In my most recent article, I discussed bias and fake narratives in the news, and how liars tend to contradict themselves, thus betraying themselves with their very own words. I explained why this is so, seeing as they have to keep lying to keep up with an unfriendly reality, and eventually, inevitably, their statements contradict each other. In addition, their declarations tend to come from different internal sources, with different goals or desires requiring different lies, and since they all emerge from a different place, the lies are often incompatible and don't play well with each other.
In this post I will apply this technique to the anti-Israel crowd and to several of their most important claims. This is relatively an easy thing to do, given decades of lies and given that hatred tends to control their thought processes.
I've seen many debates about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and most are disappointing. They tend to throw talking points at each other instead of dismantling their opponent's claims with logic or by carefully breaking down their assumptions. An example of a weak debate would be: "Israel is targeting children", "No, Hamas is using them as shields".
Given what I said above about liars, I think a much more effective technique would be to counter-attack by using their own logic against them, whenever possible. This is not only a more effective debating technique, but also incontestable and infallible, because it makes use of the most basic logical error of contradiction ('P and not-P' can never be true).
Let's start with one example: Palestinians claim refugee status even after resettling in other countries, and even the great-grandchildren of Palestinians from 1948 demand the 'right of return' into Israeli territories after 75 years of absence. The underlying premise here is that their refugee status doesn't expire no matter what they do (a law that does not apply to any other refugee in the world), and it passes on to their great grandchildren ad infinitum.
We could challenge this claim by arguing that it is impractical or exceptionalist, but, instead, we are going to dismantle it using a contradiction: When Jews claim the same right to return to Israel after 1900 years of refugee hell, the same Palestinians claim this is false, applying different rules and denying Jews the same right. If refugee status doesn't expire after 75 years even for descendants that moved elsewhere, why should it expire after 1900 years? If Palestinians can apply the right of return in this fashion, Jews can take over the whole of the land of Palestine using the same rule, because all of it at one point belonged to the Jews. Note that I am not claiming that this should become reality, but that this is an inevitable consequence of their claim.
What this means is that they do not care about logical premises and the moral or legal justification of their claims; they simply make exceptionalist demands without caring about logic, fairness and consistency. The inevitable conclusion is that their claim is based on religion or conceit, not morality or law, and claiming the land by law is merely a useful lie. This is why their two claims, one for themselves and one against the Jews, directly contradict each other.
Now we'll do the same for a few more of their claims:
Historically, if Arabs move into land that was forcibly taken from Jews (and other nations that came after them), it becomes 'Palestinian' land. But if Jews move into land that was taken from Palestinians (after being taken from Jews), they are occupying it illegally and are colonizers. Once again, note the contradictory underlying premises of two claims made by the same people. Even if you argue that Jews are conquerors, so are Palestinians. Yet the rule that conquerors cannot make the conquered land theirs is only applied to one side and not the other.
To this they may counter-claim that Palestinians didn't take the land away from Jews whereas Jews did take it from Palestinians. Except that Jews did not take the West Bank and Gaza from Palestinians either; they took it from Jordan and Egypt. Why, when Jews take land from an occupier, does this makes them illegal occupiers, but when Palestinians take land from occupiers, do the rules suddenly change and the land becomes legally theirs?
Another claim is that Jewish immigrants moving to Israel in the past two centuries are outsiders and expansionist colonizers. The Arab population of Palestine doubled in the 19th century, and then tripled again in the first half of the 20th century. And yet all of these Palestinians are seen as natives with historical roots in the region even though 80% of them (935,000 out of 1,181,00) are newcomers from the last century, and most have explicitly expressed their expansionist goals to take over the land from the river to the sea despite being newcomers.
The partition plan of 1947 was claimed by many as unfair due to there being a majority of Arabs in many cities compared to Jews. And yet, even though Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since at least the 1850s by all accounts, they refuse to hand over Jerusalem to the Jews. Does a majority count when it comes to a city, or not?
On a related topic regarding majority rule, Palestinians make claims to the land even though they no longer have a majority in Israel, claims that they justify because they were expelled or had to escape a war. And yet the only reason there hasn't been a majority of Jews in Israel since 500 CE, is because Jews were constantly being expelled, blocked from entering Israel or massacred. So, once again, how come this rule only applies to Palestinians?
If some Zionist Israelis declare expansionist goals to live in all of Israel based on the fact that their ancestors lost Israel to conquerors, they are evil colonialists that want to kill or expel Arabs. But if 75% of Palestinians in polls want a Palestine from the river to the sea, want Israel to cease to exist and refuse even a one-state solution with Israel, they are merely nobly resisting Israel. Evidently, expansionist goals depend on who entertains them.
If Israel occupies Palestine (1967-), the PLO attacks Israel. If Egypt and Jordan occupy Palestine (1948-1967), the PLO still attacks only Israel (1964-1967) and wants to destroy only Israel.
If Palestinians kill Jewish babies, we must take into account 'the context' and understand that 'this didn't happen in a vacuum'. If Israelis kill Palestinian children as casualties of bombing Palestinian baby-killers, we ignore the context and make sure we focus only on the dead children.
If Egypt (or any other country with closed borders) closes and patrols its border with Gaza and arrests smugglers, it is due to security concerns. If Israel does the same thing, this converts Gaza into a prison and Israel into prison guards.
If Israel runs Gaza, it is occupying it illegally. But if Israel withdraws from Gaza and gives it independence, it is being inhumane by not running it and supplying it with power, water and jobs. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Because it's not about what is right, but about racist hate.
If Netanyahu blocks aid from going into Gaza to stop Hamas from using it for war, he is a cruel dictator who wants Palestinians to suffer. But if Netanyahu allows money from Qatar to go into Gaza to help the citizens, he is supporting Hamas terrorists and keeping them strong for nefarious political purposes. There is nothing that Netanyahu can do that will be seen as moral. Because it is not about whether an act is moral, but about hate.
Similar to the above: If Israel bombs terrorists in Gaza and gets civilians killed, it is committing war crimes. But if Israel tries to get civilians out of the way of the war and away from the terrorists in order to save them, it is committing the war crime of displacing civilians.
Again, note that all of these observations are based on the logical foundations behind each of the above claims, and we demonstrated their blatant contradictions. This dismantles their claims using their own underlying premises. As I said: The bigger the lies, the faster and more frequently they will trip over themselves.
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