Israel, Gaza and the ‘Big Lie’

There is a broad attack on the moral integrity of the Jewish people, in both the Diaspora and Israel. Our ancient and modern history is being falsified.

For example, former President Barack Obama, in an interview with Irish journalist Susan McKay in Belfast, Northern Ireland, said that in the founding of the modern State of Israel, the land of the Jewish people was unlawfully taken from the Palestinian Arabs. He said that “understandably, these people said, ‘this is injustice and I want my land back.’”

But Obama’s assertion is wrong. Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East and Mediterranean studies program at King’s College London, noted in his 2010 “Palestine Betrayed” that no contemporary accounts described the events of 1948 as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews. “To the contrary…there was no doubt whatsoever as to which side had instigated the bloodletting and the attendant defeat and exodus,” he wrote — and that side was not the Jews.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu correctly responded to Obama in a video posted to social media, saying, “The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers. Our history is not a colonial enterprise. Our land is not stolen land. This is our homeland.” The constant, false assertion that Israel is not legitimate is similar in its rhetorical methods to another common refrain from the anti-Israel movement: that the Gaza war is a genocide.

While their subject matter is entirely different, both assertions have a similar logic. They are completely removed from reality, and they are repeated ad infinitum in any argument on the conflict. They therefore meet the definition of the “Big Lie,” the Nazi idea that you can convince people of anything if a lie is outrageous and repeated often enough.

Still, Obama is actively supporting Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan who maintains, among other things, the “genocide” view. The former president similarly supports New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has repeatedly said the same.

There is no genocide. The IDF was faced with a jihadist enemy, Hamas, who took 251 hostages and committed war crimes, genocidal in nature, in their unprovoked attack on southern Israel: murder, rape, murdered babies, the loss of 1,200 Israeli lives — the worst catastrophe to befall the Jews since the Holocaust.

In Gaza, Hamas had hundreds of miles of tunnels, sprawling under every social institution: hospitals, kindergartens, apartment buildings, schools and mosques. U.N. institutions, mainly UNRWA, were thoroughly infiltrated.

The objective of the IDF was to get the hostages back and eliminate Hamas. The IDF constantly tried to avoid killing Palestinian civilians, though, due to the nature of this warfare and Hamas’ total disregard for the lives of Palestinians, there were, unfortunately, many civilian casualties.

This was brutal urban warfare — but it is not genocide.

Many are saying that Israel wrecked the chances of a two-state solution with its war on Gaza, and that is somehow evidence of genocidal intent. But the chance for a Palestinian state was killed not by Israel’s self-defense war, but by Oct. 7 itself. That massacre changed the paradigm of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, making a Palestinian state an existential threat. Armed drones in the West Bank could reach the heartland of Israel in minutes.

Still, there are alternatives that would allow Palestinians their freedom while guaranteeing Israeli security. What is needed is a new conception of Palestinian freedom. This freedom could be expressed in, for example, clearly delineated Palestinian territories, with representation in Palestinian Councils, who would then send representatives to the Knesset of Israel. This enhanced Palestinian autonomy would satisfy the Palestinians’ need for national self-determination.

But to get there, to real Palestinian self-determination and a safe Israel, the Big Lies need to be rejected, and historical discourse must be grounded in the truth.

MOSES MORDECAI TWERSKY of Providence has a master’s degree in American history from Providence College. His novel “Love Story in Greenwich Village: New York Iranian Adventure,” was published in January 2021 by Omniscriptum and is available from Amazon and other booksellers.