Many of the Jews had multiple generations born on land they owned, others were invited guests, and many had been driven from their homes by the Russians, Nazis, or just run of the mill European antisemites.
The Israelis fought the Arab League off more or less by themselves. The Western alliance including the US had put an arms embargo on Israel, so what weapons they had were smuggled in. There’s a false narrative that the US fought this war for the Israelis, but that simply isn’t true.
I’ll tell you right now I am not going to be capable of fully litigating the entire “Nakba” narrative as I have neither the time nor inclination. Just doing a Google search on this subject will get you page after page of Palestinian and Zionist propaganda, with firsthand sources usually behind a paywall.
What I usually do in a situation where firsthand evidence isn’t available is look at the outcome and see if I can infer a narrative from it.
First: Yep, the Jews kicked the Arabs out of the land they controlled. The Arabs also kicked the Jews out of the land they controlled.
In 1949 about 20% of the Arab population remained inside the now Israeli state.
0% of the Jewish population remained in Arab controlled areas.
That fact by itself, coupled with the fact that Israel’s population today remains 20% Arab and they have full rights, citizenship, and representation in Government tells you a lot about the nature of each culture.
The Jewish population in Palestinian controlled territories remains 0% today, and I’m told map apps like Waze will warn Israelis they’re likely in mortal danger if they end up in one of those territories.
Israel took a lot of territory from the Arabs during this war, but notably the West Bank was taken by Jordan who sought to nationalize the Palestinians living there, and Gaza was part of Egypt at that point though the Egyptians didn’t want it and gave them refugee status.
Many of the Palestinians in what was now Israeli territory who had fled their homes during the war ended up in Gaza and the West Bank. This war and the run up to it are what the Palestinians call the Nakba, meaning “Disaster.”
Worth noting: The Israelis considered taking the West Bank by force at this time and had more than sufficient military might to do so. They felt the Arab Palestinians should have a state, and that taking the land would be immoral.
That’s the 1948 map. The reason it’s different from the proposed map is because Israel was attacked, fought, and won a defensive war, not because they just decided not to follow the plan.
Note how at this point the West Bank is part of Jordan and Gaza is part of Egypt, and there is no green Palestinian administered territory. More on that later.
Before we break this map down, here’s another map that starts in 1948 that tells a very clear story the facts of which no one disputes, even if they don’t like to talk about it.
After Israel was founded, the Arab states ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Jews.
The folks spreading the deceptive meme that inspired this article love to talk about the 750,000 Palestinians displaced by the war in 1948, but tend not to mention the close to a million Jews forced out of their homes to take refuge in Israel. Unlike the Palestinians the Jews had not taken up arms against their neighbors or really done anything wrong other than just be Jewish.
Also unlike Palestinian refugees in all the Arab states neighboring Israel (except Jordan), those refugees weren’t put into camps or kept from integrating, they were granted citizenship and the ability to make a better life for themselves.
75 years later you don’t see the descendants of the 1948 refugees demanding to go back to the homes and property seized from them in places like Baghdad, Cairo, and Beirut.
The ones from the West Bank… that is a bit more complicated. We’ll get into that later.
Many of the Palestinian refugees in places like Lebanon and Syria are still kept in camps and not allowed to integrate with their host countries.
This completely undisputed fact is why why Israel rolls its eyes when those same states insist they’re “helping” Palestinians by funding terrorist “freedom fighters” as though violence against Jews is the only possible solution and the situation in Gaza is the only problem. Moreso when foreigners around the world share Instagram memes like the one that inspired this article and call them colonizers.
Fast forward to 1967. Egypt closed maritime straits to Israel and massed troops on the border, as did other Arab countries.
Israel had warned Egypt previously that the closing of the straits would be seen as an act of war, and the massing of troops on the borders seemed like a pretty clear indicator they were about to be attacked again.
Like Han Solo, Israel shot first and the Arab nations discovered their militaries were a few generations behind the IDF and that air power is super important.
The 1967 map shows the aftermath of what was called the 6 day war.
Despite not being a colonial power and never fighting an aggressive war, Israel ended up taking territory from Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. The Golan Heights were formally annexed from Syria and made part of Israel as they were a strategic position Syria could (and indeed did) use to attack them.
Now we’re approaching modern times, and some fairly important stuff happened between 1967 and the next year listed on the map meme.
In 1970, the PLO was the Palestinian paramilitary group supposedly advocating for a state, but their top to-do item was that they needed to drive the Jews in Israel into the sea. That was their stated agenda and they’d say so if you asked, just like Hamas. That Grand Mufti was still kicking in Beirut with his #1 hit single “Death to the Jews” too.
In 1973 on Yom Kippur the Arab states attacked Israel again and, especially at the beginning, were doing quite well. Had it not been for Assad, the Syrian President, feeling that he needed to put his ego above listening to his Generals, it’s likely Israel would have lost not just the Golan Heights but possibly core Northen Israeli territory as well.
The Egyptians had also learned the lessons of 1967 quite deeply and quickly retook the Suez and pushed the Israelis back into the Sinai with heavy losses.
Israel was on its back foot and needed assistance. The Prime Minister at that time was Golda Meir, and she had the IDF prepare a potential nuclear response.
She then called up Nixon and said “Tell you what: Option A is that you help us win a conventional war, and Option B is we see what happens to gas prices after we make Cairo and Damascus glow in the dark.”
Nixon, like every subsequent US President, went with Option A. There’s a lot said about AIPAC and conspiratorial influence Israel supposedly wields over the US that is responsible for the strategic alliance the two countries currently have, but at the end of the day it’s the knowledge that Israel will go out with a bang if they’re ever threatened existentially that garners their Western military support.
The Arab states got this memo as well, which is why they never again raised a conventional army to invade Israel and settled into a cold war/proxy war posture instead.
Jordan was trying to integrate the Palestinians as Jordanian but many of the Palestinians refused to follow Jordanian law, didn’t recognize the Jordanian monarchy as a legitimate authority and finally tried to assassinate the Jordanian king and other officials a few times and started a full on civil war. You can Google “Black September” if you want to know more about this period.
The Palestinians were then driven into Syria and Lebanon where, and you won’t believe this, they refused to integrate and tried to overthrow the Lebanese Government in a civil war that lasted for 20 years into the 90’s. They also fought against the Syrian government in the Syrian Civil war.
This is why Palestinian refugees are not welcome today in Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon outside of the various refugee camps, many of which are now walled or fenced and have worse conditions than Gaza.
For example: A camp called Ain Al Hilweh in Lebanon is among the largest and since 2016 has been walled and blockaded like Gaza.
Also like Gaza, periodically there has been violence originating from the camp resulting in armed responses from the Lebanese military, along with almost constant violence between Muslim factions inside the camps.
In 2007 the Lebanese army actually took over another camp called Nahr al Bared and ended up razing it to the ground, killing and displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians.
There are generally no marches in US college campuses or international news coverage when this kind of thing happens, and it’s happened as recently as July 2023 when a Civil War broke out in Ain El Hilweh and is still raging. Or… well… it’s actually kind of hard to tell given how much violence happens there as a matter of course.
It’s almost like no one internationally cares about this issue or these people at all when there aren’t Jews involved, and the groups that promote the Free Palestine movement forget to mobilize or even mention these incidents in their carefully curated narrative.
It’s very interesting how even the anti-Israel/Pro Palestine press discusses the conflict. In this article from “The Electronic Intifada” (which is obviously not Pro-Israeli), they are very frank about things like Hamas stealing aid from their own people and causing a humanitarian crisis, that they operate bases out of UNRWA schools, fight with other radical Palestinian groups, and commit acts of terror in and outside the camp.
It’s like a miniature Gaza with all the same factors in play, but there aren’t any Israelis involved.
Lebanon has pretty much the exact same policies towards their Palestinians as Israel (walled camps, massive security apparatus, restricted movement and employment, no voting or representative government, etc.) but no one cries about Apartheid up there for some reason.
In 1979 Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty. Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula and returned the captured territory to Egypt, and Israel and Egypt normalized relations.
Egypt was kicked out of the Arab league for this, and the Islamic Jihad assassinated the Egyptian prime minister for daring to make peace and recognize Israel’s right to exist.
Egypt pulled out of Gaza at this time, leaving Israel to deal with it.
Israel didn’t want Gaza, and Gazans definitely didn’t want to be part of Israel.
Jordan also said “No backsies” regarding the West Bank as they found the Palestinians to be ungovernable and didn’t really appreciate their attempt to overthrow their government.
Gaza at this point was neither Egyptian nor Israeli, nor had they formed a government of their own. That status remains to this day.
That’s the 1982 map, when the handover of Sinai back to Egypt was complete. Again please note the lack of green Palestinian administered territory.
Terrorists from Gaza started shooting rockets and sending suicide bombers into Israel regularly. They also attacked Egypt pretty much weekly for daring to recognize Israel’s right to exist.
These were extra fun attacks where the terrorist would wire explosive vests with nails and metal so when they exploded in as crowded a public place as they could find, they’d hurt or kill as many innocent people as possible.
This is a major reason why the Gaza/Egyptian border is closed today, and why Egypt still refuses to accept Palestinian refugees. There are also ideological, religious, and political differences between Palestinian and Egyptian Muslims that, you guessed it, often lead to violence.
(You may by this point be detecting a pattern regarding why none of Israel’s neighbors want Palestinian refugees in their country.)
1993. PLO leader Yasser Arafat moves to Gaza. He’s spent his entire life fighting everyone he came across in every country he was in, and had his ass kicked by all of them.
After decades of bringing war and death wherever he went, Arafat negotiates the Oslo Accords with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and gets the Nobel Peace Prize for I guess… most improved attitude?
The PLO renounces terrorism. Gaza and portions of the West Bank are put under the newly formed Palestinian Authority.
1994. Jordan signs a treaty and formally ends the war with Israel and normalizes relations.
Things are honestly looking kind of hopeful at this point until…
1995. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin is shot by… wait for it… an Israeli right wing extremist.
Why? He was opposed to the peace initiative. As in so many cases, right wing extremists are why we can’t have nice things.
The main right wing party in Israel today is called Likud. They trace their roots back to the Irgun and their philosophy of aggressive preemptive strikes and disproportionate violent responses. The idea still forms the basis of their policy when they control the Israeli government, as they do today.
Israel has a parliamentary system and not the two party one Americans are used to. There are many political parties and in 2023 Likud doesn’t have anything approaching a majority of Israelis supporting it.
2000. The final peace agreement conference at Camp David breaks down.
An Israeli politician visits the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with 1,000 armed guards.
There is immediately a massive Arab protest and riots, with a brutal Israeli response. Beatings and bombings from the Arabs, Riot shields and rubber bullets from the Israelis.
The Israelis didn’t actually do a thing to the mosque other than “defile it” with their presence, but the action was designed to provoke.
Even so, if you want to talk about a disproportionate response, decades of war and death over a guy praying near a Mosque seems like Exhibit A.
The Palestinians in Gaza decide they haven’t quite had enough of terrorism after all and resume mainly targeting civilians with rockets and those fun suicide bombs I mentioned before. Hamas is ascendant during this period.
Curiously, there are no college protests accusing Hamas of war crimes or genocide. The UN certainly doesn’t seem to mind, as they’ve never passed a resolution condemning Hamas despite almost non stop war crimes for decades.
That fighting goes on until 2005 when a new cease fire agreement is reached.
Palestinians again agree to renounce violence and Israel will unilaterally withdraw from Gaza including forcibly removing Israelis who had settled there. They also agree to release 900 prisoners who had largely been arrested for terrorism.
They’d gotten about halfway through releasing the prisoners when the rocket attacks and bombings started up again, with many done by the very folks who’d just gotten out of jail.
Israel was undeterred from the peace process and gave the Palestinian authority time to rein in their terrorists.
2006: Gaza has an election. They elect Hamas, the faction who opposed the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, and who went old school towards Israeli relations in that they stated they wanted to eliminate Jews from the Earth. No Jewish state, Death to the Jews, you know the drill by now.
They also declared war on Fatah, the party of the old PLO who now ran the Palestinian Authority. For good measure they also declared war on any Muslim who just tried to live in peace with Israel and recognized it as a state. Also war on Christians, every letter in LGBTQ, men who cut their beards or eat bacon, women who show their hair or ankles, etc. You get the idea.
Now we’ve arrived at 2008, our final meme map. Note that even with the deceptive meme, it’s obvious that despite being undefeated in the various wars, the Israelis have voluntarily given up a lot of territory in the interest of peace. If they’re colonizing, they’re really bad at it.
The Israelis find an illegal tunnel (in Israeli territory) likely to be used for kidnapping and the kind of charming behavior we saw at the music festival on 10/7/2023, and destroy it before that can happen.
Hamas ramps up the suicide bombs and that fun habit of shooting rockets indiscriminately towards Jewish cities and settlements. There was no Iron Dome then, so it was far more effective.
Israel invaded with a ground assault and found Hamas had embedded itself in the civilian population to the point where it was not practical to root them out as the human cost was too high. The UN condemns Israel, but not Hamas for some reason. This kind of thing happens a lot, which is why Israel isn’t really that interested in the UN’s opinion.
Public opinion around the world was also oddly not super anti-indiscriminate-firing-of-rockets-into-Jewish-population-centers either, and Israel was drawing a lot of criticism internationally. It becomes much more difficult to insist that the Jews control the media, and very easy to understand why Israel doesn’t care how many college kids march in support of Hamas or put Palestinian flags on their Instagram handles.
Israel stayed long enough to build the wall that’s there now, controlled the border to regulate the flow of goods into Gaza to hamper Hamas’s ability to make war as much as possible, built the Iron Dome, and adopted a policy of containment since they knew the rockets weren’t going to stop coming.
Egypt also put a wall on their border and their military would fire into Gaza if the violence was spilling out towards their citizens. Their border was locked down tighter than Israel’s and another difference is that Egypt didn’t provide water, power, or aid at their own expense. When there was frequent violence, it didn’t make the news and we’d see nary a crying TikTok video about the injustice of it all.
Now we are passing the periods covered in the meme but hey let’s keep going.
Hamas shooting rockets trying to kill Israeli civilians became oddly routine and accepted. It was normal. Schools, hospitals, and private homes got hit on the regular. Oh well.
People in other countries who were not getting shelled and having rockets raining down daily certainly didn’t seem to have a problem with it and even complained that… I guess… with the wall and blockade and Iron Dome the Israelis weren’t giving the Hamas terrorists enough of a sporting chance to kill them?
That reads like sarcasm, but I’m sincerely not sure how else to interpret claims like “Israel has the power here” when it’s clear Israel does NOT have the power to make Hamas stop trying to kill them (and also most everyone else), but only to restrict the tools available for them to do so.
I’ve honestly never understood why so many Western liberals turned against Israel for doing what they could to defend their people from indiscriminate killing other than you know, antisemitism.
Israel built a smartphone app to alert for rockets (download it here), the Iron Dome generally shot said rockets down, and life went on.
Rocket attacks stopped making international front pages despite (or due to) being more common than a cloudy day.
The fact that a country literally had to develop the video game “Missile Command” in real life and spend billions annually to keep their citizens safe doesn’t seem to bother anyone.
Oh wait, that’s not true, it does bother certain people. Left wing “Peace Activists” and far right “America First” isolationists (aka racists) in the US both frequently take issue with the billions in aid sent to Israel to develop and maintain this system, even though most of it gets spent with American companies and helps the US economy.
There are tons of Twitter and TikTok videos of Israelis hearing sirens and getting alerts, and literally going out to watch the iron dome shoot down the rockets from Gaza sent to kill them.
They have a “let’s go watch the tornado from the porch” vibe like in Kansas and Oklahoma. You can even see this casual attitude at the beginning of the music festival videos that were just released as well.
Even with the Iron Dome, rockets still hit populated areas.
https://x.com/IsraelMFA/status/1027244547410153472?s=20
Meanwhile, hard right wing and Ultra Orthodox Israelis were illegally settling the West Bank with support from Likud.
The government of Israel shifted right, almost like the fact that no one seemed to care that Hamas was regularly trying to kill them resulted in a “fuck it” attitude where warmongering and bigotry would resonate with a war weary and justifiably scared population.
With that said, and even with all the context above, the current policies of the right wing Israeli government and the settlements in the West Bank are disgusting, cruel and indefensible, Full stop. Anyone who condemns this policy or the current government that enables it is neither antisemitic nor unreasonable.
Just keep in mind that it wasn’t like that for most of Israel’s existence until this latest era. Definitely not when it refused to conquer the West Bank in 1948 or ceded most of the territorial gains in 1967.
Israel is objectively not a colonial power, or at least wasn’t until Jewish extremists started settling on Palestinian land. Those extremists form the basis of the Likud support base, rather like evangelicals with MAGA in the US.
Again, the failure of the Israeli government to prevent or punish this behavior is shameful and must stop immediately.
At this point I’m going to pause and drop a note for those of you still reading, and an Easter Egg for those who will argue with me in comment sections without bothering to read this far, or at all. That Easter Egg is that the “passwird” (sp. to thwart ctrl-f) is “Pizza Box.” Anyone who doesn’t know the “passwird” and argues with me here or on social media will be mocked and ignored.
Then on 10/7/2023 it was made clear that the Israeli containment policy towards Gaza had failed, and we had the worst violence in decades.
It harkens back to tactics in the 1921 Jaffa riots or even the 1834 looting of Safed decades before the term ”Zionist” even existed, but it was much larger and somehow even more vicious.
That containment policy had been put in place because the human cost was too high to go into Gaza and try to separate Hamas from regular Palestinians, but after this attack the calculus has clearly changed.
Israel will now go in and remove Hamas’s ability to make war, and likely kill tens of thousands of people while doing so. (Note: Not anything approaching the 2.2 million that would constitute a genocide, but that reality doesn’t stop Israel of being accused of that crime on social media and in political rhetoric.)
Right now they have public opinion on their side but as we saw in 2008 that can be fickle.
That said, they’re likely to finish the job this time regardless of what anyone says as it’s clear that each passing day just adds to Hamas’s will and ability to attack.
Hamas spent the years since 2007 has raising a generation on anti-Semitic Sesame Street and terrorist summer camp.
Yes, really.
They also proactively try to get Palestinian kids killed so they can cry foul.
Again, yes, really.
The statistic that much of Gaza is 15–25 years old is brought up a lot since the Hamas attack, and the above is what these kids were raised on.
The level of propaganda and false narrative under Hamas is extreme. When Israel forcibly removed their settlements in 2005, Hamas actually claimed in their election campaign it was their military victories that did it. No joke.
These poor kids (and their parents) have been lied to and abused and manipulated by Hamas their entire lives. Even without the coming conflict it was probably already a lost generation. You can see it with the debriefing of the terrorists caught on 10/7.
Now the IDF is going to contend with a bunch of traumatized, radicalized, abused kids trying, however ineffectively, to kill them as they come to root out Hamas.
And the IDF will roll over them in what is likely to be a vicious and bloody war. The soldiers doing it will lose their souls. It’s hard to find the words to describe the level of tragedy we are about to see.
As Golda Meir said to Anwar Sadat in 1978: We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.
The PLO didn’t agree to disarm until they’d been beaten decisively for decades. Hamas won’t either, and since 2007 they’ve done little but dig in under civilians to keep it from happening.
In addition to strategic goals, I suspect the IDF wants to demonstrate beyond a doubt how badly Hamas policy has hurt Gaza, that Hamas lied about a military victory in 2005, and that supporting Hamas going forward is maybe a bad idea.
The math before 10/7 said that the most lives could be saved leaving Hamas in place and blocking their attacks.
The math now is “The most Israeli and Palestinian lives overall can be saved long term by decisively destroying Hamas,” and “In the short term the most Israeli lives can be saved by decisively destroying Hamas.”
But it’s tragic and awful and will likely still not be the end of it.
So now we’re 15 years past the last map.
It should be clear at this point from the history that Jews didn’t “colonize” Palestine.
They were invited guests, refugees, and at times actively prevented from leaving when they wanted to by the actual colonial power that controlled the region, which was never them.
There are exceptions to the above (notably in the modern West Bank), and a reason everyone says this issue is “complicated” is that any blanket statement I or anyone can make can be picked apart by the many people with more knowledge of this history than I have.
Even with that disclaimer, I don’t see any honest interpretation of these events that have Jews in the “colonizer” role.
Again, with the important exception of West Bank settlers, most Israelis in the region were born there legitimately generations ago and have no other country to “go back where you came from.”
You won’t find any other population on Earth with third and fourth generation “refugees.” A second generation “refugee” in America is just called an American. Not so in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, or Gaza.
They could have improved the Palestinians’ quality of life at any time since 1948 but find it much more fun to keep them in squalor and blame Jews for it.
It’s only radical Islam that refuses to integrate with host countries. It’s also kind of ridiculous to claim to be a citizen of a country that never existed, but the “Palestinians” do despite there being no state called Palestine until 40 years after the Nakba.
Despite all of this, the conflict seems to be portrayed in colleges and online with all the sophistication and moral nuance of the Star Wars movies, with Israel as the evil empire and Hamas as the rebels. When you compare Hamas to Princess Leia you can see how ridiculous this concept is.
If you look at this history you see a pretty clear pattern where the Palestinians refuse to work with any other entity or culture.
They refused to follow Ottoman Law to their detriment. They didn’t work with the British. They didn’t work with the UN. They repeatedly initiated armed conflict they could not win in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, just like they have done over and over in Israel.
In the absence of a foreign threat they also fight and kill each other. They have frequent civil wars, often with more than one happening simultaneously. That’s another reason the issue is labeled “complicated.”
They explicitly state they recognize no external authority and feel entitled to rule not just Palestine (despite never actually ruling it in the past), but the entire world. They clearly state they expect the world to submit to their way of life, glory to Allah.
That isn’t “Freedom Fighting,” it’s Arab Supremacy. It’s bizarre to see the American far left embracing and defending this bigoted, racist, supremacist ideology as though it isn’t contrary to everything they claim to stand for.
There’s also an odd passion among younger college kids and recent graduates where they’re emotional about this issue like it’s part of their core identity.
I’m passionate about this topic because I’m Jewish, but random Americans who know virtually none of this history act like Israel killed their parents or something, and will even attack or attack or drop good friends for daring question the “Star Wars” narrative. I’ve personally experienced this.
You definitely can’t imply the Palestinians might bear some if not most of the responsibility for their current situation because their culture demonstrably often chooses violence over discussion, doesn’t value education, and refuses to compromise or even keep their agreements.
The Palestinians are painted as completely innocent victims and the Israelis as tyrannical oppressors, and if you question that narrative at all you’ll have citizens all over the world getting very upset if they don’t try to “cancel” you outright.
Obviously the Palestinians are human beings and they need a state to live in, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to also demand that they put aside the culture of violence and supremacy they’ve displayed from the 1830’s until now before they get taken seriously.
They don’t get upset or seem to have much to say at all about other wars or actual genocides or ethnic cleansing in Armenia, Rwanda, Darfur, Yemen, The Uyghurs in China, and so many other places in Africa, anything that’s happened in the Baltic states, or even Arab states like Kuwait forcibly deporting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians after the gulf war. They definitely didn’t mind the nearly 1 million Jews ethnically cleansed from the Arab states in the 40's.
Even Russia attacking Ukraine didn’t merit the kind of worldwide protest and media attention this issue gets.
It’s ONLY Palestinian Muslims, and even then ONLY if the Jews are involved.
Muslim countries can blockade and have their military attack Palestinian camps with no flag emojis, no marches, and no teary eyed influencers making accusatory TikTok vids. It isn’t even about Muslims in general, or the Uyghurs would merit at least an occasional sit in on campus, right?
That’s not an attempt to “whatabout” attention away from this topic, just to note the odd discrepancy in attention paid, almost like there’s an organized propaganda effort driving attention to this specific topic on impressionable young people who haven’t yet learned how to recognize when they’re being manipulated.
The question a thinking person has to ask at multiple points through all of this is “Other than roll over and die, what exactly does anyone criticizing Israel expect the Israelis to do other than take the other terrible option they’ve been given by people who flat out say their goal is to kill Jews?”
And here we are again.