Introduction

I am Jewish and Israeli-born, the son of European Jewish refugees who survived the Holocaust, and a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. I do not approach this history from the outside. I grew up inside Israel’s national narrative, inherited its fears, and participated in the system I am now asking myself and others to examine.

This is also a confrontation with my own family’s history, the Palestinian home given to my family after 1948, Israeli archival records, Palestinian dispossession, and the moral consequences of the national story I inherited.

This is not an attempt to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I am increasingly skeptical of arguments that begin with a preferred solution and then select the history, facts, and morality needed to justify it.

Nor is this a balanced history of the conflict in the conventional sense. It does not attempt to give equal space to every act of violence, every failure of leadership, or every grievance held by both peoples. Its focus is Israel because Israel is the country that formed me, the national story I once believed, the military in which I served, and the system from which my family benefited. Palestinians, Hamas, Arab governments, and Palestinian leaders also bear responsibility for violence, injustice, corruption, and failed opportunities, and I address some of that where it is necessary. But this is primarily a reckoning with my own history and with what has been done in the name of the country and people to which I belong.

Moral distance does not mean pretending that power and responsibility are evenly distributed. It means applying the same moral standards to everyone while examining most closely the actions for which I have the greatest knowledge and the deepest personal responsibility.

I am attempting something different: to step outside my own identity and look at the conflict from a moral distance. If I were neither Jewish nor Israeli, if I had not grown up inside Israel’s national narrative, and if I had no inherited history, fear, or personal interest to defend, how would I judge what has happened to Jews and Palestinians, and what is happening today?

That is the question behind this essay.

A distinction is important from the outset.

Judaism is an ancient religion whose roots reach back more than 3,000 years. For many Jews, Jewish identity is also cultural, ethnic, historical, and connected to a sense of peoplehood.

Palestinian identity is a national, cultural, and historical identity, not a religion or political organization. Palestinian society includes Muslims, Christians, secular people, Bedouin communities, and others. Most Palestinians are Muslim, but Palestinian identity is not synonymous with Islam.

Some people attempt to dismiss Palestinian peoplehood or connection to the land by arguing that Palestinians did not exist before the modern national use of the name “Palestinian” became widespread. But a people does not begin to exist only when its modern national name appears. Earlier generations were described in different ways: as Arabs of Palestine, Palestinian Arabs, Ottoman subjects, or by their cities, villages, regions, religions, and extended families. Political identities and names evolved over time, as they have for peoples everywhere. But the region’s Arab population did not suddenly appear in the twentieth century. The ancestors of many Palestinians lived, worked, raised families, and built communities in the land for centuries, and many families can trace their local roots still further back.

Zionism is a modern Jewish nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century and became formally organized at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. It centers on Jewish self-determination in the land of Israel and Palestine and on the creation and continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Some Zionists support a Jewish-majority Israel alongside an independent Palestinian state and equal civil rights for all citizens. Other Zionist currents support Israeli sovereignty over all or much of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and oppose a two-state solution.

For centuries, Jews ended Passover seders and Yom Kippur services with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem.” The prayer did not originally express a modern political program or a desire to occupy territory. It carried memory, exile, religious longing, and the hope of returning to a place embedded in Jewish identity.

After centuries of persecution, expulsions, pogroms, and ultimately the Holocaust, that ancient longing became inseparable from the desperate need for safety. Zionism did not create the Jewish connection to the land. It transformed an ancient religious and historical attachment, intensified by repeated suffering, into a modern political and territorial project.

That emotional force must be understood. For many Jews, Israel is not experienced as an ordinary country. It is understood as the answer to centuries of vulnerability and the promise that Jews will never again be defenseless.

But understanding that history does not mean that every action taken in its name is justified. Jewish suffering explains the longing for safety. It cannot give Jews a greater right to safety, freedom, home, or belonging than Palestinians.

Jews in Israel and elsewhere hold a wide range of views. Some are Zionists and some are not. They also differ widely in how they support or criticize Israeli governments, Israeli policies, and the treatment of Palestinians.

Palestinian identity should not be equated with Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, the Palestine Liberation Organization, or the actions of particular Palestinian leaders or armed groups.

By the same principle, Israelis should not be equated with the actions of their government, and Jews throughout the world should never be held collectively responsible for the conduct of the Israeli state. Moral responsibility belongs to governments, institutions, organizations, leaders, and individuals for the choices they actually make.

None of this makes the history simple. Jews carry centuries of persecution, exile, dispossession, and genocide. Palestinians carry displacement, occupation, statelessness, loss, and daily insecurity. I do not have to diminish either history to say something basic: one people's suffering cannot make the other people's suffering acceptable.

I do not know whether the answer is two states, one state, a confederation, or something else. I am not pretending I can solve that. But not knowing the final solution cannot be a reason to avoid judging what is happening now.

For me it comes down to this: Jewish safety cannot depend on Palestinians losing their homes, freedom, or political rights. Palestinian freedom cannot depend on denying Jews safety or a place to belong. Any future worth having has to protect both.

What changed my mind was not one book or one argument. It was my own family's story, Israeli records about what happened to Palestinians in 1948, and things I saw myself in Israel and during my military service. Then I began comparing those memories with what is documented today in the West Bank, Gaza, Israel, and the wider region. The story I had believed most of my life no longer held together.

My mother's story is where this stops being abstract for me. Her family escaped persecution and homelessness in Europe and desperately needed a home. The home they received in Israel belonged to a Palestinian family that was no longer allowed to live there. My family was saved from homelessness, in part, by another family's loss. I have had a hard time getting around that fact.

1. The Conversation That Stayed With Me

This essay grew out of a conversation with an intelligent, thoughtful American Israeli woman who is currently living in Area C of the West Bank.

She was educated in the United States, had become a doctor, and was accomplished, curious, articulate, socially conscious, and knowledgeable across an unusually broad range of subjects. I mention that for one reason: this was not a conversation with someone I could dismiss as ignorant, fanatical, malicious, or incapable of understanding complexity.

Our conversation was civil, thoughtful, and valuable precisely because I respected her intelligence and sincerity. Yet she was completely convinced that Israel had the right to live, build towns, and expand Jewish settlements in Area C. She understood the Oslo Accords as validating that right.

That conversation stayed with me.

I was born and raised in Israel, the son of Holocaust survivors. I served in the IDF and spent much of my life accepting the Israeli national narrative almost as unquestioned fact. I am not examining Israel as someone who never understood it, never lived it, or never felt bound to it. I am examining beliefs that were once my own.

What struck me was not that she was uninformed or unintelligent. Quite the opposite. She was decent, thoughtful, and completely sincere. Yet, as I understand it, the Oslo Accords did not give Area C to Israel. They established interim Israeli administrative and security authority pending a permanent agreement. They did not transfer sovereignty or title, and settlements were specifically left for permanent-status negotiations. The International Court of Justice, the United Nations Security Council, and much of the international community regard Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as contrary to international law; Israel disputes that conclusion. [1][2]

But Area C is not merely an unresolved legal question frozen in time. While its final status remains unresolved, Israel has continued to expand Jewish settlements and facilitate the movement of more Israeli civilians into the area, creating facts on the ground that become harder to reverse with every passing year. [2]

The problem goes beyond construction. In parts of the West Bank, extremist settlers have attacked Palestinians, damaged property, intimidated communities, restricted access to land, and contributed to conditions that have pushed Palestinians from some communities. Israeli human-rights organizations and international observers have documented this pattern extensively. [2][3]

This is especially disturbing because it occurs under an occupation in which Israel possesses overwhelming military and governmental power, including extensive control over water, electricity, fuel, borders and crossings, imports and exports, movement of people and goods, access to agricultural land, and the collection and transfer of much of the Palestinian Authority’s tax and customs revenue. These controls also affect the availability and movement of food, medicine, construction materials, agricultural supplies, and other necessities of everyday life. As the occupying power, Israel has obligations toward the occupied Palestinian population, including obligations to maintain public order and protect civilians. Yet enforcement against settler violence has repeatedly been inadequate. At times, Israeli political leaders have supported settlement expansion and defended or encouraged the broader settler movement rather than restraining it. [2][3]

That is what I mean by creating facts on the ground: interim authority gradually becomes physical permanence without any formal transfer of sovereignty. Under the prevailing interpretation of international law, Israeli civilian settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal. Yet they continue to expand while the state with the power to stop that expansion enables and protects much of the settlement enterprise. [1][2]

Area C became a test for me. Forget for a moment that this is Israel. If another country occupied land, moved its civilians onto it, protected them with its army, and the people already living there were gradually squeezed into less space, what would I call it? I know what I would call it if another country were doing it.

But what stayed with me most was not the legal argument. It was her certainty.

I had heard variations of that certainty many times before, particularly from Israelis and from Jews outside Israel who strongly identify with Zionism or defend the Israeli state, including some rabbis. They were often people who sincerely believed in compassion, justice, human dignity, equality, and the moral teachings of Judaism. Yet when the conversation turned to Israel and Palestinians, I repeatedly watched those principles bend under the weight of fear, perceived Jewish self-preservation, loyalty to Israel, and sometimes attachment to land.

How can we teach justice and then rationalize injustice when we benefit from it? How can we invoke compassion for the stranger while denying another people rights we would demand for ourselves? How can rabbis teach the moral lessons of Jewish history and tradition while finding theological, historical, or security arguments to excuse conduct they would condemn immediately if another people were doing it to Jews?

Fear is powerful. So is the need to protect ourselves. I know that from Israel and from my own family. But I have also seen how easily fear becomes an explanation for keeping what benefits us. Add land, religion, national identity, and real security threats, and people can convince themselves of almost anything.

2. The Moral Questions Beneath the Arguments

I became exhausted by the usual Israeli-Palestinian argument. Every discussion seemed to arrive carrying a truckload of history, grievances, atrocities, maps, biblical claims, wars, resolutions, and reasons why the other side was more guilty. I wanted to ask a simpler moral question without pretending the history itself was simple.

Take the bird’s-eye view.

Strip away the labels and loyalties.

Forget, for a moment, who is Jewish and who is Palestinian. Forget what I was taught as an Israeli child. Forget religion, nationalism, inherited trauma, biblical promises, political slogans, and even the instinct for self-preservation.

Then ask some of the simplest moral questions:

Who lived there?

Who lost their homes?

Who controls the land today?

Who has freedom and political power?

Who does not?

Who is allowed to return?

Who is prevented from returning?

And if I belonged to neither people, what would I consider just?

These questions cannot solve borders, security, refugees, Jerusalem, settlements, or the fear each people has of domination. But they can help us decide what we should not excuse.

A fact does not stop being a fact because acknowledging it makes the eventual solution harder. Nor should we reject an uncomfortable moral conclusion simply because we cannot immediately explain how to implement it.

Before we can argue honestly about what is politically possible, we have to be honest about what has happened, what is happening now, and what should not be acceptable.

3. What Distance Allowed Me to See

I know how difficult this exercise is because I am not looking at Israel from the outside.

The Wooden Horse

I was born and raised in Israel. I grew up in a home that had belonged to a Palestinian family before 1948.

I knew something about that house long before I understood what it meant.

When I was about six years old, I found old wooden toys under the stairs: blocks and small carved animals. I remember holding a little wooden horse and asking my mother whose toys they were. She told me they had belonged to the children who lived in the house before us.

“Where are they now?”

She told me they had fled when the soldiers came.

I knew nothing about Zionism, the Nakba, competing histories, or the politics of 1948. I understood only what a six-year-old could understand: other children had once lived in my house and played with these toys. Something frightening had happened, they had left, and somehow their home had become ours.

There was a contradiction in that house that took me decades to understand. My parents were Jewish refugees who had lost almost everything in Europe and desperately needed a place to begin again. Yet the home in which we began again existed because another family was no longer there.

I can still picture that little wooden horse in my hand. The politics came much later. The human reality was already there.

my mother (right), a teenager, and her friend Bella walking freely through Jaffa in 1951. More than seventy years later, Bella was killed when a bomb from Gaza struck her home during the war..
Ajami after Jaffa’s conquest in 1948: a man sits behind the barbed-wire boundary imposed on the city’s remaining Palestinian residents. Source: Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment Archive.

The Horrible Transfer of Suffering: My Mother’s Story

Shortly before my mother died, I recorded her describing her arrival in Israel from Bulgaria as a thirteen-year-old refugee during the large migration of Bulgarian Jews in late 1948. Her education had ended after the second grade, when Jews were driven from their homes and stripped of their property. She could barely read or write, but she was intelligent, perceptive, and remarkably capable. She spent most of her working life as a seamstress in a seat-manufacturing shop from age 14. Still a child, she had already endured persecution, displacement, hunger, homelessness, bombings, dangerous and unsanitary conditions, and repeated escapes from death.

Her family arrived with nothing and was first placed in tents in Hadera. There they waited without a home, surrounded by other Jewish refugees, while soldiers assured them, “We are working on finding housing solutions for you.”

The historical record establishes the setting of my mother’s memory. When Jaffa surrendered in May 1948, fewer than 4,000 of its nearly 100,000 Palestinian residents remained. Israeli authorities concentrated those who stayed in Ajami behind barbed wire, under military rule, permits, and curfews, while Palestinian homes, apartments, shops, furnishings, and land were taken into state control and redistributed. Tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants were subsequently directed into Jaffa, including Bulgarian Jewish refugees like my mother’s family. The full historical and archival documentation appears in Appendix A. [24][25]

The historical record does not weaken my mother’s memory. It gives it a documented structure. Eventually, her family was driven from Hadera toward Jaffa. She remembered passing through a city whose destruction still felt fresh. Buildings had collapsed. Walls were shattered. The war had moved on, but its aftermath was everywhere. In her memory, even the smell of gunfire remained. Palestinian families were gone from most neighborhoods. Behind them remained furnished homes, dishes on shelves, clothing in closets, shops still stocked, and children’s belongings left behind.

Only later did the soldiers’ promise reveal its terrible meaning. “We are working on finding housing solutions for you” did not mean that homes were being built. It meant that confiscated homes from which Palestinians had already been displaced were being redistributed to Jewish refugees. The tents in Hadera and the confiscated homes in Jaffa were not separate stories. The promised solution was not ending suffering. It was replacing one people’s suffering with another’s.

My mother’s family was moved into one of those confiscated, fully furnished Palestinian Arab apartments. Her brother secured the apartment for the family. Her father took possession of several confiscated stores and later gave some of them to relatives. My mother was a good and caring person. Yet when she described taking possession of another family’s home and belongings, she said simply, “We arrived without anything. It helped us.”

I do not hear cruelty in her words. I hear the moral narrowing that trauma and desperate need can produce. Her family had suffered so much that the Palestinian family disappeared from the picture. The people who had slept in those rooms, eaten from those dishes, worn those clothes, and raised children in that home were no longer visible, even while their home and possessions made my family’s new life possible.

My Father’s Final Request

My father knew what it meant to be uprooted, to become a refugee, to endure hunger and homelessness, and to struggle for his family’s survival.

At fourteen, he was displaced in Europe without his father, who had been taken to a forced labor camp. After their home was seized, my father, his mother, and his two younger brothers fled with only what they could carry. At times, they survived outdoors without shelter. He was still a boy, but he became responsible for keeping his mother and brothers alive.

The author’s father, second from the right, wearing a Jewish star in the ghetto during the persecution of Jews in Europe.

That history shaped him for the rest of his life.

After arriving in Israel, my father worked for many years as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. Many of the other nurses were Palestinians from Akko and the surrounding area. He respected them, and they respected him. He also became nearly fluent in Arabic.

Because of him, Palestinians were never merely an abstraction to me or an enemy I had been taught to fear. They were people my father knew, worked beside, laughed with, and cared about.

As a child, I saw that affection and respect firsthand. Our family was invited to Palestinian weddings and other gatherings in the Galilee. I remember sitting beneath the night sky near campfires, surrounded by Arabic singing, rhythmic drumming, dabke dancing, food, stories, and laughter. There was no electricity or running water, but the hospitality and generosity were unlike anything I had experienced. I was mesmerized by gatherings in which everything seemed connected to family, land, memory, and belonging.

Traditional Palestinian wedding

Years later, after a long absence, I walked through the Arab market in Akko. A man came running after me, calling my father’s name. For a moment, he thought I was my father. When he realized I was his son, he spoke with great affection about how much he had loved and respected him.

That was the kind of regard my father inspired among people he had once been sent, as a young soldier, to patrol.

Many years later, I hired a journalist to write the story of my father’s life. The book was printed privately and shared only with our family. I wanted his children and grandchildren to remember our history: the hardship he endured, the people he lost, and his remarkable survival. We believed his story was complete.

Then, about eight or nine years ago, while I was visiting my family in Israel, my father approached me looking weak, shaken, and deeply troubled. His face was filled with worry, and his voice sounded fragile.

“Sit with me,” he said.

I sat beside him as he began to speak.

“I have something very important to tell you. About the book, I omitted something. I was ashamed to tell it, but I must tell you now. Maybe it can still be added. It is important.”

I had never seen him look this way. Whatever he was about to tell me had clearly been weighing on him for a very long time.

Soon after arriving in Israel as a young Jewish refugee in 1948, my father was required to serve in the newly formed IDF. He was assigned to patrol near a Palestinian village that had been divided by a military line. What had once been one village had become two halves separated by a border.

During one patrol, my father was riding in a jeep with one other soldier, who was driving. It was nearly dark when they saw movement in the bushes. Fearing an ambush and believing they were in danger, my father fired his rifle into the place where they had seen the movement.

Then everything became quiet.

When they approached the bushes, they found an elderly Palestinian man lying dead on the ground. One of his hands still held the handle of a pot, and the cooked food he had been carrying had spilled onto the earth.

My father believed the man had been trying to bring food across the military line to hungry family members living under close military guard in the other half of the divided village.

The two soldiers left quickly. For years, my father tried to escape the memory. “I wanted to forget,” he told me.

As he continued, his chin began to tremble and tears poured down his face. I had seen my father cry only once before, when his mother died.

“This was bad, Morty,” he said. “We hurt them so much. We caused so much harm to innocent people.”

He tried to continue, but he could barely speak. “I was ashamed to tell this story. Please add it to the book.”

I placed my hand on his shoulder.

“Thank you for telling me,” I said. “I already knew that Palestinian land had been taken by force. But through your story, I understand more clearly how terrible the injustice was, especially when you were forced to become part of it. You liked the Arabs. I know that. When we walked through the Arab market in Akko, people greeted you with such respect. Even when I was a child, I could see how much they cared for you. I understand why this memory was so hard for you to carry.”

My father wept. Finally, he said, “I am so sorry. I am so sorry.”

My father had once been a homeless child trying to keep his own family alive. Only a few years later, wearing an Israeli uniform, he killed an elderly Palestinian man who appeared to be trying to carry food to his hungry family.

Fear, military training, and a new border drawn through a village had transformed an elderly man carrying food through his own community into a suspected enemy.

To the governments and military authorities that impose such lines, a border may appear to be a necessary mark on a map. But those lines do not remain on paper. They pass through villages, homes, fields, roads, and families. They determine who may move, who may return, who may bring food to a relative, and who may be treated as a threat for crossing land that was once part of ordinary life.

For the people in that village, the line divided more than territory. It divided families from one another and hungry people from food. The people who created it may never have witnessed what happened there, but those who lived along it carried its consequences through grief, displacement, fear, anger, and memory.

Palestinian residents fleeing Akko during the 1948 war, carrying children and household belongings.

My father carried the shame of that killing for nearly seventy years. He could never convince himself that the man had been only an enemy. He knew Palestinians too well for that. He knew their language, food, music, celebrations, warmth, and generosity. He understood that the elderly man had a family waiting for him, perhaps hungry, perhaps frightened, and expecting him to return with food.

I do not know the elderly man’s name. I know only what my father saw when he approached the bushes: a dead man, food spilled onto the ground, and a hand still holding the handle of a pot. I also know what that memory did to my father for the rest of his life.

My father died a few years after telling me this story, at the age of ninety five. Before he died, he asked me to add it to the private book our family had made about his life.

I now understand that he was asking for more than an amendment. He wanted his children and grandchildren to know the whole truth, not only the story of his suffering and survival, but also the part that caused him pain and implicated him personally. He had carried that truth in silence for nearly seventy years, and near the end of his life, he entrusted it to me.

I do not tell this story to condemn my father. I tell it because he asked me to, and because the elderly Palestinian man’s life should not disappear into a history remembered only through borders, armies, and maps. Silence may preserve a comforting version of history, but it cannot restore the humanity of the people who were left out of it.

As I worked on the larger story of Israel and Palestine, I began to understand my father’s request differently. He showed me what it means to confront a truth that is painful, shameful, and difficult to reconcile with the story we would rather tell about ourselves.

His confession is one part of a much larger history I inherited as an Israeli, the son of Jewish refugees, and a former Israeli soldier. My mother’s memories, my father’s experience, my own life and military service, the Palestinians I knew and encountered, and Israel’s historical records gradually forced me to confront parts of that history that I had never been taught to see.

My father found the courage near the end of his life to reveal the part of his story he had been too ashamed to tell. By telling what happened to both men, and by carrying that same commitment to truth through the fuller story of Israel and Palestine, I am trying to fulfill my father’s final request.

What a Human Being Can Carry

The first shows Jewish refugees after Europe, living in tents in Hadera with only the belongings they had been able to bring. This was the world my parents knew. In Bulgaria, anti-Jewish laws restricted where Jews could live, work, and study. In 1943, Bulgarian authorities expelled almost 20,000 Jews from Sofia to the provinces, sent Jewish men into forced labor, and confiscated much of the property families left behind.

Jews living in Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia, Thrace, and Pirot suffered an even worse fate. More than 11,000 were deported into German custody, and virtually all were murdered at Treblinka.[40]

The next photographs show Palestinian families leaving Jaffa and Lydda in 1948. They, too, carried children, bundles, furniture, and whatever their bodies could bear. They did not know whether they would ever see their homes again. Most never did. Their houses, land, shops, furnishings, and belongings were taken, and families like mine were placed inside the world they had been forced to leave.

The recent photograph from Gaza completes the sequence. Again, families move through destruction carrying children, bags, blankets, water, and the remaining fragments of their lives. Again, their homes have become rubble. Again, civilians are ordered to move, pushed into ever-smaller areas, and left wondering whether there will be anything to return to.

These histories are not identical, and they do not need to be identical for us to recognize the same human terror. A frightened family leaves its home carrying only what the body can bear. Behind them remain rooms, family photographs, furniture, gardens, neighbors, graves, and the ordinary life that made that place home. Ahead of them is uncertainty, dependence, and the possibility that someone else will take possession of everything they were forced to abandon.

As the son of Holocaust survivors, I was taught to recognize this image when the people carrying the bundles were Jews. My moral failure was not recognizing it with the same clarity when the people carrying them were Palestinians. If the sight of Jewish families driven from their homes awakens grief and outrage in me, the same sight cannot become acceptable when the uniforms, language, or victims change.

Today, in Gaza, this image is being created again before the entire world.

I still have the original recording of my mother telling this story, together with my memories of several conversations we had about it before she died. When historical explanations and familiar excuses begin to obscure what happened, I return to her voice. A Jewish refugee family needed a home. A Palestinian family lost one. My family’s need was real. So was the other family’s loss. The moral failure was treating one as visible and the other as expendable.

When My Certainty Began to Break

My military service reinforced the Israeli story I had been taught. Looking back, I can see how thoroughly I absorbed its assumptions: who we were, who the Palestinians were, why we were always defending ourselves, and why the violence around us was supposedly forced upon us.

Morty Bachar sitting on the hood of a dusty military jeep with a machine gun, navigating through the Sinai Desert during his IDF service.

For much of my life, that narrative did not feel like a narrative. It felt like reality.

Leaving Israel eventually gave me something I could not have had while completely immersed in it: distance. I have experienced this conflict first from the inside, as an Israeli who lived the story, served the state, and believed much of what I had been taught, and later from far enough away to examine those assumptions, compare them with historical evidence, and take Palestinian experience more seriously.

I have lived in the United States for many years and now make my home in Delaware, where I work as a ceramic artist. That physical distance from Israel, and the creative life I built outside it, gave me room to reconsider the history, assumptions, and loyalties that had shaped me.

My questioning had already begun while I was still living in Israel. After my regular military service, and during the years when I returned for reserve duty, I began seeing things I had previously accepted or failed to see. Questions about land, equality, the treatment of Arabs, and the gulf between our image of ourselves and the reality experienced by Palestinians became impossible for me to push aside.

None of this felt intellectually exciting to me. It hurt.

As more of what I had been taught began to unravel, I experienced something close to an identity crisis. I had grown up believing in the essential righteousness of Israel’s story. I had served in its military believing that story. Israel was not an abstract country whose history I was reconsidering. It was part of me.

Discovering that the history I had been taught was incomplete and distorted did not make me feel enlightened. It made me angry, ashamed, and betrayed. Questioning that story meant questioning part of myself.

Distance did not magically remove my bias. I can still be wrong, and I probably am wrong about some things. I have to question what I believe now just as I question what I was taught growing up. The test I keep coming back to is simpler: would I judge this the same way if I had been born into the other family, on the other side?

I am not rejecting a country or a people I never understood. I am questioning beliefs that once formed part of my own identity.

4. What Israel’s Own Records Confirm

Not Palestinian testimony. Not an accusation from Israel’s enemies. Israel’s own intelligence reports, military orders, and sworn testimony.

What You Need to Know

For decades, many of us were taught a simple explanation for the Palestinian exodus of 1948: the Arabs left, often because Arab leaders told them to leave. Israel fought a defensive war and inherited the homes they abandoned.

A secret Israeli intelligence analysis written in June 1948 concluded that Jewish military actions and their effects were responsible for approximately 70 percent of the Palestinian displacement it examined, while orders from Arab institutions and armed groups accounted for only about 5 percent of evacuated villages. By June 1, the report estimated that approximately 391,000 Palestinians had already been displaced. [41]

Then, nearly eighty years later, extraordinary additional Israeli records came into public view. Thousands of wartime documents discovered beside a Tel Aviv dumpster in 2024, together with military-court records made public and examined in 2026, include written Israeli military orders involving killing and removal of Palestinians and sworn testimony from senior Israeli officers describing terror and violence as methods used to induce populations to flee. [42][43]

These records do not prove that every Palestinian was expelled at gunpoint or that every village experienced the same events. They establish something more precise and extremely difficult to dismiss: the mass Palestinian exodus cannot credibly be explained as a population simply choosing to leave, or primarily obeying Arab orders to evacuate. Israel’s own contemporary intelligence, military orders, and officers’ testimony contradict that story.

The testimony itself is even more direct. During the military trial of Shmuel Lahis following the October-November 1948 killings at Hula, Mordechai Maklef, then an operations officer on the northern front and later the IDF's third chief of staff, testified: “The intention was to expel. It is impossible to expel 114,000 people … without terror.” Haim Ben-David, a Carmeli Brigade operations officer who later became an IDF major general and David Ben-Gurion's military secretary, described what happened when a Palestinian insisted on remaining in his home: “He gets a bullet.” These statements were given by senior Israeli officers in an Israeli military court, not by Palestinian witnesses or Israel's enemies. [42][43]

Taken together, the June 1948 intelligence analysis, the written operational orders, and the officers’ sworn testimony make the central point difficult to evade. They do not show that every Palestinian left in the same way. They do show, in Israeli records, direct military action, killing, expulsion, terror, and fear being used or produced in ways that drove civilians from their communities and discouraged or prevented return. The old blanket explanation that Palestinians simply chose to leave, or mainly obeyed Arab evacuation orders, cannot account for this documentary record. [41][42][43]

For me, this is not merely another historical dispute. It reaches directly into the story I was taught as an Israeli child. I was taught a version in which we fought for survival, the Arabs left, and their abandoned homes became available because they had chosen to go. The archival record does not permit that simple story to survive. Israeli intelligence, Israeli operational orders, and testimony by Israeli commanders themselves describe a much harsher reality.

The complete intelligence findings, military orders, testimony, document images, historical qualifications, and links to the original collections are presented in Appendix A for readers who wish to examine the record in detail.

5. Displacement and the Right to Resist

Palestinians should have a right to return and, even more fundamentally, the right not to have been expelled or displaced in the first place. That is my moral conclusion.

I know the right of return is one of the hardest parts of this conflict. I do not know how full return could work in practice after so many decades. Some combination of return, restitution, and compensation may be necessary. But the difficulty does not make the original loss disappear. People lost homes, land, communities, and a country, and many were prevented from going back. Something is still owed to them.

My mother’s testimony prevents me from treating that principle as an abstraction. Her suffering was real, and her need for safety was urgent. The Palestinian family’s home did not therefore become morally ownerless. The injustice done to my family could not be repaired by transferring dispossession to theirs.

Remedy matters too. Germany did not undo the Holocaust by paying compensation, and no check could restore what survivors lost. But postwar Germany accepted an ongoing obligation to compensate many survivors, and German-funded programs continue to make pension and hardship payments today. My own parents received regular compensation checks. Those payments did not erase their suffering, but they represented something morally important: acknowledgment that a grave historical wrong can create obligations that do not simply expire with time. If I believe that principle when the victims are Jews, I have to be willing to apply it when the victims are Palestinians. Return will not be possible in every case, but restitution, compensation, and other agreed forms of reparation should be part of any serious attempt to repair the dispossession of 1948 and allow surviving refugees and their descendants to live with greater security and dignity. [47]

You cannot take my house in Delaware because your ancestors had a farm here a thousand years ago, no matter how badly you and your people have suffered since.

Jews unquestionably have a powerful historical, religious, and emotional connection to the land, and the longing for refuge after centuries of persecution was real. But neither ancient connection nor terrible suffering grants an unlimited right to land inhabited by another people. The tragedy is that one people’s legitimate need for safety and belonging was answered through another people’s displacement.

Whatever one concludes about every detail of Israel’s creation, the fundamental problem remains. The Zionist project sought to create a Jewish-majority state, and later to preserve that Jewish majority, in a land that at the beginning of the project was overwhelmingly inhabited by non-Jews. That demographic objective created an inherent conflict: it was extraordinarily difficult to establish and maintain a Jewish majority while preserving the continued presence, political equality, and property rights of the Palestinian population already living there. [4]

In 1948, that conflict led to the mass displacement of Palestinians through a combination of war, flight, expulsion, coercion, and fear. Historians continue to debate the degree to which particular expulsions were planned in advance, arose from wartime circumstances, or resulted from local decisions. But what is not seriously disputable is that a very large Palestinian population lost its homes and was prevented from returning. [5]

Zionist discussions of population transfer, including those associated with Ben-Gurion, show that transfer was contemplated well before 1948. The history of particular quotations is sometimes disputed, which is why I do not rest this argument on any single sentence attributed to Ben-Gurion. The broader historical record is more important: transfer was considered, displacement occurred on a mass scale, and Palestinian refugees were not permitted to return. [6]

This history was not simply a story of Zionists acting and Palestinians passively suffering. Palestinian Arabs fiercely opposed Zionism and Jewish immigration. Violence against Jewish civilians occurred before Israel existed. Palestinian Arab leadership rejected the 1947 UN partition proposal, and after Israel declared independence, neighboring Arab states entered the war. [7]

Jews therefore experienced the conflict not merely as a project of national expansion but also as a struggle for survival, particularly in the immediate shadow of the Holocaust. Those realities matter. They help explain fear, resistance, and the intensity of Jewish attachment to sovereignty. But they do not erase the equally important question of what happened to the Palestinian population during Israel’s creation, or whether people who lost their homes should permanently bear the consequences of decisions made by leaders, armies, and neighboring states.

Regardless of whom one blames for every war, uprising, terrorist attack, military operation, or failed negotiation that followed, that original displacement is fundamental to understanding the violence that grew from this conflict.

It does not justify murdering civilians. Nothing does.

Nothing in this essay diminishes the horror of October 7: the murder and kidnapping of Israeli civilians, the trauma of rocket attacks, or the genuine fear carried by Israelis and by Jews whose historical memory includes centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. Deliberate attacks on civilians are wrong whether committed by Hamas, other Palestinian armed groups, Israeli settlers, the Israeli state, or anyone else. Murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and deliberately terrorizing civilians do not become moral because the person committing them has suffered injustice. [8]

Eventually I found myself asking a question that stripped away almost everything else:

What if I had simply been born Palestinian?

Not a morally different person. Me. The same temperament, the same stubbornness, the same attachment to family and home, but born on the other side.

What would I believe if my parents had taught me their history instead of mine? What would I feel if my family had lost its home or land, if I spent my life passing through another people’s checkpoints, if my grandfather’s olive trees were uprooted, or if soldiers entered my home in the middle of the night and took my son away?

Would I peacefully accept circumstances that I would never expect an Israeli Jew to accept?

I cannot know exactly what I would do. But I know myself well enough to doubt that I would simply accept it.

Understanding why a human being resists and morally approving everything done in the name of resistance are entirely different things.

We cannot demand from Palestinians a level of passive acceptance that we would never demand from ourselves.

Palestinians also have moral responsibilities that cannot simply be explained away by occupation or dispossession. Hamas’s deliberate murder and kidnapping of civilians on October 7 was indefensible. So are rockets deliberately or indiscriminately directed at civilian communities, glorification of attacks on civilians, antisemitism, and political movements that deny Jews any legitimate place in the land.

Palestinian leaders have also failed their own people through corruption, authoritarianism, destructive political choices, and missed opportunities. None of this makes occupation, settlement expansion, displacement, or collective punishment morally acceptable. It means only that, if I am going to apply the same moral standard to everyone, Palestinians do not receive an exemption from it either.

6. Where Greater Force Leads

The history described above is not only about the past. The next three sections examine where I believe the same forces may now be leading Israel.

Without confronting the underlying realities of displacement, occupation, unequal power, fear, and trauma, I do not believe peace will ever exist.

Palestinian resistance will continue. Some of it will be nonviolent. Some will be political. Some will be armed. And some, tragically, will cross every moral and legal boundary by targeting civilians.

If the underlying conditions remain unchanged, Israel is likely to answer recurring resistance with greater military force, tighter control, and further repression. That force will generate more Palestinian suffering, which will produce more anger, more resistance, and another Israeli response.

We have watched this cycle intensify dramatically since October 7.

Gaza is perhaps the most extreme physical expression of that cycle. After years of war, an extraordinary proportion of its housing stock has been damaged or destroyed. A 2026 assessment by the United Nations, World Bank, and European Union reported that approximately 371,888 housing units had been directly affected, representing 76.6 percent of Gaza’s housing units. [9]

At the same time, OCHA reported in June 2026 that the Yellow Line encompassed roughly 53 percent of the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces were temporarily deployed within that area, and Palestinian access was heavily restricted. In practice, this concentrated most of Gaza’s approximately two million residents into the remaining portion of a territory that was already extraordinarily densely populated before the war. [10]

There is another pattern that troubles me: the use of harm to families and surrounding civilians as a claimed means of deterrence or military necessity. Israel has long demolished or sealed the family homes of Palestinians accused of attacks, even when other people living in the home were not accused of the act. Israel describes punitive demolitions as deterrence; human-rights organizations have condemned the practice as collective punishment. B’Tselem reports that during the Second Intifada, 628 housing units were demolished because of the alleged acts of 333 Palestinians, leaving 3,983 people without homes, and that almost half of those homes had never housed the person whose actions were cited as the reason for demolition. [48]

The same moral question arises in war when Israel says a militant, command post, weapons cache, tunnel, or other military objective is located in or near a civilian building or neighborhood. Some of those military claims may be genuine. But a security explanation does not erase the obligation to distinguish civilians from combatants, assess proportionality, and take feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm. Nor does it erase the human question: how much destruction to uninvolved families can be justified in order to reach the person or military objective being targeted? [49]

The result is that people who have already been displaced are crowded into an even smaller part of an already tiny strip of land.

There is something else about Gaza that I find impossible to escape: we cannot easily say that we did not know.

We have watched much of this unfold almost in real time. We have seen dead and injured children, grieving parents, destroyed neighborhoods, displaced families, damaged hospitals, desperate searches for food and water, and human beings digging through rubble for the people they love.

No argument about Hamas, military necessity, responsibility, disputed numbers, terminology, or international law can erase what is visible.

I wake up every morning with a sense of dread, wondering what new suffering I will witness in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon as a result of Israeli actions. I watch the images, the videos, and the reports, and often find myself in tears.

The deepest pain is knowing that much of this is being done in my name, by my own country. The soldiers carrying it out are not strangers to me. They could be people I once knew. They could be my cousins, my nephews, my former neighbors, or the children of friends. I wore the same uniform. I was once part of the same military.

I do not want someday to comfort myself by saying that I did not understand what was happening. Once we know, the moral question becomes what we are willing to do with that knowledge.

Lebanon troubles me for the same reason. I keep asking where this much force leads, not only for the people on the receiving end, but for Israel itself.

The Same Playbook: No Home and No Land to Return To

In southern Lebanon, I see a pattern that raises a similar moral danger: civilian displacement, widespread destruction of homes and agricultural land, and conditions that can make return difficult. The result is not simply that families may have no house to come back to. Damage to orchards, soil, water systems, and agricultural infrastructure can also undermine the livelihoods on which return depends. [11][12][38][39]

A June 2026 assessment by the United Nations Development Programme and Lebanon’s National Council for Scientific Research found 11,095 buildings completely destroyed in southern Lebanon, affecting 17,891 housing units. Another 2,242 buildings were partially damaged and 9,311 sustained lesser damage. Amnesty International had already documented the destruction of more than 70 percent of all structures in three border municipalities and concluded that many residents had no homes to which they could return. [11][38]

Destroyed homes in a southern Lebanese border community.

The destruction extends beyond buildings. Human Rights Watch verified Israeli use of white-phosphorus munitions in at least 17 municipalities in southern Lebanon. Soil studies found white-phosphorus residues in several affected villages, while agricultural assessments documented burned orchards, damaged crops, lost livestock, and long-term harm to food production. In February 2026, after Israeli aircraft sprayed a chemical substance along the border, Lebanese laboratory testing reported glyphosate concentrations 20 to 30 times higher than normal application levels in some samples and warned of risks to soil fertility and agriculture. [12][39]

White-phosphorus munitions descending over southern Lebanon.

Every turn of that wheel makes Israel less secure, not more.

The greater the force Israel employs, the more isolated it becomes. As Palestinian suffering becomes increasingly visible to the world, sympathy for Palestinians grows and anger toward Israel grows with it. Tragically, some of that anger spills over into antisemitism against Jews who have absolutely nothing to do with Israeli government policy.

The result is more suffering, more hatred, and ultimately less security for everyone, including Jews.

I also see another possible stage in that projection. Israel’s international position may begin to resemble what happened internationally with apartheid South Africa. I am not saying the histories or systems are identical. I am talking about the trajectory of world opinion.

A country can defend what it is doing for a long time, especially when powerful allies stand behind it. But there can come a point when people outside the country have simply seen too much. The explanations stop overcoming what they see with their own eyes. Public opinion changes, and eventually governments feel that pressure too.

I believe Israel is heading toward that isolation. The world can now watch Gaza and the West Bank almost in real time. It can see settlement expansion, Palestinian communities being displaced, different systems of rights and movement, military occupation, settler violence, demolished homes, and enormous civilian suffering.

Israel has an explanation for almost every individual action. The problem is what all those actions look like when you put them together.

South Africa ultimately reached a point where maintaining the existing system carried an international and internal cost that could no longer be sustained. Something had to change dramatically. I believe Israel risks reaching a similar crossroads, not because the world has suddenly become hostile to Jews, and not because every criticism of Israel is fair, but because modern communications have made it increasingly impossible for any country to control how the world sees what it is doing.

My projection is not that Israel can indefinitely suppress Palestinian resistance through greater force. It is that greater force will accelerate the international isolation that makes the existing system impossible to sustain.

7. When Expansion Stops Being a Fringe Idea

There is another reason the destruction and displacement in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon cannot be viewed only as the temporary consequences of war. A growing political movement in Israel does not see the present map as final. It speaks in the language of return, settlement, sovereignty, and a Greater Israel.

The phrase Greater Israel does not describe one universally agreed map or one official government plan. For some, it means permanent Israeli rule over the West Bank. For others, it includes Gaza. At the outer edge, religious-nationalist maps extend into parts of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and still farther. Most Israelis do not necessarily support those maximal maps, and Israel has not formally adopted a policy of annexing all the territories they depict. That distinction is important. But it would be equally irresponsible to dismiss the movement as an irrelevant fantasy.

The governing coalition sworn in under Benjamin Netanyahu in December 2022 declared that the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel and promised to promote settlement in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan Heights, and Judea and Samaria, the biblical names it uses for the occupied West Bank. In 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke in Paris from a lectern displaying a map that incorporated Jordan and the West Bank into Israel. In August 2025, Netanyahu said in an i24NEWS interview that he felt he was on a historic and spiritual mission and was very attached to the vision of the Promised Land and Greater Israel. [54][55][56]

Gaza shows how quickly an idea once treated as politically impossible can acquire ministers, conferences, promotional material, and a practical vocabulary. In January 2024, eleven cabinet ministers and fifteen members of the Knesset attended a Jerusalem conference calling for renewed Jewish settlement in Gaza and the so-called voluntary migration of Palestinians. Among them were National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Smotrich. Ben Gvir called for Palestinians to leave Gaza, while Smotrich had publicly advocated emigration and renewed settlement. These were not anonymous extremists outside the political system. They were members of the government helping shape policy while Gaza was being destroyed. [57][58]

The marketing had already begun. In December 2023, Harey Zahav, an Israeli developer associated with settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, circulated a promotional image placing proposed villas over a photograph of devastated Gaza beneath the slogan, “A house on the beach is not a dream.” The company later said that it was not actually selling plots and described the advertisement as a mixture of humor, wishful thinking, and an effort to open discussion about rebuilding settlements in Gaza. That qualification must be included. This was not an authorized government development plan. But the image still matters. Before Palestinian families could even return to the ruins of their homes, an Israeli business was already presenting those ruins as the setting for Jewish beachfront housing. [59]

The same pattern is now visible to Israel’s north. The Uri Tzafon movement openly advocates Jewish settlement in southern Lebanon, distributes maps and proposed Hebrew community names, and argues that lasting security requires moving Israel’s border to the Litani River. This remains a minority position, and Israeli governments long denied territorial ambitions in Lebanon. Yet by 2026 the idea was receiving greater attention from politicians and the media. Ben Gvir spoke of a settlement plan for Lebanon, while Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that Israeli forces would seize and control a broad security zone reaching to the Litani. A military occupation is not the same as civilian settlement or legal annexation. But history gives us reason to pay close attention when temporary security control, destruction that prevents return, and an organized settlement movement begin to occupy the same territory and the same political conversation. [60][61]

Syria adds another warning. Israel has occupied additional Syrian territory beyond the previously occupied Golan Heights and has demanded a demilitarized zone across southern Syrian provinces. Israeli leaders describe these measures as security requirements, not annexation. That may be the present official explanation. But the larger expansionist movement treats military reach, biblical claim, settlement, and sovereignty as stages of the same historic mission. [62]

I have spent much of this essay describing how Israel grew: by conquest, the removal and prevention of return of Palestinians, the transfer of their property, the renaming of places, the construction of new communities, and the gradual conversion of facts created by force into a reality the world was eventually asked to accept. That history is precisely why present declarations of territorial ambition must be taken seriously.

The danger is not that every maximalist map will become policy tomorrow. The danger is that the world will again be told that each step is temporary, defensive, exceptional, or too fringe to matter, until military control becomes settlement, settlement becomes permanence, and permanence is presented as irreversible.

For almost eighty years, Israel has been remarkably successful at separating each act from the larger pattern and persuading much of the world to accept its explanations one event at a time. The past documented in this essay is a warning against allowing that to happen again. When senior officials speak of Greater Israel, when ministers gather to plan Jewish settlement in Gaza, when movements map Israeli communities in Lebanon, and when Palestinians are being driven from land that others openly imagine inhabiting, we should believe that the intention is serious enough to confront before it becomes another accomplished fact.

This is not an accusation against every Israeli or every Jew. It is a demand that governments, journalists, religious leaders, and citizens stop treating explicit expansionist ambitions as harmless rhetoric. The world should insist now that military necessity cannot become a pathway to permanent territorial acquisition, that displaced civilians must be allowed to return safely, and that no people’s homes or homeland may be converted into another people’s real-estate opportunity.

8. Israel’s Changing Society

There is another part of this projection that worries me deeply. While international pressure on Israel is growing from the outside, Israeli society itself appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

In 2023, I wrote that Israel appeared to be fragmenting along religious, ideological, and ethnic lines. I worried that religious nationalism would gain political power, that settlement and territorial expansion would become harder to restrain, and that educated and professionally mobile Israelis might eventually decide the country was moving somewhere they could no longer follow.

I hoped I was being too pessimistic. Looking at Israel now, some of what frightened me then no longer feels nearly as remote.

The political and demographic forces inside Israel are changing. Religious-nationalist and far-right movements have become increasingly influential, and politicians such as Itamar Ben Gvir, once considered far outside the political mainstream, now hold substantial power. [13]

That extremism has now entered the law itself. On March 30, 2026, the Knesset passed legislation making death by hanging the default punishment for Palestinians from the occupied West Bank convicted by military courts of deadly terrorist attacks. The law permits a death sentence without a unanimous judicial decision, sharply restricts appeal or clemency, and does not apply equally to Jewish Israelis accused of comparable ideologically motivated violence. The United Nations human-rights chief condemned it as discriminatory and incompatible with international law. [52]

The brutality was not confined to the legislation. At his fiftieth birthday celebration in May 2026, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir was presented with cakes decorated with hanging nooses, one bearing the words, “Sometimes dreams come true.” Senior police and prison officials reportedly attended. A government minister and people responsible for law enforcement were not solemnly confronting the taking of human life. They were celebrating its prospect while wearing small noose-shaped lapel pins. The noose had become a political emblem, and the execution of Palestinians a decoration on a birthday cake. This is what dehumanization looks like when it moves from the political margins into government, law, and public celebration. [53]

At the same time, some of Israel’s fastest-growing communities are among its most religious and politically conservative. If those demographic and political patterns continue, voting power may shift toward greater support for the nationalism, religious absolutism, settlement expansion, and hard-line policies that are already making compromise more difficult. [14]

There is also an economic reality that should not be avoided merely because it is uncomfortable to discuss. A substantial portion of Haredi men spend many of their prime working years in full-time yeshiva study rather than participating in the labor force. As a result, a rapidly growing segment of the population contributes less through paid employment and taxation while many households also receive government support and, like other Israelis, make use of public services. [14][15]

Haredi women participate in the workforce at much higher rates, and that distinction matters. Nor should anyone overlook the many ways Haredi communities contribute to Israeli social, religious, and communal life. But the economic challenge created by low labor-force participation among Haredi men is real, particularly as the Haredi population becomes a larger share of Israeli society. [14][15]

At the same time, many secular, educated, and professionally skilled Israelis, scientists, physicians, engineers, entrepreneurs, academics, technology workers, and others who contribute enormously to Israel’s economy and international competitiveness, increasingly have both the ability and, in some cases, the motivation to leave.

If secular and highly skilled Israelis become increasingly alienated by religious extremism, endless war, weakening democratic institutions, and international isolation, some will take their skills and families elsewhere. Their departure reduces the political, cultural, and economic counterweight to the groups moving Israel further toward nationalism and religious rule. Those groups gain greater electoral influence, the country moves further in that direction, and still more secular and internationally mobile Israelis consider leaving.

This is no longer purely hypothetical. Israel experienced negative net migration in 2024, with more people leaving than arriving, and the negative balance was projected to grow in 2025. Israel’s technology sector has also experienced a measurable outward movement of workers since October 7. [16][17]

The figures do not establish why every individual left or prove that the movement will become permanent. They do show that outward movement and the possibility of a damaging brain drain are no longer merely theoretical concerns. [16][17]

My concern, then, is not simply that Israel will become more isolated internationally. It is that the country could become more extreme internally while losing part of the educated, secular, and highly skilled population that is central to its professional, technological, scientific, and economic strength and that also provides an important political and cultural counterweight to extremism.

If those two trajectories continue, growing pressure from outside and growing fanaticism from within, they will eventually collide.

I increasingly worry that the greatest long-term danger to Israel may not come solely from external enemies. It may also come from what prolonged occupation, religious nationalism, internal division, and the normalization of domination do to Israel itself.

A country can possess extraordinary military power and still weaken from within. Weapons can defend borders. They cannot create social cohesion, economic resilience, democratic values, or a shared moral purpose.

Israel’s future depends on more than its ability to defeat its enemies. It depends on what kind of society Israelis are willing to become in order to defeat them.

9. The Narrative I Once Believed

Israel developed powerful official, educational, political, and cultural narratives emphasizing Jewish vulnerability, existential danger, and self-defense.

In the version of that narrative that I absorbed growing up, Palestinian displacement and the continuing occupation received far less moral weight. Palestinian violence was understood primarily as hatred of Jews, rather than also as a response to dispossession, occupation, statelessness, and despair. Israeli military force was presented overwhelmingly as defensive, necessary, and unavoidable.

I know the power of that narrative because I was one of those young Israelis. I wore the uniform. I accepted assumptions that seemed so self-evident that I did not recognize them as assumptions.

My conversation with the woman living in Area C reminded me how powerful that conditioning remains. She did not appear to be lying to me. She believed what she was saying. In some ways, that disturbed me more.

A national narrative is most powerful not when people knowingly repeat something they believe to be false, but when its assumptions are absorbed so completely that they feel like personal knowledge and unquestionable truth.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan devoted much of her scholarly work to examining how that absorption occurs inside Israeli Jewish education. In her 2012 study, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, she analyzed history, geography, and civics textbooks not only through their words, but through their maps, photographs, graphic design, place-names, and omissions.

She found that Palestinians were frequently absent as ordinary human beings or confined to narrow categories such as refugees, farmers, enemies, terrorists, or a demographic threat. Jewish historical attachment and Israeli statehood were presented as the natural framework of the land. Palestinian displacement and Israeli responsibility received far less attention, while Israeli military force was generally presented as necessary self-defense.

Her argument helps explain how my mother’s story could be true, personally witnessed, and still remain almost entirely outside the national moral picture. Indoctrination does not require every sentence in a textbook to be false. It works through repetition, emphasis, maps, images, omissions, and the careful arrangement of whose history is visible and whose disappears. Eventually, the story no longer feels like something we were taught. It feels like memory, knowledge, and common sense. [22]

The Myth of an Empty Palestine

One of the most consequential ideas inside the narrative I inherited was that pre-1948 Palestine was essentially empty, uncultivated, or waiting for others to develop it. The phrase most closely associated with that idea is “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Not every Zionist used the slogan, and not everyone who used it meant that literally no human beings lived there. Some meant that the country lacked a people whose national claim they were prepared to recognize. But that distinction does not rescue the idea. It reveals how the erasure worked: Palestinians could be physically present while being treated as politically, culturally, and morally absent. [30]

As a description of Palestine’s population, society, agriculture, and urban life, the “empty land” story was false. Used to erase the people already living there and to present their country as vacant or awaiting redemption, it was a Zionist political lie. Precision makes that conclusion stronger, not weaker. Israeli historian Anita Shapira wrote that the phrase was common among Zionists at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries and that it legitimized the Jewish claim while removing uneasiness about a competing claim. [30]

The demographic record leaves no room for the literal myth. The 1947 report of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine estimated the population at the end of 1946 at 1,203,000 Arabs, 608,000 Jews, and 35,000 others. Arabs formed the clear majority. These were not statistical shadows. They lived in cities, towns, and hundreds of villages; cultivated fields and orchards; worked in ports, factories, shops, schools, newspapers, religious institutions, and municipal bodies; and participated in an active political and cultural life. [31]

The photographs below make the point visible. Jaffa in 1932 was a dense coastal city linked to surrounding citrus groves, roads, commerce, and a working port. The 1936 photograph of orange crates being moved from Jaffa to ships documents an export economy that required growers, laborers, packers, merchants, boat crews, transport, capital, and international trade. These images do not romanticize Palestine or deny poverty, uneven development, conflict, or the Jewish contribution to the country’s growth. They refute the claim that Palestine was socially blank or economically inert. [32]

Public-works cover inscribed “Government of Palestine, P.W.D., Haifa District,” with English, Arabic, and Hebrew. It records the official Mandate-era administrative name;

The banknote and public-works cover establish a narrower but important fact: “Palestine” was the ordinary official geographic and administrative name under the British Mandate, printed on currency and public infrastructure in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. They do not prove that an independent sovereign Palestinian state existed before 1948. They prove that the name was real, official, and embedded in daily administration. Denying that history is not clarification. It is erasure. [33]

Three claims are often deliberately collapsed. First, there was no independent sovereign state called Palestine immediately before 1948. That is true, because the territory was governed as the British Mandate of Palestine. Second, there was no Palestinian people. That is false: a large Arabic-speaking population possessed communities, institutions, family histories, economic life, and an increasingly articulated national identity. Third, the land was empty. That is false in the most direct factual sense. The absence of sovereignty is not the absence of a people.

Israeli education has not been uniform, and it has changed. Early state textbooks largely centered the official Zionist narrative and gave limited space to Palestinian society or to Palestinian displacement in 1948. Later materials became more varied, and some teachers and historians introduced critical accounts and Palestinian perspectives. Yet the erasure did not simply disappear. A peer-reviewed 2025 study found that the Nakba was explicitly mentioned in only 40 percent of the Israeli Jewish-school teaching materials it examined. Some materials opened space for ethical inquiry; others minimized Palestinian suffering or denied the event’s significance. [22] [34]

The historical record does not require denying Jewish history, Jewish persecution, Jewish labor, Jewish attachment to the land, or the genuine achievements of the Zionist project. It requires refusing to build those truths on the deletion of another people. Pre-1948 Palestine was not empty. It was inhabited, cultivated, organized, argued over, loved, and remembered. The myth of vacancy prepared the mind to see dispossession as development and the people displaced as an obstacle rather than as human beings with homes.

That is why this issue belongs beside my mother’s testimony and the documented histories of Jaffa and Akko. If I was taught that Palestinians left by their own will, and if the inhabited country that existed before 1948 was reduced to desert awaiting rescue, then the omissions were not peripheral mistakes. They protected a moral story in which conquest could be remembered only as liberation, emptied homes could become available housing, and the people behind barbed wire could vanish from the account. The evidence does not permit that story to stand.

I encountered the power of that conditioning during a conversation with a cousin who grew up with me in Akko. He was defending the expansion of Israeli control over the land as just.

“They attacked us in 1948,” he said. “We had to defend ourselves. During the fighting we pushed them away for our safety, and Akko became ours. We defended ourselves.”

“But we conquered Akko,” I said.

“No, we did not conquer it.”

I told him that the fact was written in stone on a memorial in Akko, not far from where he lived. He insisted that could not be true. So I sent him a photograph of the memorial.

The Hebrew inscription honors the fallen of the War of Liberation, the fighters of the Western Galilee, and כובשי עכו, “the conquerors of Akko.” The official memorial itself uses the word “conquerors.” [23]

Memorial in Akko honoring the fighters of the Western Galilee and כובשי עכו, “the conquerors of Akko.”

He continued to argue.

This was not a lack of evidence. The evidence was carved into a public monument a short distance from his home. But the word “conquered” could not enter his understanding because it collided with the Israeli national story that Jewish forces had only defended themselves and that Akko had simply become ours.

The same state could honor “the conquerors of Akko” while teaching its citizens to hear only “the liberators of Akko.” That is the power of a national narrative: it can make a person reject the literal words carved into his own memorial.

For many years, Israel was remarkably successful in presenting its understanding of the conflict internationally, particularly in the United States. Political and public discussion often emphasized Israel as a democracy defending itself against aggression. Occupation, settlement expansion, unequal systems of rights, and the daily reality experienced by millions of Palestinians received far less attention.

The same narrative was reinforced outside the schools through official government messaging, political advocacy, lobbying organizations, familiar media framing, religious claims, and the repeated suggestion that forceful criticism of Israel revealed hostility toward Jews. Not every journalist, teacher, politician, rabbi, or Jewish organization participated in this in the same way. But together these institutions created enormous pressure to remain within the accepted boundaries of the story.

Social pressure enforced those boundaries even when no formal censorship existed. People who spoke openly could be shunned by friends or relatives, excluded from communal or professional spaces, denied invitations or institutional support, described as traitors or self-hating Jews, or accused of antisemitism. The fear of losing relationships, belonging, reputation, employment, or opportunity taught many people to remain silent. Others learned to soften what they said until the truth no longer sounded like the truth.

Genuine antisemitism is real, dangerous, and must be confronted. But when the accusation is used against people for documenting Palestinian dispossession, criticizing occupation, or questioning a political system built around ethnic and religious privilege, the word becomes a weapon against truth. It protects Israel from accountability while weakening the meaning of antisemitism when actual hatred of Jews occurs.

But the information environment has changed. Smartphones, social media, independent journalism, human-rights documentation, Israeli and Palestinian voices, and the extraordinary visibility of Gaza and the West Bank have made it increasingly difficult for any government or national narrative to determine what the outside world sees.

The Strategy Depends on Forgetting

There is a strategy hidden inside the story Israel tells about itself. Israel presents each new use of overwhelming force as an isolated act of self-defense, beginning the clock at the moment Israelis are attacked and refusing to show what preceded it. The attack against Israelis becomes the whole history. Occupation, blockade, settlement expansion, dispossession, earlier bombardment, and the denial of return are pushed outside the frame. Israel appears only as the victim, even while it possesses the army, controls the borders, destroys the homes, displaces the population, and determines who may return. [7] [9] [10]

The manipulation does not require inventing every Israeli injury. The October 7 attacks against Israeli civilians were real crimes. Hezbollah attacks on Israeli communities were real, and Israeli civilians had a right to safety. The distortion begins when those crimes are used to erase everything that came before them and to make Palestinian or Lebanese civilians collectively responsible. A real wound is turned into a permanent moral license: strike, empty, demolish, hold the land, prevent return, and then describe the result as an unavoidable defensive response.

The sequence is painfully familiar. First, insist that Israel had no choice. Second, widen the definition of security until almost any destruction can fit inside it. Third, remove or confine the people. Fourth, transform the emptied landscape into military space, settlements, parks, roads, housing, or new development. Finally, control the memory. Teach the next generation about the danger Israel faced, but not about the homes that were emptied, the population that was prevented from returning, or the new society built inside the ruins. [27] [28] [29]

Manshiyya, the northern Jaffa neighborhood shown below, makes that process visible. Israeli photographer Rudi Weissenstein recorded the ruins at the end of 1948. Research by Israeli architectural historian Or Aleksandrowicz of the Technion concludes that the large-scale demolitions were not simply an unavoidable result of battle. Wartime confusion and claims of urgent security were used to advance a planned and legally questionable modernization project. Much of the erased neighborhood was later absorbed into Tel Aviv’s roads, offices, parking areas, beachfront development, and Charles Clore Park. The rubble disappeared beneath a new landscape, and the Palestinian neighborhood disappeared from ordinary public memory. [35] [36]

The photograph from Jabalia in January 2025 is separated from Manshiyya by seventy-seven years, but the visual resemblance is impossible to dismiss. Entire neighborhoods have again been reduced to rubble. Families have again been displaced. The language is again security and necessity. Meanwhile, territorial lines, military corridors, buffer zones, and prohibited areas determine where Palestinians may live and whether they can return. The events are not identical, and history never repeats mechanically. But the governing logic is recognizably similar: destroy the physical world of a population, compress or remove that population, control the land, and insist that the aggressor is only defending itself. [9] [10] [37]

I see the same danger in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah’s attacks do not make Lebanese villages expendable. Yet extensive destruction of homes, infrastructure, and agricultural land has again been explained through security and the need to create distance from Israel’s border. A temporary security zone can become a prolonged military fact. A prolonged military fact can become a new boundary. When the original residents are absent long enough, political language begins to treat their absence as normal. [11] [12]

I have come to understand how important forgetting is. Once enough time passes, land taken by force can start to look as if it simply belongs to whoever has it now. A destroyed village becomes open land. Refugees become a 'refugee problem.' A Palestinian neighborhood becomes a park, a highway, a museum, or an expensive address. Eventually a child growing up there has no idea what was there before. I was that child.

But the machinery of forgetting no longer works as it once did. In 1948, photographs could be archived, testimony marginalized, Palestinian place names removed, and the official story repeated for decades before most outsiders encountered the evidence. Today the destruction is recorded by satellites, journalists, aid agencies, smartphones, survivors, and sometimes by Israeli soldiers themselves. Images cross the world before the dust settles. Governments may dispute the meaning, restrict access, attack the messenger, or flood the public sphere with competing claims, but they cannot make the ruins invisible.

The evidence is no longer hard to find. What is hard is allowing it to change what we believe. Jaffa taught me what can happen when destruction is followed by silence and rebuilding. Gaza is happening in front of us. In southern Lebanon, I hear the same language of temporary security that can become permanent reality. I do not think this record can disappear the way so much of 1948 disappeared from the story I was taught.

When the Other Side Stops Being Human

There is another part of this that became especially disturbing to me during my most recent visit to Israel. Contempt toward Arabs is not new to me. I grew up with it. But this time, it felt different in its intensity and in how openly it was expressed. Attitudes that had always existed seemed more extreme, more casual, and more widespread. The dehumanization of Arabs seemed to have moved closer to the surface.

The language was part of my childhood too. I remember hearing expressions such as “stinking Arab,” “they breed like rabbits,” “you cannot trust them,” and “they only understand force.” This was not language confined to extremists. It was common language among regular Israelis around me.

As a child, I did not hear this and identify it as prejudice. Adults repeated it casually, so it became part of how the world supposedly worked. I learned who “we” were and, just as importantly, who “they” were.

I remember guard dogs behind fences or on chains at some workshops and auto body shops. Certain dogs that seemed calm when Jewish people passed would erupt when Arabs approached. As a boy I wondered: How does the dog know who is Arab?

A dog knows nothing about Jews or Arabs, religion, history, borders, or 1948. Whatever association it learned came from the human environment around it. Children learn from their environment too. We watch adults, hear their words, and notice whom they welcome and whom they fear. Eventually those lessons can sink so far below conscious thought that they feel instinctive.

There is an important contradiction in my own childhood memories. Some of my warmest memories of growing up in Akko are of the Arab residents of the Old City. As a boy, I wandered its narrow alleys, market, and fishing piers, often by myself. Among Arab Muslims and Christians, I remember feeling safe and welcomed.

People greeted me warmly with ya ayuni, “my eyes,” an expression of affection, or habibi, “my dear.” I heard sabah al-kheir, “good morning,” and keef halak?, “how are you?” I especially remember the bakeries, with their enticing displays of breads, pastries, and sweets. I had no money and was not asking for anything, yet I was often invited to taste something simply because I was a child passing by.

At the harbor, fishermen let me linger beside them and taught me some of their fishing tricks, including how to make good bait. Shopkeepers welcomed me. People stopped to talk to me. I was not seeking their generosity or kindness; it was simply offered.

They treated this wandering Jewish boy as someone who belonged there.

At a time when other parts of my childhood often felt hostile or unsafe, the Arab quarter was one of the places where I could simply wander and feel at ease.

Looking at these photographs, I understand more clearly why I loved being inside Old Akko. The beauty was not only in the stone alleys, arches, market, harbor, and sea. It was the only place I knew where Palestinians seemed to inhabit a space that was still recognizably their own. Arabic filled the market. Palestinian families worked, shopped, cooked, prayed, fished, greeted one another, and welcomed me into a living world that had not been completely remade around a Jewish national story. As a child, I did not yet understand that this was only a surviving fragment of a much larger Palestinian city and country. I simply felt that, inside those walls, I was entering their space rather than seeing them as tolerated outsiders in mine. That may be why I felt both the difference and the belonging so strongly, and why Old Akko remained one of the places I loved most.

Later, when my own children were growing up and our visits to Israel were frequent, I wanted them to experience some of what I had experienced as a boy. We spent time in the Old City of Akko and visited Arab villages, not as a political lesson, but because I wanted them to see what I saw: ordinary people, families, markets, food, hospitality, humor, generosity, and a culture that was very much part of the country in which I had grown up.

That ordinary human life was largely absent from the American and Israeli news coverage I encountered and from much of the Israeli school curriculum and national narrative I grew up with. Arabs were too often presented to us as backward, hostile, or terrorists rather than as neighbors living ordinary lives. [18]

I wanted my children to know Arabs as people rather than as a category or an enemy. I wanted them to respect a way of life different from their own and to see “different” not as something to fear or look down upon, but as something beautiful. Those experiences stayed with them into adulthood.

One experience with Patty and one of our daughters has stayed especially vivid. We were walking through Old Jaffa when I became almost mesmerized by the mixture around us: the Italian Embassy, people speaking French, Orthodox Jews, tourists, market visitors, shopkeepers, and vendors. Then the Muslim call to prayer floated from a minaret across this extraordinary gathering of languages, religions, clothing, cultures, and histories.

I stopped and took a video because the moment struck me as beautiful. Nothing dramatic was happening. That was precisely the beauty of it. People who were different in almost every imaginable way were simply living alongside one another.

Later I showed the video to my sister. Her six-year-old grandson was watching. When he heard the Arabic call to prayer and saw how captivated we were, he looked at his grandmother in genuine surprise: “Grandma, what? They like Arabs? Look what they like. Why?”

At six years old, he had already learned that liking something Arab required an explanation. Before he could understand occupation, terrorism, Zionism, Palestinians, or history, he had absorbed the division between “us” and “them.” The moment in Jaffa showed me how naturally different people can inhabit the same space. His question showed me how early a child can be taught that they should not.

Sometimes seeing another person as human begins simply by spending enough time together to discover that the story you were given about them is not the person standing in front of you.

Those memories have never left me. Perhaps that is one reason the dehumanization I hear today troubles me so much. The people being reduced to “Arabs,” “terrorists,” or enemies are not an abstraction to me. I can still see their faces, hear those affectionate greetings, smell the bread, spices, and sea air of the market, and remember the fishermen patiently showing a Jewish boy how to make better bait.

I heard variations of “they are all terrorists,” “kill them all,” “wipe them out,” and insulting references to “stinking Arabs,” as if an entire people could be reduced to something less worthy of concern. What disturbed me was not only the words themselves, but how ordinary they could sound. They were not always spoken in rage during a political argument. Sometimes the contempt seemed almost automatic, as though the humanity of the people being discussed had simply disappeared.

One moment during my visit has stayed with me. A young relative was watching a news report about a car accident in which two Arab Israelis had been killed. His immediate reaction was: “Good, they are not Jews.”

My mind immediately went to Patty, the love of my life, who is not Jewish. Would he feel the same way if Patty had been in that car? Would her death somehow matter less because she was not a Jew?

His reaction revealed what the environment around him had taught him. A child does not naturally decide that one human life matters more than another because that person is Jewish. He learned that distinction, and what he said matched what I was hearing from the adults around him.

This kind of dehumanization may be one of the deepest obstacles Israel eventually has to confront. Governments can change. Policies can change. Settlements can be removed. Borders can theoretically be negotiated. But none of those things, by themselves, erase generations of fear, hatred, separation, superiority, and the habit of seeing another people as less human.

Palestinians have accumulated generations of fear, grief, anger, and trauma as well, and I do not imagine those feelings will simply disappear. But my responsibility in this essay is first to examine the society I came from and the beliefs and attitudes I grew up around.

A political agreement, if one ever comes, will not be enough. Israelis and Palestinians will somehow have to learn to see each other again as individual human beings rather than simply as categories: Jew, Arab, terrorist, occupier, enemy.

Because once we stop seeing the person on the other side as fully human, almost anything can eventually be justified.

When I entered the military, one lesson drilled into us was that empathy could be a weakness. I understood the military logic: a soldier who hesitates at the wrong moment can get himself or others killed. We were trained to react, follow orders, control fear, and suppress emotions that might interfere with what had to be done.

Later, as an officer, I participated in passing that hardness on. Only much later did I begin asking what happens when the ability to suppress empathy, perhaps useful in the seconds when a soldier’s life is in danger, follows you beyond those seconds and becomes a way of seeing an entire population.

A soldier may sometimes need to suppress empathy to survive a moment. A society cannot suppress empathy indefinitely without changing what it becomes.

The Arabs I had known as a boy kept interfering with the category of enemy. I could still smell the bakeries and sea air, hear ya ayuni and habibi, and remember fishermen patiently helping a Jewish boy. The human beings stored in my memory never completely matched the category I had been taught to fear.

Looking back, I sometimes think of my changing views less as acquiring a new political ideology than as unlearning a reflex. The instincts needed to confront an armed enemy become dangerous when transferred to an entire people. In some ways, I am still doing that work.

Years later, outside Israel, I occasionally encountered the same mechanism from the opposite direction. People who carried stereotypes about Jews sometimes told me after knowing me, “You’re Jewish, but you’re different.” I was not different. Their category was wrong. An actual human being had entered a space previously occupied by a stereotype.

10. If I Were Neither Jewish Nor Israeli

When survival becomes our primary lens, it can distort what we are willing to see. Fear can cloud the very moral values we believe we are protecting. The words our survival, our people, our homeland, and never again carry enormous emotional power for Jews, particularly for children of Holocaust survivors.

I understand that instinct because it exists in me too.

But moral principles mean very little if they apply only when our own survival, identity, land, or interests are not threatened.

It is easy to believe in justice when justice costs us nothing. The real moral test comes when justice requires us to surrender something we want: land, power, privilege, control, security, or simply the comforting belief that our side has always been right.

This is where self-preservation, and sometimes greed, can overwhelm morality. We can become so determined to preserve ourselves, our state, our demographic majority, and our claim to the land that we fail not only Palestinians, but ourselves and the Jewish moral tradition we claim to represent.

If our biblical and Jewish teachings about justice, compassion, the stranger, and the value of human life apply only when they do not conflict with Jewish interests, then what exactly are those teachings worth?

Being the son of Holocaust survivors makes this conflict inside me even harder.

One lesson I inherited from my parents’ history was that Jews must never again be defenseless. I understand the power of that lesson in my bones. But I inherited another lesson too.

I learned what can happen when human beings are reduced to a category; when their rights become conditional; when displacement becomes acceptable; and when ordinary people learn to look away because another population has been defined as dangerous, inferior, or simply not one of us.

I cannot carry that history and then silence my conscience when another people is dehumanized. The lesson of the Holocaust cannot end with Jewish survival. It must also teach us what happens when another people is reduced to a category, stripped of rights, displaced, and treated as less human.

I am also troubled by our selectivity. We can invoke ancient scripture when it supports a Jewish claim to the land and become considerably less literal when the same religious tradition demands justice, compassion, humility, and concern for the stranger.

There is something morally upside down about sanctifying the land while compromising the values that supposedly made the land sacred in the first place.

I am trying, as best I can, to detach myself from that instinct and from the sense of entitlement that some interpretations of Judaism, Zionism, Jewish persecution, and Israeli history can encourage in us.

Chosen for Responsibility, Not Privilege

I also struggle with the idea of Jews as the “chosen people.” In Israel and among some American Jews, I have seen chosenness interpreted as special status, sometimes carrying the implication that Jewish lives, needs, or claims matter more.

But Jewish tradition teaches nearly the opposite. Chosenness is a covenant of responsibility, not a grant of superiority. The Israelites were called to become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” The prophet Amos warned that being chosen meant being held more accountable for wrongdoing, not less. [64]

This responsibility is reflected in tikkun olam, commonly understood today as repairing the world through justice, compassion, and care for others. Yet the convenient interpretation reverses that meaning. Chosen becomes privileged. Responsibility becomes entitlement. Instead of requiring more from ourselves, it is used to justify demanding more from others.

I sometimes see a quieter version of this in reactions to Patty. She is an extraordinarily kind, charitable, and respectful person. Yet when some Jewish people learn that she is not Jewish, the response is occasionally disappointment: “Oh, she isn’t Jewish? She is going to convert, right?” The implication is that despite the person she already is, she remains somehow incomplete or less worthy.

I hear it in language too. Words such as goy or shiksa are not necessarily insults, but I have heard them spoken with a tone that makes “not Jewish” sound like something lesser. I have heard that tone directed toward Patty simply because she is not Jewish, and it troubles me.

That may seem like a small thing compared with what Palestinians endure, and of course it is. But it has made me think about how easily human beings divide the world into “us” and “them,” and how dangerous that division becomes when reinforced by nationalism, fear, and war. With Palestinians, and particularly Muslims, I have watched that distance become far more severe. Once another people are seen primarily as a threat, rather than as individual human beings, actions that would otherwise be morally unbearable become easier to tolerate.

Dehumanization does not always begin with hatred. Sometimes it begins quietly, with the belief that our people matter more.

If chosenness has moral value, it cannot mean being chosen above Patty, Palestinians, Christians, Muslims, or anyone else. It must mean accepting a greater responsibility toward them. Otherwise, chosenness becomes privilege disguised as faith.

For years, I have encountered the assumption that criticizing Israel means I do not love it. I have come to believe almost the opposite.

Indifference would be much easier. I could simply stop looking. But the stubborn insistence on defending Israel regardless of what it does, even when that requires setting aside one’s own moral principles and the moral teachings of Judaism, has gradually weakened my attachment to it.

Love should allow us to confront wrongdoing. When loyalty requires us to stop questioning, it becomes something other than love.

Israel formed me. Hebrew is my first language. Its landscape is embedded in my childhood. Its history intersects with my family’s history, and people I love still live there. That is precisely why watching what Israel has become capable of doing is painful.

That same moral standard also forces me to examine the character of the state itself.

Israel has important democratic institutions, including competitive elections, political parties, courts, and formal citizenship rights. But democracy means more than elections. It requires equal protection under law, equal political worth, and a genuine ability to influence the authority that governs one’s life. It requires a political system in which ethnicity or religion does not determine whose belonging or rights carry greater weight. [19]

When I consider the different legal and political realities experienced by Jewish citizens, Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Palestinians in the West Bank, and Palestinians in Gaza, I cannot call the overall system democratic in the full moral sense of that word. [19]

I also have to question why the state must belong primarily to one ethnic or religious people.

Remove our emotional attachment to the word Jewish for a moment.

How would we judge an Islamic or Christian state built around maintaining the demographic dominance and political character of one religious or ethnic group while another people living under its authority were expected to accept a secondary place?

Would we call that a liberal democracy?

Even the Israeli flag illustrates the contradiction. A national flag should be a symbol under which every citizen can imagine themselves belonging equally. Israel’s flag contains the Star of David as its central symbol. It represents Jewish identity, not a shared civic identity belonging equally to every citizen.

But I also have to ask what it means to a Palestinian citizen of Israel.

And the question of equality goes far beyond symbols. Palestinian citizens of Israel have the right to vote and hold citizenship, but formal citizenship does not mean that every citizen encounters the state on equal terms. Decades of land-allocation, zoning, and planning policies have sharply restricted the ability of many Arab communities to expand. Palestinian citizens have faced serious obstacles in obtaining building permits, while some predominantly Jewish communities have been permitted to use admissions committees that can restrict who may live there. [21]

The result is that an Arab citizen can possess an Israeli passport and vote in the same election as a Jewish citizen while still confronting very different practical opportunities to acquire land, build a home, or live in particular communities. [21]

The mechanism is not identical to American segregation or redlining, but the moral comparison is useful. In the United States, formal citizenship and constitutional equality coexisted for generations with zoning, lending, housing, and land-use practices that restricted where Black citizens could live and whether their communities could prosper. If we recognize the injustice when those mechanisms operate in American history, we should be willing to recognize a related injustice when land and planning systems produce unequal realities in Israel.

I once encountered that difference between citizenship on paper and equality in life while Patty and I were lost in the ancient Arab quarter of Akko. An Arab Israeli man recognized that we were lost and changed where he was going simply to walk us out of the maze.

As we walked, I asked whether he finally felt like an equal citizen of Israel. He smiled. “No. Not at all.” He spoke about overcrowding, inadequate schools and public services, sanitation, the difficulty of obtaining permission to build, and the barriers Arab families faced in trying to move beyond neighborhoods like his.

He told me that after 1948 his grandparents had told his parents to be patient: “They promised us. Eventually we will be equal.” His parents later told his generation the same thing. Then his own children began asking why another generation should believe equality was coming if they only remained patient.

“How long can we wait?” he asked.

He was not talking about Gaza or the occupied West Bank. He was an Israeli citizen who spoke fluent Hebrew and had lived his life inside the state whose citizenship he carried. Yet after generations of his family being told to wait, he still did not experience that citizenship as equality.

The contradiction stayed with me. Here was a man telling me that his country had kept people like him at a distance for generations. Yet when he saw two Jewish strangers lost in his neighborhood, his first instinct was to help us find our way home.

At some point, “give it time” begins to sound less like a promise and more like an answer designed never to be fulfilled. If we want to understand where anger, rejection, and extremism come from, we should pay attention to how long people have been asked to wait before condemning them for losing patience.

How can we tell that citizen, “You are completely equal here; this country belongs to you exactly as much as it belongs to me,” while the flag, national anthem, immigration laws, and fundamental identity of the state explicitly celebrate my Jewish identity rather than our shared citizenship? [20]

Jewish history, culture, identity, and connection to the land can continue without determining whose rights, belonging, freedom, home, or humanity count more.

That principle must be equally true for Jews and Palestinians.

And if I have to abandon that principle in order to preserve a Jewish state as we currently define it, then I have to ask myself whether it is the principle or the state that needs to change.

Conclusion

Permanent military domination cannot be the answer. Displacement without remedy cannot be the answer. Attacks on civilians cannot be the answer. Unequal political and legal rights cannot be the answer. And the security and freedom of one people cannot permanently depend on controlling, displacing, or denying the freedom of another.

My mother’s story taught me why: security built by making another people permanently insecure cannot produce lasting safety.

Any just future must protect civilians on both sides; provide equal human and political dignity; address Palestinian displacement through return, restitution, compensation, or genuinely agreed alternatives; and allow both Jews and Palestinians to live securely without requiring either people to surrender its identity, history, or humanity.

That brings me back to where I started.

If I were not Jewish or Israeli, and none of this belonged to my own family history, what would I call fair?

Jews deserve safety, memory, dignity, freedom, and belonging.

Palestinians deserve exactly the same.

If preserving any political system requires me to believe otherwise, then it is not the moral principle that needs to change. It is the system.

The challenge is not to decide whose humanity matters more. It is to build a future in which neither people must deny the other’s humanity, freedom, dignity, safety, or belonging in order to live securely.

About the Author

Morty Bachar and Patty Storms in Lewes, Delaware.

Morty Bachar has lived in the United States for many years and now lives in Lewes, Delaware, with his partner, Patty Storms. Before devoting himself to art, he built a career in engineering and technology management, holding senior positions working with early applications of artificial intelligence, RF ID, face and voice recognition, telecommunications, and consumer technology.

Morty and Patty own and run Lakeside Pottery Studio, which they founded in Stamford, Connecticut, and later relocated to Delaware. What began as a ceramic art and teaching studio grew into a nationally recognized center for ceramic and sculpture restoration, custom pottery, and Kintsugi. Its educational programs recorded more than 15,000 class and workshop enrollments, and its extensive online library of pottery, restoration, and Kintsugi lessons is used by artists, educators, students, and craftspeople around the world.

Patty is a lifelong artist from Maine, a painter, ceramic artist, instructor, and master ceramic-restoration painter. She works in oil, watercolor, pencil, pen and ink, and ceramics; creates commissioned art; and has exhibited and sold her work through galleries and exhibitions. As co-founder and co-owner of Lakeside Pottery, she has taught children and adults and helped shape the studio’s creative and educational mission.

Morty’s Kintsugi work was selected twice as an official White House gift for Japanese prime ministers, in 2021 and 2024. Lakeside Pottery also received the Better Business Bureau of Delaware’s 2019 Torch Award for Marketplace Ethics.

Morty continues to work as a ceramic artist, educator, and writer. Whether restoring damaged three-dimensional art or examining difficult history, he is guided by the belief that repair begins with seeing clearly what has been broken.

Appendix A: Israel’s Archival Record of the 1948 Palestinian Exodus

This appendix preserves the detailed historical and archival discussion supporting the main narrative. It is separated from the personal stories so readers can examine the underlying record without interrupting their flow.

Jaffa, Ajami, Akko, and the Transfer of Property

The historical record establishes what surrounded my mother’s encounter. Jaffa surrendered to the Haganah on May 13, 1948, one day before Israel declared independence and several months before the main Bulgarian immigration wave. Of the city’s close to 100,000 Palestinian residents, fewer than 4,000 remained. Israeli authorities concentrated those who remained in Ajami, which was enclosed by barbed wire and controlled through military rule and curfews. The homes, apartments, shops, furnishings, and land of Palestinians who had fled or been expelled were taken into state control and redistributed. Authorities then directed tens of thousands of new Jewish immigrants into Jaffa, sometimes dividing large confiscated Palestinian houses among several families. [24] Ajami was not a UN refugee camp, but a Palestinian neighborhood turned into a fenced and controlled enclave. Jaffa’s direct military rule was lifted in 1949, but Israel’s broader military government over Palestinian citizens continued until 1966. The end of the fence and formal military government did not restore the homes, property, or equal freedom that had been taken.

The few thousand Palestinians who remained in Jaffa were not allowed to resume ordinary life in their own city. Families were removed from neighborhoods across Jaffa and concentrated in Ajami behind barbed wire, under armed military rule, permits, and curfews. Many lived in crowding, insecurity, and poverty while Palestinian apartments, shops, furniture, land, and household belongings outside the enclosure were taken into state control and assigned to Jewish newcomers. The wire did more than restrict movement. It forced the dispossessed to remain close enough to see the city taken from them. [24]

Look first at the man seated behind the strands of barbed wire. We cannot know his private thoughts, but we can understand the reality forced upon him. He was confined in the city to which he belonged while European Jewish refugees moved freely through streets from which Palestinian families had been removed. Somewhere beyond that wire may have stood his home, a relative’s home, a shop, a workplace, or the rooms of neighbors now occupied by newcomers. To be dispossessed is one pain. To remain nearby, fenced in, and watch other people prosper inside the life taken from you is another. It can produce grief, humiliation, helplessness, and rage. The photograph of my mother and Bella in 1951 makes that contradiction painfully intimate. They are young, well dressed, and walking freely and joyfully through Jaffa, only a short distance from Palestinians confined in Ajami. Their freedom was not abstract: my mother’s family was living in a confiscated Palestinian apartment, and her father had taken possession of confiscated Palestinian stores. I cannot say that the man in the photograph owned their particular apartment or shops. But he represents the people whose homes, storefronts, streets, and city were taken and transferred to families like mine. My mother was generous, helpful, and self-sacrificing. The point is not that she was cruel. The point is more disturbing: decent people can benefit from theft and land seizure when the people who paid the price have been placed behind a fence and outside the national story. One photograph shows the freedom created for Jewish refugees; the other shows the freedom taken from Palestinians to provide it. This is not history sealed in 1948. The same logic continues wherever Palestinian land is seized, Palestinian movement is restricted, Palestinian homes are taken or demolished, and a new Israeli reality is built in their place.

What happened after the wire is part of the same story. Once direct military rule over Jaffa ended, Palestinians were not simply restored to the city that had been taken from them. Many remained concentrated in Ajami and nearby Jaffa neighborhoods, often as protected tenants in property now controlled by the state rather than as secure owners of the homes in which they lived. Families grew, but adequate housing, infrastructure, public investment, and legal room to expand did not keep pace. Additions needed approval from state property managers and municipal planning authorities; when residents enlarged crowded homes without those approvals, the same additions could become grounds for demolition or eviction. In 2007, a government housing-company document listed 497 eviction and demolition orders issued in eighteen months in Ajami and Jabaliya, many involving alleged squatting or additions made without approval and building permits. [24]

Then the pressure acquired a profitable form. Ajami occupies beautiful Mediterranean land. After decades of neglect had helped produce poverty and deterioration, state land and housing bodies auctioned or sold properties, municipal development drew investors, and coastal real-estate prices rose beyond the reach of many Palestinian residents. Expensive homes and luxury projects received the planning path and capital that local families had long struggled to obtain for ordinary additions or housing for their children. Some residents, exhausted by debt, insecurity, legal disputes, overcrowding, and the rising cost of remaining, sold and left. A sale made under that pressure can be recorded as voluntary while still belonging to a larger structure of displacement. This is the creeping method: restrict the space in which a community can live, make normal growth difficult, allow deprivation to deepen, then open the same land to wealthier developers and buyers. Palestinian residents are left watching costly new homes rise beside neighborhoods whose deterioration was treated for years as inevitable. The barbed wire disappeared, but the struggle over who is permitted to remain, build, inherit, and belong did not. [24]

This directly contradicts the comforting story I learned as a child: that the Palestinians simply left of their own free will and thereby abandoned their property. Whatever mixture of fear, battlefield flight, expulsion, collapse, and individual decision operated in different places, Jaffa itself disproves that blanket claim. Many were driven out. Those who remained were concentrated under armed rule. The property of both groups was taken under state control and transferred for Jewish use. A voluntary departure does not require barbed wire for those who refuse to leave, nor confiscation that prevents the displaced from coming home.

The timing is equally revealing. A contemporary Jewish Telegraphic Agency report dated December 19, 1948, recorded 3,000 immigrants arriving in Israel in a single movement, more than 2,500 of them from Bulgaria. That shipment was part of the migration in which approximately 45,000 of Bulgaria’s roughly 50,000 Jews came to Israel and Jaffa became the center of their new community. My mother’s family was not stumbling into an accidental vacancy. It was entering a documented system that transformed Palestinian dispossession into housing for Jewish refugees. [25]

Jaffa and Akko were not isolated accidents. The same larger sequence, with local differences in timing and force, reshaped Haifa, Tiberias, Safad, Beisan, Lydda, Ramle, Palestinian neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, and hundreds of villages: military conquest or intimidation; mass flight and expulsion; refusal of return; state seizure of homes, land, shops, and belongings; destruction or repopulation; and the settlement of Jewish citizens and immigrants in the emptied space. More than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed or depopulated during the 1948 war. [27][28]

This was not merely thousands of unrelated families making the same spontaneous choice to abandon everything at the same moment. Plan Dalet, finalized by the Haganah in March 1948 before statehood, authorized operations against Arab population centers, including the destruction of villages that could not be continuously controlled and the expulsion beyond the state’s borders of populations where resistance occurred. Historians dispute whether it constituted one blanket order to expel every Palestinian, but its written provisions supplied a premeditated military framework within which depopulation, expulsion, destruction, and territorial consolidation could occur across the country. [27]

The policy after the flight and expulsions removes any remaining doubt about the desired result. On June 16, 1948, while ministers debated whether refugees should return, Ben-Gurion stated, “We must settle Jaffa; Jaffa will become a Jewish city,” and argued that Arab return should be prevented. The new government then converted wartime absence into a durable transfer of population and property. The “big plan” was not only what happened during battle. It was the combined system: create or exploit the emptying, prevent return, take control of the property, settle Jews in it, and erase the Palestinian presence from the national story. [29]

What Israeli Intelligence Reported in June 1948

There is an extraordinary contemporary Israeli document that helps answer one of the most disputed questions about 1948: Why did so many Palestinians leave their homes?

On June 30, 1948, the Intelligence Service, Arab Section, prepared a report titled Migration of Eretz Yisrael [Palestine] Arabs Between December 1, 1947 and June 1, 1948. This was not a Palestinian account written decades later, nor an accusation by Israel’s enemies. It was an internal Israeli intelligence assessment produced while the displacement was still taking place. [41]

The report estimated that by June 1, 1948, approximately 391,000 Palestinian Arabs had already been displaced from their places of residence, while acknowledging a possible margin of error of 10 to 15 percent. Within the borders of the proposed Jewish state, it reported that approximately 180 of 219 Arab villages were already empty. It estimated that 82 percent of Arab rural localities had been abandoned, 80 percent of the rural Arab population had left, and 94 percent of the urban Arab population had left. It calculated that 239,000 Arabs had left the territory it identified as the State of Israel, while another 152,000 had been displaced from their places of residence outside it, including Jerusalem. [41]

The report ranked the major causes of displacement. First was direct Jewish military action against Arab communities. Second was the effect of Jewish attacks on neighboring communities, particularly after the fall of major towns and population centers. Third were operations by the Irgun and Lehi. Only fourth came orders and directives from Arab institutions and armed groups. It also identified Jewish psychological-warfare operations intended to induce flight, evacuation ultimatums, fear of retaliation, the presence of armed groups and foreign fighters, fear of an Arab invasion, isolation of Arab villages within Jewish areas, and general fear and local circumstances. [41]

The report estimated that at least 55 percent of the overall displacement resulted from Haganah operations and the effect those operations had on surrounding communities. It attributed another approximately 15 percent to Irgun and Lehi operations and their effects. Its conclusion was unusually direct: approximately 70 percent of the Palestinian displacement it examined resulted from Jewish military actions and their consequences. By comparison, it estimated that orders and directives from Arab institutions and armed groups accounted for only about 5 percent of the villages evacuated. [41]

Original Hebrew page 5 of the Israeli Intelligence Service report, June 30, 1948. It states: “Without a doubt, hostilities were the main factor in the population movement,” and concludes that Jewish military action by the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi was decisive, with approximately 70 percent leaving their communities as a result. Full English translation and archival link appear in source [41].

The report went further. It stated that in the early stages of the exodus, Arab institutions actually attempted to prevent people from leaving. The Arab Higher Committee tried to restrain the flight through restrictions, penalties, threats, press and radio propaganda, and efforts to keep military-age men from leaving. Those efforts eventually collapsed as the mass exodus accelerated. [41]

The Israeli intelligence officers also understood that a village did not have to be physically expelled at gunpoint for military action to cause its population to flee. They described the enormous psychological effect created when larger Palestinian centers fell. The report specifically identified the fall of Tiberias, Safed, Samakh, Jaffa, Haifa, and Acre as producing large waves of further displacement. It noted that attacks on one community could empty neighboring communities as well. The report also described the effectiveness of surprise, prolonged shelling with extremely loud explosions, Arabic-language loudspeakers, organized “whispering” campaigns, and evacuation ultimatums. [41]

Deir Yassin had a particularly powerful effect. The report stated that the attack had a particular impact on the Arab population’s psychology and described some subsequent departures as panic flight. It estimated that Irgun and Lehi actions had about a 15 percent direct impact on the overall intensity of the migration and described their effect on the evacuation of Jaffa and its surrounding rural area as decisive and critical. [41]

Perhaps most revealing is what happened when some Palestinians tried to go home. The report explained that villagers often initially fled only a short distance. When Jewish forces did not permanently occupy an evacuated village, some residents attempted to return. The intelligence officers acknowledged that this sometimes forced Israeli forces, in the report’s own words, to engage “on more than one occasion, in expelling residents” who had returned. [41]

None of this means that every Palestinian was expelled at gunpoint or that every village experienced exactly the same circumstances. The report itself describes a mixture of direct military attack, fear created by attacks elsewhere, Irgun and Lehi operations, psychological warfare, evacuation ultimatums, localized Arab evacuation orders, general fear, and other local circumstances. Nor does this document alone settle the historical debate over whether there was a single centralized plan to expel the Palestinian population.

What Newly Revealed Records Added in 2026

In March 2024, Ronit Zilberman found boxes containing thousands of documents beside a dumpster in Tel Aviv. The collection had belonged to Rafi Kotzer, one of the first fighters in the Golani Brigade and a founder of the 12th Battalion’s commando unit. She brought the material to the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. The collection included wartime orders, operational records, maps, photographs, and other material, some of it previously unpublished. Akevot’s work also coincided with the declassification of thousands of pages of 1948 military-court records, creating a documentary record that could be compared with the newly recovered papers. [42][43]

One of the most disturbing documents is a July 1948 order written by Yitzhak Broshi, commander of Golani’s 12th Battalion, titled “Conduct in captured villages where there is a population.” According to the document, residents of captured villages were to receive identification certificates. Transferring a certificate to another person could bring a death sentence. Failure to appear for military inspection could result in the person being shot and the person’s house being blown up. An Arab from outside the village who was found there was to be shot, and the order prescribed shooting every tenth man in a captured village where outsiders were discovered. It also ordered the execution of the men of a household in which property stolen from Jews was found. These were not recollections recorded decades later. They were written wartime directives bearing the commander’s signature. [42]

This document provides one concrete example of why Palestinians could flee even when no soldier physically forced every family from its home. When residents of a captured village lived under written military orders in which failing to report for inspection could mean being shot and having a house blown up, outsiders could be shot, and collective punishments could include executions, leaving could become an act of survival. People did not need to be marched from every village at gunpoint to be driven out. Fear for their lives and the lives of their families could accomplish the same result. This is why the distinction between “fled” and “expelled” can sometimes conceal more than it explains: flight under a credible threat of death is not simply a voluntary decision to abandon one’s home. [42]

Another Broshi order concerned Arab a-Zabah, a Bedouin community in the Lower Galilee. The directive was that no person or trace of the community was to remain and stated that every Arab among the Zabahim was to be killed. A separate July order concerning Palestinians hiding around Mount Turan instructed soldiers to kill those found hiding. Another document reported Arabs returning to captured villages, apparently to retrieve possessions and food, and ordered that the area be “cleansed of Arabs”; under the heading describing the method, it instructed that every Arab encountered was to be killed. [42]

The newly available military-court testimony is equally consequential. It emerged from the case of Shmuel Lahis, a Carmeli Brigade company commander tried for killing civilians in Hula, a Lebanese village, on October 31 and November 1, 1948. Akevot’s Case 19/48 reconstructs the case from military-court transcripts, written orders, photographs, unpublished diaries, and other records. Lahis argued that he had acted in accordance with the practices and orders of the war, and senior officers testified at his trial about the methods used elsewhere. [42][43]

One witness was Mordechai Maklef, then an operations officer on the northern front and later the third chief of staff of the IDF. In testimony now published, Maklef told the military court that there had been operations in which civilians were killed and named Safsaf, Jish, Ilaboun, Lod, Ramle, and operations in the south. Speaking about the expulsion of approximately 114,000 Palestinians from the Galilee, he told the court that a population of that size could not be expelled without terror and that an initial element of terror was necessary to make people leave. [42]

Another witness, Carmeli Brigade commander Maxim Cohen, was even more explicit. Asked how a village was expelled, he described deliberately brutal violence against an individual in front of others as a means of frightening the entire population into flight. He testified that villages were not evacuated without such methods and said that Israeli victory depended on the fear these acts created. [42]

The testimony itself is even more direct. During the military trial of Shmuel Lahis following the October-November 1948 killings at Hula, Mordechai Maklef, then an operations officer on the northern front and later the IDF's third chief of staff, testified: “The intention was to expel. It is impossible to expel 114,000 people … without terror.” Haim Ben-David, a Carmeli Brigade operations officer who later became an IDF major general and David Ben-Gurion's military secretary, described what happened when a Palestinian insisted on remaining in his home: “He gets a bullet.” These statements were given by senior Israeli officers in an Israeli military court, not by Palestinian witnesses or Israel's enemies. [42][43]

Taken together, the June 1948 intelligence analysis, the written operational orders, and the officers’ sworn testimony make the central point difficult to evade. They do not show that every Palestinian left in the same way. They do show, in Israeli records, direct military action, killing, expulsion, terror, and fear being used or produced in ways that drove civilians from their communities and discouraged or prevented return. The old blanket explanation that Palestinians simply chose to leave, or mainly obeyed Arab evacuation orders, cannot account for this documentary record. [41][42][43]

The Broader Israeli Archival Record

There is now a larger Israeli archival record through which these documents can be examined rather than treated as isolated discoveries. The Akevot Institute maintains digital collections containing hundreds of original archival documents, and its Military Rule 1948–1966 collection includes internal correspondence, meeting minutes, testimonies, maps, photographs, and reports. Akevot has also published declassified 1948 provisional-government minutes showing that ministers discussed reports of massacres and suspected war crimes while the war was still underway, and it has documented the long-term restriction of public access to archival files concerning the uprooting of Palestinians in 1948. These collections provide additional primary-source material for readers who want to examine the Israeli documentary record directly. [44][45][46]

Two additional Akevot collections deepen this record. The Riftin Report, commissioned by Ben-Gurion in February 1948 and concealed for 73 years, documented internal Haganah investigations into extrajudicial killings, torture during interrogation, looting, and theft of Arab property, together with Riftin’s warning that legal procedures and public oversight were necessary. The Tantura collection presents a narrower case: a plan for Jewish settlement in the still-populated village before its conquest; the expulsion of its residents; contemporary orders and reports concerning unburied bodies and a mass grave; and later soldiers’ testimony alleging executions. The number and circumstances of deaths remain disputed, but the documents establish depopulation, advance settlement planning, the presence of many bodies, and the long silence surrounding what happened. [50][51]

Source Notes

[1] Oslo II, 1995. Article XI describes the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a single territorial unit whose integrity and status were to be preserved during the interim period, and provides for phased transfer of West Bank and Gaza territory to Palestinian jurisdiction except for issues reserved for permanent-status negotiations. Article XVII identifies Jerusalem, settlements, specified military locations, Palestinian refugees, borders and foreign relations among the permanent-status issues. The agreement therefore established interim arrangements rather than transferring Israeli sovereignty over Area C. United Nations text of the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement (Oslo II)

[2] International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion, July 19, 2024. The Court concluded that Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, are being maintained in violation of international law. It found extensive evidence of Israeli incentives for relocation of Israeli civilians and businesses into the occupied territory, settlement infrastructure integrating settlements with Israel, forced displacement of Palestinians, and a systematic failure to prevent or punish settler attacks. ICJ Advisory Opinion, July 19, 2024 and ICJ summary

[3] OCHA on settler violence and displacement. OCHA recorded about 1,420 incidents of Israeli settler violence in 2024 involving casualties and/or damage to Palestinian property. It also reported that intimidation and attacks on Palestinian Bedouin communities displaced more than 300 families comprising 1,762 people, including 856 children. OCHA, Humanitarian Situation Update #252, West Bank

[4] Population of Palestine and the demographic setting of Zionism. A documentary history by Eran Kaplan and Derek J. Penslar reports that in 1880 there were roughly 450,000 Arabs and 25,000 Jews in the area corresponding to present-day Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Official Mandatory-era statistics likewise show a large non-Jewish majority: in the 1922 census, Palestine had 589,177 Muslims, 71,464 Christians and 83,790 Jews. By the end of 1946, UNSCOP estimated 1,203,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews. These figures support the essay’s demographic description without implying that Jews lacked longstanding historical communities in the land. Kaplan & Penslar, *The Origins of Israel, 1882–1948: A Documentary History*, JSTOR; League of Nations/Mandate population statistics; UNSCOP 1947 population data

[5] Palestinian displacement in 1948. A 1949 UN Economic Survey Mission estimated approximately 726,000 refugees as people who had fled from territory held by Israel and were unable to return; its broader relief figure was higher when additional categories were included. The source establishes the mass scale of displacement and inability to return, while the essay appropriately leaves the causes of individual departures open to historical debate. UN Economic Survey Mission, First Interim Report (“Clapp Report”). General Assembly Resolution 194 subsequently stated that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date and addressed compensation. UN Conciliation Commission summary of Resolution 194

[6] Ben-Gurion and population transfer. The historical debate over Zionist transfer proposals is substantial, and the wording of one often-quoted sentence in Ben-Gurion’s October 5, 1937 letter to his son has a disputed textual history. The Journal of Palestine Studies published the letter and discusses the controversy in the context of the broader scholarly debate, citing historians including Benny Morris and Ben-Gurion biographer Shabtai Teveth. This source supports the essay’s deliberately cautious formulation that transfer was contemplated and that the argument does not depend on one disputed quotation. Journal of Palestine Studies / Institute for Palestine Studies, “JPS Responds to CAMERA's Call for Accuracy: Ben-Gurion and the Arab Transfer” Additional Israeli and academic foundation: Benny Morris, an Israeli historian at Ben-Gurion University, traces pre-1948 transfer thinking, wartime displacement, and the subsequent policy blocking return through Israeli archival records in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. The Ben-Gurion Archive provides the leader’s original diaries and papers. Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press; Ben-Gurion Archive

[7] Partition, Palestinian Arab rejection and the 1948 war. Contemporary UN records state that the Jewish Agency accepted the 1947 partition plan while the Arab Higher Committee rejected any solution based on partition. UN historical records also document that fighting between Palestinian Arab and Jewish forces intensified before the end of the British Mandate and that armed forces from Arab countries entered after Israel proclaimed statehood in May 1948. UN Yearbook 1947–48; UN record on the status of Jerusalem and the 1948 war

[8] October 7, 2023 attacks. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry investigated attacks on civilian targets in Israel on October 7, including killings, hostage-taking, and rocket and mortar attacks, and documented serious violations committed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, detailed findings on attacks carried out on and after October 7, 2023

[9] Gaza housing destruction. The final Gaza Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment released in April 2026 by the United Nations and European Union, jointly conducted with the World Bank, reported approximately 371,888 homes directly affected, equivalent to 76.6 percent of Gaza’s housing units, and estimated physical infrastructure damage at $35.2 billion. Final Gaza Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment and full RDNA report

[10] Gaza Yellow Line and territorial compression. OCHA reported on June 26, 2026 that the Yellow Line spanned about 53 percent of the Gaza Strip, marking roughly where access restrictions were enforced on most Palestinians and confining them in practice to the remaining 47 percent. OCHA, Humanitarian Situation Report, June 26, 2026

[11] Southern Lebanon destruction. Amnesty International’s satellite analysis of 26 municipalities along the Israeli-Lebanese border counted 10,803 structures severely damaged or destroyed between late September 2024 and late January 2025. More than 70 percent of buildings were destroyed in several municipalities. In Kfar Kila, Amnesty found a 300-to-500-meter-wide stretch of buildings and orchards along the border was almost completely razed. Amnesty International, “Israel’s extensive destruction of Southern Lebanon”

[12] Lebanon agricultural losses and recovery needs. FAO, working with Lebanon’s Ministry of Agriculture and CNRS-L, assessed conflict-related agricultural damage and losses from October 2023 through November 2024. It estimated $118 million in damages, $586 million in losses, and $263 million in reconstruction and recovery needs, with southern Lebanon among the areas most affected. FAO, Lebanon Agricultural Damage and Loss Assessment

[13] Itamar Ben Gvir and far-right political power. As of August 2026, Ben Gvir serves as Israel’s National Security Minister and is a far-right member of the governing coalition, with authority and influence over police and prison systems. This supports the essay’s characterization of a figure once outside the mainstream now holding substantial governmental power. Associated Press, August 17, 2026

[14] Haredi demographics. The Israel Democracy Institute’s Statistical Report on Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel 2025, using CBS estimates, reports approximately 1,452,350 Haredim in Israel at the end of 2025, or 14.3 percent of the population, and fertility of about 6.5 children per woman. It projects the Haredi share to continue increasing. Israel Democracy Institute, Statistical Report on Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel 2025

[15] Haredi employment and yeshiva study. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported a 2025 employment rate of 53.8 percent for Haredi men aged 25–64 and 82.3 percent for Haredi women, compared with 82.0 percent for Jewish men overall. The Taub Center reports that among non-employed Haredi men aged 25–44, about 70 percent are yeshiva students. Israel CBS, Labour Force Survey Data, December 2025; Taub Center, *The Israeli Labor Market 2025*

[16] Israeli migration. The Taub Center reports that in 2024 the number leaving Israel exceeded the number entering, including new immigrants, by about 26,000, and projected a negative balance of about 37,000 in 2025. It also notes rising emigration among Israel-born Israelis while cautioning that Israeli emigration rates remain relatively low by international comparison. Taub Center, *Israel 2025: A Demographic Crossroads*

[17] High-tech workers relocating abroad. The Israel Innovation Authority estimated that approximately 8,300 high-tech employees left Israel for a year or more between October 2023 and July 2024, about 2.1 percent of the high-tech workforce. It also reported that the number of high-tech employees in Israel fell by about 5,000 in 2024, the first decline in at least a decade. Israel Innovation Authority, 2025 High-Tech Employment Status Report

[18] Israeli and Palestinian educational narratives. A peer-reviewed comparative study of Israeli and Palestinian schoolbooks found that both sets generally present unilateral national narratives, portray the other side as an enemy, emphasize negative actions by the other, and provide relatively little information about the other side’s religion, culture, economic activity, and daily life. The study also found that explicit dehumanizing and demonizing characterizations were rare, an important qualification. This source supports the essay’s broader point about absence of ordinary Arab life and enemy-centered narratives; the essay’s recollection of Arabs being presented as “backward, hostile, or terrorists” remains explicitly a personal recollection rather than a claim attributed to this study. Adwan, Bar-Tal & Wexler, “Portrayal of the Other in Palestinian and Israeli Schoolbooks,” *Political Psychology* 37(2), 2016

[19] Different democratic and legal realities. Freedom House describes Israel as a parliamentary democracy with competitive multiparty politics and independent institutions, while separately assessing the West Bank and Gaza because political rights and civil liberties differ substantially. Its West Bank report notes that Jewish settlers are Israeli citizens with Israeli voting rights while most Palestinians in the West Bank cannot participate in Israeli national elections; most Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem hold residency rather than citizenship. Freedom House, Israel 2025; Freedom House, West Bank 2025; Freedom House, Gaza Strip 2025

[20] Jewish national identity, state symbols and self-determination. Israel’s 2018 Basic Law states that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people and that exercising national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people. It defines the flag as white with blue stripes and a blue Star of David and identifies Hatikvah as the national anthem. Knesset, full text of Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People

[21] Palestinian citizens of Israel, land, planning and admissions committees. Human Rights Watch has documented longstanding disparities in land allocation, zoning, municipal expansion and housing affecting Palestinian citizens of Israel. It reports that admissions committees in some smaller Jewish communities can effectively exclude Palestinian applicants and describes discriminatory planning policies as sharply restricting access to land and the expansion of many Palestinian communities. The Israeli Planning Administration disputed HRW’s characterization and told HRW it had made substantial efforts to advance planning in Arab communities. Human Rights Watch, “Israel: Discriminatory Land Policies Hem in Palestinians”

[22] Nurit Peled-Elhanan and Israeli schoolbooks. Peled-Elhanan’s 2012 study, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, analyzes selected Israeli Jewish-school history, geography, and civics textbooks through their language, maps, photographs, graphic design, and omissions. She argues that recurring textual and visual choices marginalize Palestinians as ordinary people, frame them largely through restricted or threat-oriented categories, and normalize a predominantly Jewish-Israeli territorial and historical narrative. Her work is a forceful critical intervention rather than a neutral consensus account, and other researchers have reached more mixed conclusions about changes in later Israeli textbooks. Bloomsbury book page; Edinburgh University Press scholarly review; Institute for Palestine Studies discussion

[23] Akko memorial and the conquest of the city. Israel’s official memorial website identifies the monument as commemorating the fighters of the Western Galilee and the conquerors of Akko. It transcribes the Hebrew inscription as “נצח והוד לחללי מלחמת השחרור, לוחמי הגליל המערבי וכובשי עכו. תש״ז-תש״ח.” The Haganah historical site likewise describes the May 1948 assault, bombardment, surrender, and conquest of Akko. Official Israeli memorial page; Haganah historical account of the conquest of Akko

[24] Jaffa’s fall, Palestinian displacement, and the redistribution of property. Adalah reports that fewer than 4,000 of Jaffa’s close to 100,000 Palestinian residents remained after the city fell in May 1948 and were concentrated in Ajami behind barbed wire and under military rule. It further reports that displaced residents’ homes and commercial properties passed into state control, that authorities directed new Jewish immigrants into the city, and that large Palestinian houses were sometimes divided among several immigrant families. Adalah, Modern Displacement of Palestinians in Yaffa Independent Israeli and peer-reviewed support: Israeli scholars Dan Rabinowitz and Daniel Monterescu document Jaffa’s depopulation, the June 1948 prohibition on Palestinian return, and the large-scale placement of Jewish newcomers in Palestinian property. The barbed-wire boundary photograph reproduced in this essay is credited to the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment Archive. Rabinowitz and Monterescu, Cambridge University Press The same Adalah study reports that Palestinian population growth was not matched by adequate housing; that residents faced barriers to permits and approvals for additions; that a 2007 Amidar document listed 497 eviction and demolition orders issued over eighteen months in Ajami and Jabaliya; and that state property sales, the Jaffa Slope development, private investment, and rapidly rising prices intensified the displacement of Palestinian residents from valuable coastal land.

[25] The late-1948 Bulgarian immigration wave. A Jewish Telegraphic Agency report dated December 19, 1948, documented the arrival of 3,000 immigrants, more than 2,500 of them Bulgarian Jews. Guy H. Haskell’s historical study records that approximately 45,000 of Bulgaria’s roughly 50,000 Jews immigrated to Israel and that Jaffa became the principal center of Bulgarian Jewish life. These records establish the timing and scale surrounding the author’s mother’s testimony; the details about her family’s apartment and stores remain her firsthand account. JTA contemporary report; Guy H. Haskell, From Sofia to Jaffa

[26] Akko’s conquest, displacement, and resettlement. The Journal of Palestine Studies dates Akko’s conquest to May 17, 1948. A peer-reviewed study in the International Journal of Middle East Studies reports that roughly 4,000 Palestinians remained and that approximately 3,600 Jewish residents had joined them by mid-1949. The statement that the author’s father’s family was moved into a confiscated Palestinian home is family history supplied by the author. Journal of Palestine Studies, The Fall of Acre in the 1948 Palestine War;International Journal of Middle East Studies, Reconfiguring the Mixed Town The Akko account is also supported by Mustafa Abbasi, an Israeli historian at Tel-Hai Academic College, whose archival research reconstructs the city’s May 1948 conquest, surrender, and population collapse. Rabinowitz and Monterescu place Akko within the peer-reviewed comparative history of Israel’s transformed mixed towns. Mustafa Abbasi, “The Fall of Acre in the 1948 Palestine War”; Cambridge comparative study

[27] Plan Dalet and the wider urban expulsions. The Haganah’s March 1948 Plan Dalet stated that operations against hostile population centers could include “destruction of villages” and, where resistance occurred, destruction of the armed force and expulsion of the population beyond the borders of the state. Its role as a master expulsion plan remains contested among historians; the text nevertheless documents advance authorization for destruction and expulsion under specified conditions. The 1948 offensive captured and depopulated major Palestinian urban centers including Tiberias, Haifa, Safad, Beisan, Jaffa, and Akko.Text of Plan Dalet; Walid Khalidi, “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine” Israeli historian Benny Morris describes Plan Dalet as providing the strategic and doctrinal basis and formal cover for expulsions by commanders, while distinguishing that conclusion from the claim that it was a blanket order to expel every Palestinian. His account is grounded in Haganah and Israeli archival material and published by Cambridge University Press. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited

[28] The broader destruction, depopulation, confiscation, and resettlement pattern. The Institute for Palestine Studies’ reference work All That Remains documents more than 400 Palestinian villages destroyed or depopulated in 1948. Columbia University’s Middle East Institute summarizes the subsequent confiscation of village land and property, the razing of most sites, Jewish settlement in others, and the systematic renaming and remaking of the landscape.Institute for Palestine Studies, All That Remains; Columbia University, “Erased from Space and Consciousness” Benny Morris’s Israeli archival study documents the destruction of abandoned villages, allocation of Arab land to Jewish settlements, establishment of new settlements on abandoned sites, and settlement of Jewish immigrants in empty Arab housing. His earlier Oxford University Press collection also examines the IDF Intelligence Service’s own 1948 analysis of the exodus and the work of the Transfer Committees. Cambridge chapter, “Blocking a Return”; Oxford University Press, 1948 and After

[29] Ben-Gurion and the decision against refugee return. Benny Morris’s archival study of the Israeli cabinet debate records Ben-Gurion’s June 16, 1948 position that Jaffa should be settled as a Jewish city and that Palestinian refugee return should be prevented. The chapter documents how an initially improvised refusal of local returns became a national policy during 1948.Benny Morris, “Deciding against a Return of the Refugees, April-December 1948”

[30] The “land without a people” formulation and its function. Israeli historian Anita Shapira writes in Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (Stanford University Press, 1999) that the phrase was common among Zionists at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries and served to legitimate the Jewish claim while removing uneasiness about a competing claim. Historians disagree about how widely the exact slogan was used and whether “a people” meant inhabitants or a recognized nation. That dispute does not alter the demographic record. See https://books.google.com/books?id=EdhtAAAAMAAJ

[31] Population of Palestine in 1946. The official 1947 Report of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine estimated the end-of-1946 population at 1,203,000 Arabs, 608,000 Jews, and 35,000 others, for a total of 1,846,000. See https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-179435/

[32] Jaffa and its orange economy in photographs. The Library of Congress identifies the 1932 aerial photograph as “Jaffa from the land side showing main roads into town. Orange ships at anchor,” and the 1936 photograph as orange lighters carrying full loads of orange boxes from Jaffa toward a ship. Both are in the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection and carry the rights statement “No known restrictions on publication.” See https://www.loc.gov/item/2019706662/ and https://www.loc.gov/item/2019709020/

[33] Mandate-era currency and administration. The Bank of Israel records that banknotes during the Mandate were issued by the Palestine Currency Board. The illustrated one-pound note is dated 1939 and bears English, Arabic, and Hebrew inscriptions. The photographed Haifa public-works cover likewise bears the official English wording “Government of Palestine,” alongside Arabic and Hebrew. These objects document the Mandate’s official nomenclature; they are not evidence of an independent sovereign state. Bank of Israel, Annual Report 1955, Chapter XIV: https://boi.org.il/boi_files/BankIsraelAnnualReport/Annual%20Report%201955/part%20two/pe_14.pdf

[34] The Nakba in current Israeli Jewish-school teaching materials. R. Weintraub and colleagues, “The Nakba in Israeli history education: Ethical judgments in a divided society,” Theory & Research in Social Education (2025), found explicit mention of the Nakba in 40 percent of the teaching materials examined and documented both critical engagement and forms of minimization or denial. See https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00933104.2024.2396319

[35] Manshiyya’s planned destruction and the use of “security” as justification. Or Aleksandrowicz, an Israeli architectural historian at the Technion, argues that the 1948 demolitions were not simply a consequence of wartime damage. His peer-reviewed study concludes that Tel Aviv’s leadership exploited wartime confusion and misinformation to pursue a large-scale and legally questionable modernization project, while presenting the demolition as an urgent security measure. See “The Camouflage of War: Planned Destruction in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, 1948,” Planning Perspectives 32, no. 2 (2017): https://cris.technion.ac.il/en/publications/the-camouflage-of-war-planned-destruction-in-jaffa-and-tel-aviv-1-2/

[36] Manshiyya photograph and later landscape. The late-1948 photograph is credited to Israeli photographer Rudi Weissenstein and The PhotoHouse, Tel Aviv. The Jewish Museum Hohenems identifies it as “Manschieh, Ende 1948” and describes the municipality’s large-scale demolition operation and planned reconstruction. Haaretz has documented that Charles Clore Park was constructed over the neighborhood’s ruins. See https://www.jm-hohenems.at/en/veranstaltungen/you-cannot-kill-a-city-in-a-single-day-the-destruction-of-manschieh and https://www.haaretz.com/life/2021-12-14/ty-article-magazine/.premium/unearthing-the-palestinian-neighborhood-buried-beneath-a-tel-aviv-park/0000017f-e2e6-d9aa-afff-fbfec8c60000

[37] Jabalia photograph. Reuters identifies the image as a drone view of Palestinians walking past the rubble of houses and buildings in Jabalia, northern Gaza, on January 19, 2025, following the ceasefire. Photograph by Mahmoud Al-Basos. Reuters asset RC20DCANZJIT: https://www.reutersconnect.com/item/a-drone-view-shows-houses-and-buildings-lying-in-ruins-following-a-ceasefire-between-israel-and-hamas-in-the-northern-gaza-strip/dGFnOnJldXRlcnMuY29tLDIwMjU6bmV3c21sX1JDMjBEQ0FOWkpJVA

[38] South Lebanon building destruction through April 2026. A joint UNDP and CNRS-L building-damage assessment reported 11,095 buildings completely destroyed, 2,242 partially damaged, and 9,311 with minor damage, with direct building damage estimated at $1.38 billion. United Nations Development Programme, June 19, 2026

[39] Environmental and agricultural damage in southern Lebanon. Human Rights Watch verified white-phosphorus use in at least 17 municipalities. FAO and Lebanon’s Ministry of Agriculture estimated $118 million in agricultural damage and $586 million in losses. Lebanese testing after the February 2026 aerial spraying reported glyphosate concentrations 20 to 30 times above normal application levels in some samples; the full extent and duration of contamination remained under study. Human Rights Watch; FAO agricultural assessment Official Lebanese government source: Lebanon Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Environment joint statement, February 4, 2026

[40] Bulgaria’s persecution, expulsion, confiscation, and deportation of Jews. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that Bulgarian authorities expelled almost 20,000 Jews from Sofia to the provinces, deployed Jewish men to forced labor, and confiscated much of the property left behind. It also records the deportation of more than 11,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia, Thrace, and Pirot into German custody, after which virtually all were murdered at Treblinka. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Bulgaria,” Holocaust Encyclopedia: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/bulgaria

[41] Israeli intelligence analysis of the Palestinian exodus, June 1948. The Intelligence Service (Arab Section) report, Migration of Eretz Yisrael [Palestine] Arabs Between December 1, 1947 and June 1, 1948, dated June 30, 1948, estimated 391,000 displaced Arabs with a 10–15 percent margin of error. It reported approximately 180 of 219 Arab villages empty within the territory it identified as the State of Israel; 82 percent of Arab rural localities abandoned; 80 percent of the rural Arab population and 94 percent of the urban Arab population having left. The report ranked direct Jewish military actions and their effects as the principal causes, estimated at least 55 percent attributable to Haganah actions and their impact and about 15 percent to Irgun and Lehi, concluding that approximately 70 percent left as a result of Jewish military action. It attributed about 5 percent of evacuated villages to orders or directives from Arab institutions and armed groups, documented psychological-warfare measures and the wider effects of the falls of major Palestinian centers, and acknowledged cases in which returning residents were expelled again. The full translated report, including the detailed community-by-community annex, is published by PalQuest with an introduction by the Akevot Institute. Original Israeli Intelligence Report on the Depopulation of Palestine, 30 June 1948 (PalQuest / Akevot Institute) Primary publication: Akevot Institute — 1948 intelligence report and archival history; Akevot English translation of the original report

[42] Adam Raz, “‘Annihilate Every Arab You See’: What the Israeli Army Did in 1948, Revealed,” Haaretz, February 27, 2026. The investigation reports on the Rafi Kotzer collection found in Tel Aviv in March 2024 and newly declassified 1948 military-court records. It reproduces and discusses written Golani orders and testimony by senior Israeli officers, including Mordechai Maklef and Maxim Cohen. Full English PDF hosted by Akevot Institute: Haaretz investigation / Akevot PDF

[43] Akevot Institute, Case 19/48: Shmuel Lahis and the Hula Massacre, published February 26, 2026. Akevot describes the study as drawing on military-court testimony, written orders, photographs found in the discarded collection, unpublished diaries, and other records concerning the Hula killings and related 1948 events. Akevot Institute — Case 19/48

[44] Akevot Institute, Military Rule 1948–1966 digital and annotated document collections. The collection contains hundreds of original archival records, including internal correspondence, meeting minutes, testimonies, maps, photographs, and reports. Akevot — Military Rule 1948–1966 archive

[45] Akevot Institute, “Suspicions of war crimes in 1948: ‘If these acts are covered up – the blame lies with the entire government.’” Newly exposed portions of provisional-government meeting minutes from November–December 1948 document ministers discussing reports of massacres and suspected war crimes. Akevot — 1948 provisional-government minutes

[46] Akevot Institute, SILENCING: DSDE’s Concealment of Documents in Archives. Akevot documented efforts by the Director of Security of the Defense Establishment to restrict access to archival material, with particular attention to records concerning the 1948 war and the uprooting of the Palestinian population. Akevot — Silencing archival records

[47] Holocaust survivor compensation and continuing German-funded payments. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany states that West Germany recognized an obligation to compensate Holocaust survivors beginning with the 1952 negotiations, and that German-funded compensation programs continue today. Its Article 2 Fund provides eligible survivors monthly pension payments, distributed quarterly; other German-funded programs provide additional hardship payments under specified eligibility rules. The comparison in the essay is moral rather than legal: compensation cannot undo the original crime, but it recognizes that historical dispossession and persecution can create continuing obligations toward victims. Claims Conference — Article 2 Fund and survivor pensions Current payment schedule: Claims Conference — Current Beneficiaries’ FAQs

[48] B’Tselem, “Punitive House Demolitions.” B’Tselem documents Israel’s policy of demolishing or sealing homes as a deterrent measure because of the alleged acts of a household member, including figures from the Second Intifada. B’Tselem — Punitive House Demolitions Exact figures: B’Tselem — Through No Fault of Their Own (2004)

[49] International Committee of the Red Cross, customary and treaty rules on distinction, proportionality, and precautions in attack. These rules require parties to distinguish civilians from combatants and civilian objects from military objectives, prohibit attacks expected to cause excessive incidental civilian harm in relation to the anticipated military advantage, and require feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm. ICRC — Conduct of Hostilities and Protection of Civilians

[50] Akevot Institute, The Riftin Report, March 1, 1948, annotated English translation published in 2021. Commissioned by David Ben-Gurion and concealed from public access for 73 years, the internal Haganah inquiry examined allegations including extrajudicial killings, torture during interrogation, looting, theft of Arab property, and inadequate accountability. Riftin recommended clearer legal procedures, a permanent legal organization, limits on death sentences, and public oversight of Arab property in areas under Jewish control. Akevot Institute — The Riftin Report

[51] Akevot Institute, Tantura Revisited, archival collection covering April 7 through June 11, 1948. The collection includes the pre-conquest settlement plan, the May 29 burial directive, the June 9 report referring to a mass grave, the June 11 Davar account of additional bodies, a 1946 village map, and later soldiers’ testimony alleging executions. The collection establishes the village’s depopulation and the documented presence and burial of numerous bodies, while acknowledging that the number and circumstances of the deaths remain disputed. Akevot Institute — Tantura archival collection

[52] Israel’s 2026 death-penalty law. On March 30, 2026, the Knesset passed legislation making death by hanging the default sentence for West Bank Palestinians convicted by military courts of deadly terrorist attacks. The UN human-rights chief called the law discriminatory, raised due-process concerns, and urged its repeal. Reuters, March 31, 2026: UN says Israel’s death-penalty law violates international law

[53] Itamar Ben Gvir’s noose-decorated birthday cakes. Reports and published images from his May 2026 birthday celebration show cakes decorated with nooses, including one bearing the message, “Sometimes dreams come true.” Reports also identified senior police and prison officials among those attending. The Independent, May 3, 2026: Israel’s national security minister receives noose-decorated birthday cake; see also Times of Israel, August 20, 2026: Ben Gvir announces construction of gallows

[54] Israel’s thirty-seventh government policy guidelines. The coalition declared an “exclusive and inalienable right” of the Jewish people to all parts of the Land of Israel and committed itself to settlement in the Galilee, Negev, Golan Heights, and Judea and Samaria. Government of Israel guidelines; Times of Israel summary: https://www.timesofisrael.com/judicial-reform-boosting-jewish-identity-the-new-coalitions-policy-guidelines/

[55] Smotrich’s March 2023 appearance in Paris. Associated Press reported his denial of Palestinian peoplehood; photographs and diplomatic reporting documented the lectern map incorporating Jordan and the West Bank. Associated Press: https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-netanyahu-smotrich-tensions-38150d2ba81f571b1d5333dd7b046af0

[56] Netanyahu and the Greater Israel vision. Times of Israel reported Netanyahu’s August 2025 i24NEWS statement that he was on a historic and spiritual mission and was very attached to the vision of the Promised Land and Greater Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-says-hes-on-a-historic-and-spiritual-mission-endorses-vision-of-greater-israel/

[57] Gaza resettlement conference. Reuters documented the participation of cabinet ministers and coalition lawmakers in the January 2024 conference calling for renewed Israeli settlement in Gaza: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-ministers-join-ultranationalist-conference-urging-gaza-resettlement-2024-01-29/

[58] Calls by Ben Gvir and Smotrich for Palestinian emigration and Gaza resettlement, and the United States response. Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-slams-israeli-ministers-statements-resettlement-palestinians-outside-gaza-2024-01-02/

[59] Harey Zahav Gaza beachfront advertisement. Contemporary reporting reproduced the December 2023 image and recorded the company owner’s statement that it was not an actual sale but “somewhere between a joke and wishful thinking.” Housing and Land Rights Network summary of the iNews report: https://hlrn.org/activitydetails.php?id=p3FrYw%3D%3D

[60] Uri Tzafon and advocacy for settlement in southern Lebanon. L’Orient Today reported the movement’s program, its incursions into Lebanon, its goal of extending Israel to the Litani, Ben Gvir’s reference to a settlement plan, and the fact that the position remained a minority view: https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1541546/israeli-settlers-from-uri-tzafon-group-swim-in-south-lebanons-hasbani-river.html

[61] Official Israeli plan for military control in southern Lebanon. Reuters reported Defense Minister Israel Katz’s March 2026 announcement that Israeli forces would seize and control territory up to the Litani River as a security zone: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-military-occupy-swathe-southern-lebanon-defence-chief-says-2026-03-24/

[62] Israeli military presence and demands in southern Syria. Reuters reported Netanyahu’s demand for demilitarization of Quneitra, Daraa, and Sweida and Israel’s deployment in the UN-monitored separation zone: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-wont-allow-hts-forces-southern-syria-netanyahu-says-2025-02-23/

[63] “Promised Land of Israel” patch. The publicly circulated June 2024 photograph shows a privately produced patch on an individual soldier’s uniform. Reporting described controversy around such unofficial patches; the image does not establish official IDF adoption or representativeness. The New Arab: https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-army-bans-radical-messiah-patch-uniforms