Dismantling Zionist Talking Points

Spend any time defending Palestinian rights and you will encounter Zionist talking points. There are dozens of them. They’ve been around for decades. Sometimes called “hasbara,” or Israeli propaganda, they have been concocted to justify Zionist claims to Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the discriminatory system of laws in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. They have been used to justify the illegal Jewish-only settlements on stolen Palestinian land, and mass murder and deliberate starvation of innocents in Gaza. A colleague in the movement for Palestinian liberation heard two Zionist talking points in a book group he’s part of in Miami, and asked for some resources to challenge these untruths. What follows are the two Zionist talking points he encountered last month. Here I offer well-sourced, scholarly refutations to set the record straight.

Zionist Talking Point #1: Islamic countries expelled as many Jews as the Jews expelled Palestinians.

Refutation: This Zionist talking point seeks to exonerate Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by falsely claiming the Arab countries did the same thing. They did not. For the most part, Jews left (for reasons cited below); they were not expelled. And there certainly was no ethnic cleansing, widespread violence toward the Arab Jews, as there was for the Palestinians. It is undeniable that there was anger in the Arab world about Israel’s dispossession and mass killing of the Palestinians. This translated in some instances to hostility toward the Jewish populations in Arab countries. The Nakba, the Arabic word for “catastrophe”, (1947-49) changed the atmosphere for Jews in the Arab world. This represented a change from the longstanding atmosphere of peace and acceptance that Jews enjoyed in the Arab world. The little-known truth is that Jews were safely ensconced in societies throughout the Arab world for hundreds of years before massive Jewish emigration to Palestine. In modern times, when Jews fled persecution and pogroms in Christian Europe, they found refuge in the Arab world. The Arabs embraced the Jews and protected them. Islam taught that Jews were “people of the book,” one of the three Abrahamic religions with holy books – Jews (Torah) Christians (The Old and New Testaments) and Muslims (The Quran). Intermarriage between Muslims and Jews, and Muslims and Christians was allowed, and Jews and Christians enjoyed protection. Before the Zionist incursion in Palestine, there were sizable populations of Jews in Iraq (150,000), Yemen (50,000), North African countries (450,000). The Jewish community in Iraq was one of the oldest, most continuous Jewish communities in the world. To give another example: the Jewish Quarter in Cairo and the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo date to the year 882 CE. In 1948, when Israel declared its “independence,” Arab Jews were prosperous and well-integrated into Arab societies, experienced little antisemitism, and had put down deep roots.

Arab Jews were reluctant to emigrate to Palestine. In 1948-1950, Zionists resorted to underhanded methods to pressure Arab Jews to leave their homes and businesses to move to the new Zionist state of Israel. For example, Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, conducted false flag terror operations to sow fear in the Jewish community. In Baghdad, they planted bombs in synagogues. Israel urged Iraq’s prime minister to pass legislation against the Jewish community, prompting them to leave; as they left, Iraqis seized their property and capital. These underhanded methods created a hostile environment for Iraqi Jews when none had existed beforehand. The Yemeni Jews were intensely religious. In order to induce them to emigrate to Israel, Zionists promised them they were building a messianic society in Israel, though the secular Zionists had no intention of doing so. In fact, most of them were atheists. Egyptian Jews were recruited by Pinchas Lavon, the Israeli defense minister, to bomb targets associated with the West (libraries and cinema) in order to undermine Egypt’s ties with the West. The Lavon Affair caused tensions between non-Jewish Egyptians and the Jews of Egypt, causing many Jews to emigrate.

The suggestion that Arab countries expelled the longstanding Jewish members of their societies because of antisemitism is false and ahistorical. It is a wild claim that goes against centuries of acceptance of Jews in the Arab world, and a long history of peaceful and mutually-beneficial co-existence. It is true that there were some Arab Jews who were curious about the Zionist experiment and voluntarily emigrated to Israel to be part of it. However, for the most part, Arab Jews left only when nefarious Zionist actions undermined their largely peaceful, well-assimilated homes in the Arab world, and made staying impossible. *Sources: Israeli “New historian,” Ilan Pappe’s A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (London: One World Books, 2024), and Avi Shlaim, esteemed Arab-Jewish historian at Oxford University, Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew (London: One World Books, 2024)

Zionist Talking Point #2: The reality of the Nakba is that Palestinians left of their own accord and chose not to return.

Refutation: This is a monstrous lie. The truth is that Israel’s generals and top political leaders executed Plan Dalet in the winter and spring of 1948 (months before Israel declared independence from Britain and before the war with Arab countries) in order to ensure Jewish supremacy, both numerically and in terms of sheer power. Plan D was to ethnically cleanse as many Palestinians as possible from Palestine so a majority Jewish state could be formed. Throughout 1948 and into 1949, Israel drove over 750,000 Palestinians off their land and out of their homes. They killed roughly 15,000 Palestinians. They destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages, setting explosives and reducing them to rubble. Palestinians were forcibly expelled east to refugee camps in Jordan, north to Syria and Lebanon, and south to the Gaza Strip (Egypt closed its border). On April 9, 1949, Zionist paramilitaries attacked the village of Deir Yassin, slaughtering over 100 Palestinians, including children. The massacre was carried out despite the village agreeing to a non-aggression pact. There were dozens of Deir Yassins in the Nakba. The idea that the Palestinians, a proud people with deep love for their homeland, would simply abandon everything “of their own accord” and never bother to return is absurd and offensive. Think about it: the word Nakba means “the Catastrophe” in Arabic. Why would they call it “the Nakba” if they were simply choosing to walk away? No, the Nakba is a gaping wound in the heart of every Palestinian. It is the collective memory of deeply painful scars and losses that refuse to heal. Palestinians famously wear the keys to their homes, and insist on their “right of return.” They long to return home. It is a centerpiece of their identity. Those who stay on the land and refuse to leave, despite all the oppression, do so out of this same deep love of their homeland, sumud – resilience, steadfast hope. One of the central sticking points in peace negotiations over the decades has been that Israel continues to deny Palestinians their right to return home, while Palestinians passionately insist on their right of return. *Sources: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007) by Ilan Pappe, All That Remains (2006) by Walid Khalidi, and The Hundreds’ Year War on Palestine (2021) by Rashid Khalidi.