Speaking Honestly About Lies In The Israel-Palestinian Conflict

The media and United Nations are partially culpable for the current violence in the Middle East as they have been deliberately lying to the people in the region and the world.

Let’s speak honestly about the situation.

LIE: Palestinians are in favor of two states. So claims Tor Wennesland, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. It is simply untrue, as shown in repeated Palestinian polls.

LIE: Israelis are storming al Aqsa. This is repeated in Palestinian media to incite the Muslim world to attack Jews. It is plainly false unless a person can call a handful of Jews walking around the Temple Mount during regular visiting hours – nowhere near the al Aqsa Mosque – some kind of ‘storming’.

LIE: The al Aqsa Mosque Compound / Temple Mount is only holy for Muslims. This piece of fiction is repeated frequently in Muslim capitals around the world. But it’s also said at the United Nations, which marked the holiest site for Jews as purely a Muslim site in official maps.

LIE: Jordan has exclusive authority over Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. While King Abdullah II may say it over and again, it is simply not so. Israel agreed to recognize the “special role” of Jordan solely for Muslim sites. It never granted Jordan exclusive authority to anything and certainly not for Christian sites.

LIE: Gazans want the more moderate Palestinian Authority as the government, not Hamas. A wishful sentiment and complete lie, as shown in repeated polls. Hamas controls 58% of the parliament and would win presidential elections if held now. Even James Zogby of the Arab American Institute bemoaned the “deformity of Palestinian culture” which favors violence, when he addressed the United Nations in June 2023, while The New York Times falsely states otherwise.

LIE: Settlers are more dangerous than Palestinian Arabs. So said Wennesland before the October massacre when he addressed the United Nations Security Council. But his own figures show that Palestinians killed FIVE TIMES more Israelis than Israeli ‘settlers’ killing Palestinians in the second quarter of 2023, and 2.5 times as many in the first quarter of 2023.

LIE: The Israeli government is more extreme and right-wing than Hamas and Fatah. The media repeatedly inserts a narrative that the current Israeli government is the most right-wing ever and that one minister had a photo of Baruch Goldstein, a murderer of 29 people, in his house. But the media NEVER informs readers that Hamas is a terrorist group with a genocidal jihadi charter calling for the death of Jews and destruction of Israel. It does not mention the dozens of Palestinian schools, squares and tournaments named after mass murderers of Jews. It does not mention that the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas is a holocaust denier.

LIE: Gaza is an open air prison. The reality is that Gaza is a terrorist safe haven in which Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and many other terrorist groups train and plan terrorist attacks.

LIE: Israel is enforcing an illegal blockade against the peaceful residents of Gaza. Since 2001, the majority of Gazans have supported killing Israeli civilians inside Israel. They support Hamas, which is sworn to destroy Israel. As such, the blockade of Gaza is considered a legal precaution to save lives.

LIE: The Palestinians are ready to make peace. Not only do Palestinians not favor a two state solution, they cannot even make peace between themselves. The West Bank and Gaza Strip are severed. Hamas and Fatah cannot agree to any power-sharing arrangement. Palestinians have been unable to have a vote since 2006. And the current president is viewed as so corrupt and ineffective that any agreement he would theoretically sign with Israel would be worthless on the Palestinian street.

LIE: ‘East Jerusalem’ is Occupied Palestinian Land. While people may argue whether the ‘West Bank’ and Gaza are occupied Palestinian land, there is no scenario in which anyone can claim the eastern portion of Jerusalem, including the Old City was ever Palestinian. It wasn’t earmarked to be Palestinian in the 1947 Partition Plan which never took place, was illegally annexed by Jordan from 1950 to 1967, and part of Israel since that time. The place ‘East Jerusalem‘ only existed from 1949 to 1967, nineteen years in the city’s 4,000 year history.

LIE: Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem are stateless. Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem got resident status when Israel formally annexed the eastern part of the city and reunited it in 1980. Palestinians can apply for Israeli citizenship and thousands already have become Israelis.

LIE: Israel is an apartheid state. Israel enables all citizens to vote, become part of the government, own real estate, attend schools, and more. Israel is the most liberal country for 1,000 miles in any direction. That is in sharp contrast to the Palestinian Authority that is a truly apartheid and antisemitic entity that wishes to have a country free of any Jews.

LIE: Israel engaged in ethnic cleansing of Arabs. Israel gave all people in the land citizenship when it declared statehood in 1948, including non-Jews. The population of Arabs in both Jerusalem and all of Israel has grown more than Jews in Jerusalem and Israel, respectively, and also more than Arabs in neighboring countries. It was Jordan that ethnically cleansed all Jews from eastern Israel and eastern Jerusalem in what became known as the Jew-free “West Bank.”

LIE: Israel wants to take over the entire region. The halls of the United Nations are crowded with “intellectuals” who say “The Zionist idea to dominate the area from the Nile to the Euphrates, is well known,” making the Jews look greedy in taking “Arab land,” as portrayed in the New York Times. It is simply untrue, as proved by Israel giving up land to Egypt, Palestinian Authority and Jordan, while all Israel sought in exchange was peace.

LIE: Jews lived very well in Muslim lands and they just chose to immigrate to Israel once it was founded. Jews survived as second class dhimmis in Arab lands for centuries, paying a special jizyah, non-Muslim tax. After Israel was founded, Arab nationalism swept the region and antisemitic laws and pogroms forced roughly 1 million Jews to flee the homes they had in Muslim lands. The New York Times shares a very different narrative.

LIE: Only Arabs are indigenous to the holy land. The New York Times will try to instill that only Arabs are indigenous to the holy land. The fact is that while many Arabs came to the region in the seventh and eighth centuries, Jews have been in the land for over 3,000 years. Jews are the only people to establish their kingdom and capital there. Judaism is the only religion that is specifically tied to a land – the land of Israel. Further, while many Jews came to the land between 1920 and 1948, there were more Muslims that entered the land under the British than Jews.

LIE: Israel is a European colony. So says college professors parroting an Arab narrative. The fact is that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel and the British didn’t send any citizens to settle the land, they simply facilitated Jewish immigration to their homeland.

LIE: The United Nations and UNRWA are impartial and just providing assistance to “refugees.” The UN has adopted Palestinians as its permanent wards as has devoted numerous distinct agencies, like UNRWA, and resolutions for this particular group.

LIE: Gazans and West Bank Arabs are “refugees”. The world bemoans the status of millions of “refugees” who are simply not, and never were, refugees. These people live in the same land with the same people with the same language and culture just a few miles from where grandparents used to live. They have self-determination. At best, one can refer to them as descendants of internally-displaced people.

LIE: The current violence is because Hamas and Iran want to derail the Saudi Arabian – Israeli normalization. The October massacre was over a year in the making and pre-dated the aggressive discussions of normalization. The horrible truth is that the United States allowed Iran to reach the point of being nuclear weapons capable, so now feels compelled to give Saudi Arabia nuclear power to balance the arms race in the Middle East. As a condition for the U.S. giving the Saudis nuclear power, the Americans are insisting on normalizing relations with Israel. This is a war that is much more about Iranian and Saudi nuclear ambitions, not that Iran is upset about a normalization agreement between Israel and KSA.

LIE: Hamas is a “resistance movement”. Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. It “resists” Jewish presence in the Middle East. Palestinians support its mission, if not always its tactics.

LIE: Israel deliberately targets civilians. Israel takes more precautions than any other fighting force to limit civilian casualties. It drops leaflets to get people to move and calls their cellphones. It has dummy rockets that “knock” on the roof a minute before an armed missile hits a building to allow people to leave. It gives time for civilians to move out of the fighting area. But Hamas and its suporters encourage the civilians to stay putting them in harm’s way. Hamas builds its terrorist infrastructure and shoots rockets from mosques and schools. And Hamas brutally focuses on civilians for torture, butchering small children and burning families alive.

The list of lies goes on.

The effect of all these lies is a twisted idea of reality. It produces a fictional narrative that Palestinians are moderate and really support a two-state solution but the right-wing Israeli government is blocking it. The Israelis are racists who are trying to take over Palestinian land as they covet the entire region. First the Jews stole the land from Arabs as a colonial power, subjugated and ethnically-cleansed them from the land, and they continue to try to steal more, as they brutalize the local Arab population in an “ongoing Nakba“.

In reality, it is Palestinian Arabs who refuse to accept a Jewish State in the region. They rejected it in 1947, 1948, 1967, 2000, 2008 and every day. They want the entire region to be dominated by Muslim Arabs and support the killing of Jews until they “liberate” the land “from the River to the Sea.” Israel does its best to protect itself from the genocidal neighbors next door.

People are realizing that students on college campuses have been misinformed and indoctrinated about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but so has the world. We must all confront the false narratives about the conflict so we can honestly pursue a better future.