The Definition of Hypocrisy

Nearly every Palestinian claim about Israel screams of extreme hypocrisy.

1. You cry ‘apartheid’, although pre-October 7^th, 20,000 Gazans came in daily to work in Israel without any let or hindrance and Palestinians worked and mingled freely with Israelis in WB Judea/Samaria without any threat or problems.

Yet if a Jew wandered into an Arab WB town, they risked being stoned, knifed or killed, and in Gaza the risk was almost certain death or kidnapping.

Furthermore, Israel’s Arab population is 21%, who integrate fully with the mostly Jewish population, whereas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority controlled WB, the number of Jews is zero.

Showing in fact that the racist ‘apartheid’ claim runs almost exclusively from Arab-Palestinians towards Israelis rather than the reverse.

2. You cry ‘Nazi’ and create derogatory terms like ZioNazi, yet Israel has no agenda in any of its statutes or protocols to kill Palestinians.

Yet the other way, there are fixed agendas and protocols among the main Palestinian Jihadist groups to kill Jews. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, in fact formed a pact with Hitler to do so, and now has a school named after him in the West Bank. Killing of Jews and ‘martyrdom’ are encouraged in Palestinian schools. A main clothing store in Gaza has been named Hitler 2, and Mein Kampf has been found in many homes there during the current incursion.

Showing in fact that ‘Nazi-like’ traits are found far more commonly in the Palestinian territories than in Israel.

3. You form organizations like BDS to restrict Israeli and foreign companies from operating in WB Judea-Samaria, yet no such restrictions exist for Arab, Palestinian or foreign companies to operate within Israel.

This uncomfortably reflects practices in Nazi Germany, where initially Jews were restricted from running certain companies or were barred from numerous professions.

Furthermore, 40-60% of the labour employed in Israeli and foreign companies operating in WB Judea-Samaria is Palestinian-Arab, and at wages 70-100% higher than they would receive in Palestinian Authority territories.

Little surprise, therefore, that they welcome these Israeli and foreign companies, but this Palestinian workforce is never polled by the PA to get their views. Indeed, their voice is silenced on the issue under threats of them being guilty of ‘normalization’ or ‘collaboration’ with Israel, which can carry heavy prison sentences or a death sentence.

4. You cry ‘ethnic cleansing’, even though a 21% Arab population remains in Israel, most of them Muslim. Yet when Jordan combined with the Palestinians won the area of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1948, they expelled 100% of the Jews there, when there had been a Jewish population in Jerusalem for thousands of years, and for the past 100 years had constituted the majority there.

Furthermore, shortly after 1948, the Arab nations of the Middle East and North Africa expelled or forced out through violence or intimidation all the Jews, when they had been residing in those nations for many hundreds of years.

And still today, Palestinians and their supporters can be seen proudly waving ‘From River to Sea’ banners, effectively calling for the ‘ethnic cleansing’ wiping out or removal of all the Jews in Israel.

5. You cry ‘racism’, yet at the same time regularly quote Islamic religious texts terming Jews as ‘sons of pigs and apes’. Instruct your children both at home and at school that Jews are untrustworthy, dangerous and ‘inferior beings.’ That killing Jews is seen as righteous and ‘martyrdom’ with the aim of killing Jews is exalted.

In support of that ‘racist’ endeavour, your ‘moderate’ political leader, Mohammed Abbas, has an open ‘pay for slay’ policy of Jews. And the more extreme Hamas leaders have it both in their charter – ‘Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it… The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them’ – and practice it even more forthrightly, which led to October 7^th.

6. You use the term ‘occupation’, yet from 2005 until the current day, not a single Israeli soldier was stationed permanently on Gaza soil. And in the West Bank, 83% of the Palestinian population are resided over by PA Police and Security. Israeli soldiers are only present at checkpoints and to protect Israeli residents of WB Judea-Samaria.

This is by no means the correct definition of ‘occupation’, when we compare to the WW2 occupations of France and Holland by Germany, when Nazi officials controlled both the central governments of those nations and every facet of daily life and movement.

If there was a heavy and ‘brutal’ occupation, as you claim, then it would be impossible for Mohammed Abbas to sit in Ramallah with an open ‘pay to slay’ policy and encourage the killing of Israelis. That practice would have been strictly barred under a normal ‘occupation’.

7. You cry ‘uneven handling’ when it comes to land acquisition, claiming that you can’t buy land when Jews can. Fully knowing this to be untrue. No land is available for outright sale in Israel, it is all offered on 100 year leases, available equally to Jews and Arabs.

Yet, the other way, if a Palestinian attempts to sell land to a Jew in any Palestinian Authority controlled area, they face a heavy prison sentence or even death. The restrictions with land acquisition you claim run entirely the other way.

8. You cry ‘stole our land’, yet this is patently untrue. Jews started returning and buying land in the late 1800’s, with these numbers increasing dramatically in the 1920s and 1930s. In most cases, they paid double the going price for the land they purchased, meaning that overall their combined monetary investment in land in the region was far more than the prior Arab population.

As you well know, most of the land in the area (as with most nations) was state owned, so this transferred from the original Ottoman Empire to British pre-partition ownership, then finally Israel. Notwithstanding, a compensation board fund was established in 1948 to repay any Palestinians who lost their personal property at market value + 20%. So no private land at all was ‘stolen’.

For the over 1 million Jews who lost their property in various Arab nations between 1948-1950, no equivalent compensation board was set up for them. If anyone had the right to protest their property was ‘stolen’, it would be them.

Furthermore, to attempt to support this ‘stole our land’ false claim, a Palestinian support chart has been doing the rounds online which states ‘Palestinian and other’ owned land at 93% and Jewish owned at 7%. The dishonesty arising from the ‘other’ definition, which lumps in all the State and private Turkish/Lebanese/Greek owned land together. Private Palestinian owned land was only 11%. So, a similarly dishonest chart from a Jewish perspective would read, ‘Jewish and other’ owned land 89%, Palestinian owned land 11%.

Again, we see almost a complete reversal of truth applied.

9. You use the term ‘oppression’, yet for the past 78 years you have oppressed the Israeli people with now four major wars – the first three combining with neighbouring Arab nations – a thirty-five year suicide bombing campaign, continual rocket attacks from Gaza, and countless stoning, knifing, shooting and car-ramming attacks.

Even aside from the all-out massacre of October 7^th, still to this day Israel suffers a staggering 248 terrorist attacks a month. While most of these are ‘stoning incidents’, which only occasionally cause loss of life, among them are a number of car-rammings, knifings and shootings.

Without the Iron Dome, civilian losses in Israel from numerous rocket attacks, could be approaching 100,000. And the area close to the border with Gaza, Sderot, where the Iron Dome is less effective, has been dubbed the ‘bomb shelter capitol of the world’, with more bomb shelters per square mile in Sderot than anywhere else.

Has any other nation suffered this same level of continual terrorist attacks and ‘oppression’?

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John Matthews is an experienced writer and journalist. The author of 24 books, including two centred around WW2 and the holocaust in the name of J.C. Maetis (his father’s original Jewish name) his first experience of writing about the Middle East came as a war correspondent covering the last years of the Lebanese Civil War, which led to his second book, ‘The Crescents of the Moon’. He has since written on the subject for a number of journals, including The Times, Sunday Times, Newsweek, The Independent and The Spectator. He was also in the run-up to the millennium editor of European Brief, the main magazine for the European Parliament, editing the likes of Tony Blair, Al Gore and Henry Kissinger on subjects ranging from the fall of the Berlin Wall and European unity, climate change and nuclear fusion to, once again, the Middle East. He lives in London with his wife and family.

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