A Postwar Debriefing

That is quite the list of accusations, and of course, every word of that narrative is nonsense. Occupation, apartheid, proportionality, and genocide are all actual legal terms with fixed meanings and definitional criteria that do not apply to Israel. You might even be excused for thinking that just engaging in this conversation gives unnecessary credence to these falsehoods.

But the truth is that we let these claims go unchallenged at our peril. Study after study has shown that this kind of inflammatory, discriminatory, anti-Zionist rhetoric is actually dangerous, and leads directly to the kinds of anti-Semitic attacks against innocent Jewish people and institutions that we are seeing around the world.

That is why, to paraphrase the Mishnah, it is so important to know how to respond to these heresies.

1) Israel is an illegal occupying power

To begin, while the history of Israel could fill a tome, the modern legal history is simple. In 1922 the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine officially established an area in the Middle East to be a national home for the Jewish People and entrusted it to Great Britain. The land was not given to the Jews, nor was it stolen from anyone else. Jewish people came from around the world to buy and cultivate land in order to further expand the existing Jewish communities that had remained in Israel as a continuous presence since Biblical times and throughout the exiles.