Robert Inlakesh
Source: Al Mayadeen English
Each time such claims are made, they end up serving as admissions that the accusers understand full well that the actions they are committing make them look guilty.
As this is how the Israeli regime was born, it is only natural that we address its response to the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of Palestine between 1947 and 1949. Today, it is an established fact, confirmed by documents and oral history, that some 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homeland by Zionist militias to pave the way for the establishment of the Zionist entity.
For decades after 1948, the Zionists attempted to sell the lie that Jews from Europe arrived in the supposedly empty land of British Mandate Palestine and were suddenly attacked by anti-Semitic Arab armies simply because they were Jewish. However, as Palestinian voices began to emerge and publish works on the issue, coupled with a generation of what is known as the “new Israeli historians," this narrative quickly collapsed, exposed as the pack of lies it always was. This exposure posed a significant challenge to the "legitimacy" of the entity that had not only established itself beyond the lines of the 1947 UN partition resolution but also occupied the remaining Palestinian territories in 1967, along with territories in other Arab nations.
When the true history of the struggle began to enter the mainstream and challenge the settler colonial regime, they then pivoted and began to construct a new victim narrative centered around Jews from Arab countries. The Israeli regime now claims that an early equal number of Middle Eastern Jews were expelled from their lands and sought refuge in the newly established Zionist entity. They attempt to frame this as an antisemitic injustice and a “population exchange”.
While some Zionist actions contributed to the migration of Jewish populations from Arab nations like Iraq, the majority of Jews were not forcibly expelled but left voluntarily for occupied Palestine, according to available documentation. Even if all Jews from various West Asian countries had been driven out, this would not equate to the displacement experienced by the Palestinian people, nor was it the doing of the Palestinians.
The Zionists recognized that the world was becoming aware of the great injustice committed during the Nakba and appropriated the narrative in order to claim victimhood, suggesting they were the true victims of ethnic cleansing, or at least on par with the Palestinians. This revisionist narrative aims to garner sympathy by alleging their victimhood in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. However, they are aware that their actions against the Palestinians were a morally irreconcilable crime against humanity, and this invented narrative of shared suffering is easily debunked.
Next, we have the crime of Apartheid, which Palestinian human rights groups have been highlighting for decades and has now been confirmed by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israeli rights group B’Tselem. The evidence for the Israeli regime operating a system of Apartheid is indisputable. After successfully suppressing the proof for so long, the facts finally caught up with them a few years ago.
To divert attention from the reality, Zionists have argued that because Israelis aren’t allowed to enter Gaza or the West Bank, it is actually the Palestinians who are imposing an Apartheid system against them. However, anyone with even a basic understanding of the situation knows that there are around 750,000 illegal Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank and the eastern part of occupied al-Quds. Additionally, it is the Israeli regime that imposes a ban on its settlers entering either Gaza or Areas A and B of the West Bank, which are de-facto control of the Palestinian Authority.
More recently, allegations have been made to justify their genocide against the people of Gaza. These claims are particularly the most important to address at this time. Ironically, many of these accusations are things that the Zionist entity itself is responsible for. Each of these points deserves to be addressed separately (in no particular order):
1- Human shields: The Israeli regime constantly accuses Hamas and other Palestinian Resistance groups of using civilians as human shields. This allegation, often repeated during various military assaults on Gaza's civilian population, is used to justify the mass murder of innocent people to the international community.
However, this claim has been debunked multiple times by Amnesty International in its human rights reports, notably following the 2008/9 and 2014 Israeli assaults on Gaza. For example, during the 2008/9 war, there was not a single documented case of Hamas using Palestinian civilians as human shields. In contrast, there were documented cases of Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields even acknowledged by the Zionist regime. The last time the Israeli soldiers were held accountable for using human shields was in 2010 when two soldiers were given minimal punishment for using a Palestinian child as a human shield during the 2008/9 war. Ironically, the most severe punishment given to an Israeli soldier during that period was for stealing a credit card from Gaza, resulting in a seven-and-a-half-month prison sentence.
This human shield allegation, like the previous crimes mentioned above, is actually an inversion of what the Israeli military had been systematically committing for decades. Until the Israeli Supreme Court banned it in 2005, the Israeli army had the use of human shields built into its military doctrine under the “neighbor procedure”. Despite the ban, there have been numerous cases where Israeli soldiers, in defiance of their own Supreme Court, have taken Palestinian civilians, including children, as human shields. The most recent case occurred late last week in the Jabriyat neighborhood of Jenin, which was caught on video and condemned by the U.S.
2- A mass rape campaign: The Israeli propaganda machine has also promoted the idea that Hamas inflicted a pre-meditated mass rape campaign against Israeli women on October 7. To begin with, there is not a victim or accuser that exists to prove even one rape occurred, with the only evidence for such allegations about individual rape cases being limited to interpretations of what may have happened to certain Israelis whose bodies were found lying in a certain way. Yet, even in these cases noted in UN reports, there is no actual proof for any of the claims, and they can only be considered as a possibility.
Without delving too deeply into the various demonstrable lies perpetuated by Zionist propagandists and the distortion of crime scenes as noted in UN reports by rescue service groups like the infamous ZAKA group, it suffices to say that there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest a mass premeditated rape or sexual violence campaign ordered by the Palestinian Resistance.
On the other hand, we have testimonies of released Palestinian female prisoners who say that women were being raped in Israeli detention. Additionally, in February the UN produced a report on 2 cases of rape committed against Palestinian women, in addition to various cases of sexual assault and threats of rape, triggering a United Nations panel of experts to call for an inquiry. In the UN’s most recent rights report, which dedicated its first half to October 7 allegations, it concluded that mass sexual violence was carried out by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians, both online and in person. The UN report also pointed fingers at the Israeli chain of command and labeled the cases of sexualized torture and assault against men and women as “systematic”.
There is also the gruesome evidence that continues to emerge from the Sde Teiman detention center, where Palestinian civilians from Gaza are held without a charge. Women testified to being sexually assaulted and having pepper smeared on their genitals. Multiple men testified to being raped with electrified and burning metal rods, and in one case, a Palestinian man even died after being raped in this manner.
Additionally, Israeli soldiers have openly filmed themselves wearing Palestinian women’s lingerie and rummaging through their underwear draws. They have also filmed civilians they had kidnapped and forced to strip fully or partially naked to humiliate them. Various reports have also emerged of the soldiers using attack dogs to rape kidnapped civilians.
The verdict here is clear: Not a single proven case of any Palestinian raping an Israeli, yet there are countless cases with mountains of evidence of Israeli soldiers raping Palestinians.
3- Captives: This topic may be contentious to some, but it must be noted. Israel complains about Hamas having captured Israeli soldiers and settlers from the areas surrounding the Gaza Strip. Under international law, taking non-combatants as captives is a crime and is not justified except if it can be demonstrated that it was done for the specific purpose of protecting the non-combatant. There simply is not enough evidence to get into claims of this nature, however.
While Palestinian Resistance groups captured around 200 Israelis, the Israeli regime has been taking Palestinians as captives without any charge since 1967. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been detained and locked up as political prisoners in Israeli military detention. The Israelis were holding around 5,000 Palestinian hostages on October 6, which has now more than doubled, many of whom were in administrative detention (held without any charge).
The reality here is that for a regime that specializes in kidnapping children and innocent civilians, holding some of them for years without even issuing a single charge against them, it is simply laughable for them to complain about captive-taking. This is the case because the entire reason the Resistance took Israelis as captives is to conclude a prisoner exchange to release thousands of their own detainees who basically nobody cared about, nor do we even hear a peep about today. The Zionist entity currently holds more than 100 times the number of detainees than the Palestinian Resistance does. Moreover, the soldiers that are being held are legitimate prisoners of war, so to describe the Israeli soldiers as innocent captives is just ridiculous.
4- Genocidal intent: Until January, the Israeli regime simply denied the accusation of committing genocide in Gaza, brushing such allegations off as “anti-Semitic”. Yet, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in favor of South Africa’s case accusing the Zionist entity of committing genocide in Gaza, holding them plausibly accused of committing genocide, the Israeli narrative had to shift.
Quite predictably, the Israeli regime and its propagandists began accusing Hamas of attempting to commit genocide. They also attempted to portray the popular chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a call for the genocide of Jewish people. To any intelligent person, such narratives are no more than a childish claim “I know you are but what am I."
5- They are like al-Qaeda and ISIS: The Israeli regime’s propaganda at the start of the genocide in Gaza was fixated on attempting to compare Hamas to terrorist groups like Daesh and al-Qaeda. Putting aside the fact that the Israeli military not only helped al-Qaeda fighters and gave them medical treatment in southern Syria, we can just look at some simple facts and figures to see who is closer to such terrorist groups.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, the Israeli military has murdered around 50,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including those missing under the rubble and presumed dead. Roughly 70% of those killed are reportedly women and children. This toll has been inflicted over the course of 9 months on a population of 2.3 million people.
In contrast, the worst-ever death toll inflicted by Daesh occurred during the first two years of its insurgency in Iraq, with the UN reporting 18,800 deaths. It took only 9 months for the Israelis to inflict a civilian death toll so high in Gaza against a smaller population size, killing as many children alone as the total civilian death toll inflicted by Daesh over two years. Moreover, comparing the statements of Daesh's sectarian killers to those of Israeli officials reveals similarly murderous and supremacist language, depicting groups committed to killing those who disagree with their sectarian exclusivist rule.
At best here, you could argue that Daesh didn’t possess the weapons that the Zionists do, which is why their killing was on a much smaller scale. However, if any group in the Palestine-Israeli struggle is to be compared to Daesh, it would be more accurate to compare the Zionist military.
Although there have been countless other accusations leveled at the Palestinians, these are perhaps the most prominent of late. All of them are simply attempts to blame the people of Palestine for crimes that the Zionist entity specializes in. Each time such claims are made, they end up serving as admissions that the accusers understand full well that the actions they are committing make them look guilty. It is a kind of collective narcissism that governs the way Zionists think, when their crimes are pointed out, they invert reality to make themselves both the hero and victim.
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