Fact Check: Is Israel a Colonized Apartheid State?
On Oct. 7, the world saw first-hand the worst attack perpetrated against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. It all began when Hamas — the Democratically-elected political authority of the Gaza Strip — barraged Israel with a flurry of rockets.
Under the cover of that fire, Hamas troops invaded the Jewish state and embarked on a historic massacre of innocent civilians. Babies were beheaded. Women were raped. Children were tortured in front of their parents and vice versa. According to the Associated Press, roughly 1,400 were killed.
Despite this, in the subsequent weeks, many in the Western world began to push back against Israel’s defensive counterattack. Widespread left-wing protests rushed to the defense of the Palestinian people. Some even tacitly or explicitly came out in support of Hamas itself.
Two recurring claims appear to be motivating these protests. One, that Israel is a colonized state that “stole” the land of Israel from the Arab Palestinians, and two, that the Jewish state is currently enacting apartheid against its non-Jewish population.
But do either of these claims carry any truth?
FACT-CHECK: Was the nation of Israel stolen from the Palestinian people, and is its current government enacting an apartheid against its Arab population?
CONCLUSION: False on both counts.
Both claims are completely baseless. A thorough look at the region’s history, as well as Israeli policy, proves as much.
Did the Jewish People “Colonize” So-Called “Palestine”?: Israel’s Ownership Claim
The Jewish claim to the land now known as Israel dates back to Biblical times.
After Moses led the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery, they eventually made their way to the Promised Land, known then as the land of Canaan.
By 1000 B.C., the kingdom of David was established, according to HISTORY.
Any fair and honest accounting of history would say that this was the first nation of the region, meaning the Jewish people are the indigenous people of Israel.
The only other group to live in the region before the Israelites were the Canaanites, a semi-nomadic people not native to the land who have since disappeared from history (recent DNA analysis suggests the descendants of the Canaanites are both Jewish and Arab).
Over the next few millennia, numerous empires and nations took control of the region, including the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans.
Of note, in 135 A.D., the Romans — who were then in control — named the region “Palestine” to erase its Jewish history. Arabs hadn’t yet taken control of the region.
“[A]fter stamping out the province of Judea’s second insurrection, the Romans renamed the province Syria Palaestina — that is, ‘Palestinian Syria.’ They did so resentfully, as a punishment, to obliterate the link between the Jews … and the province …,” Hudson Institute’s Douglas J. Feith wrote on the subject.
Eventually, from 1517 to 1918, most of the region was ruled over by the Ottoman Empire, per HISTORY.
After losing World War I, the Ottoman Empire was dissolved and control of the region fell to the British Empire.
On July 24, 1922, the League of Nations — the precursor to the United Nations — created the “Mandate for Palestine.”
This mandate gave the United Kingdom control of the region with the goal of eventually “establishing the Jewish national home,” according to the Economic Cooperation Foundation.
Eugene Kontorovich, a professor of law at George Mason University, detailed why the League of Nations chose to give control of “Palestine” to the Jewish people in a video published in 2022.
“There was a simple reason for this: The League recognized that Jews were the indigenous people of the area,” Kontorovich said.
When addressing claims of Israel’s supposed “colonization,” there’s only one question that matters: How can indigenous people be “colonizers” of their native land?
To say that Jewish ownership of Israel is illegitimate is to pretend that history began sometime after the kingdom of David was established.
Did the Jewish People “Colonize” So-Called “Palestine?”: The Palestinian Territories Belong to Israel
The mandate eventually led to the Jewish state proclaiming independence in 1948.
However, despite Israel’s historic claim to the region, the surrounding Arab nations completely rejected the prospect of a Jewish state.
According to HISTORY, directly following Israel’s creation, five Arab nations — Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon — attacked the country on all sides.
Somehow, the tiny, brand-new nation survived, and a ceasefire was agreed to in 1949. As part of the ceasefire agreement, the West Bank technically became part of Jordan and the Gaza Strip part of Egypt.
However, these changes in ownership had no legal standing as far as international law is concerned.
“[According to international law,] a war of aggression cannot be used to change another country’s borders,” Kotorovich said in the 2022 video.
Because of this, when Israel won back the two regions in the Six-Day War, this was not an “occupation.”
“When Israel liberated these territories in 1967 during the Six-Day War, it was retaking its own land,” Kotorovich said.
“You can’t occupy land that belongs to you.”
Did the Jewish People “Colonize” So-Called “Palestine?”: Israel’s Legal Right to Occupy Palestinian Territories
According to HISTORY, in 1987, the Arab Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank led an uprising — known to them as an “Infatida” — killing hundreds.
To broker peace, Israel signed the Oslo Peace Accords — which they didn’t have to, given their ownership rights. This resulted in the creation of the Palestinian Authority.
The PA then took over some parts of the West Bank, leading to Israel’s withdrawal from those parts of the region in 1997.
Then, in 2000, Palestinians initiated a series of suicide bomb attacks against Israel. This resulted in Israel pulling all Israelis and troops from the Gaza Strip.
Since Hamas was elected to power in 2006, numerous additional attacks have been launched against the Israeli people.
Because of this, international law also dictates that Israel has a right to occupy Palestinian territories.
As noted by renowned legal scholar Alan Dershowitz in 2015, “Military occupations are clearly permitted under international law following an aggressive attack by a neighboring state.”
“Under international law, until a meaningful peace is achieved and all terrorism against it ceases, Israel has every right to retain military control over this area,” Dershowitz said.
The Palestinians have indeed demonstrated ad nauseam their repeated willingness to launch terror attacks against Israel.
As Benny Morris of the Wall Street Journal explained in a 2022 article, Israel’s full withdrawal ensured additional terror attacks took place.
“After Israel completely withdrew its settlers and military from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Hamas took over and began to rain down rockets on Israel’s nearby settlements, eventually sending missiles flying toward Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion International Airport,” Morris wrote.
“Hamas would likely gain control of the West Bank if Israel withdrew, allowing it to bombard Israel’s population centers. Hamas rule would allow Iran to install forces and weapons on the West Bank, as it has already done in Lebanon.”
Repeated rejections of a two-state solution show that the Arab group is more interested in destroying Israel than it is in forming its own state.
“Israel has been willing at key junctures, notably right at the beginning in 1948, to accept a two-state solution,” National Review’s Rich Lowry wrote.
“The Palestinians must be counted among the worst nationalists the world has ever known: They have repeatedly rejected opportunities to obtain a nation-state because they hate Israel’s legitimate national aspirations more than they love their own.”
Is Israel an Apartheid State?
Finally, since the Oct. 7 terror attacks that rocked Israel and left hundreds of innocent Jews dead, wounded, kidnapped or raped, much of the far-left in the U.S. and the rest of the West have hurled accusations that Israel is an apartheid state, mirroring the racial segregating policies of South Africa in the 20th Century.
Rania Al Abdullah, the Queen Consort of Jordan, accused Israel of apartheid on CNN on Tuesday during an interview with network anchor Christiane Amanpour.
While she complained about Israel’s counter-attacks against Hamas since Oct. 7, Abdullah told CNN that Israel is an “apartheid regime,” which “occupies, oppresses and commits daily documented crimes against Palestinians.”
In a world exclusive, @QueenRania of Jordan spoke with me about the ongoing bombing of Gaza, civilian deaths, the massacres of October 7, and what she calls “a glaring double standard” in the west’s reaction to all this. Watch our full conversation. pic.twitter.com/68QUO3Vez9
— Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) October 24, 2023
No person or group has accused Israel of engaging in the systematic discrimination of a group of people more than Amnesty International, which wrote Israel’s policies toward Hamas and those who elected the terror group to power are “part of a system which is designed to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.”
“This is apartheid,” the group continued. “Laws, policies and practices which are intended to maintain a cruel system of control over Palestinians, have left them fragmented geographically and politically, frequently impoverished, and in a constant state of fear and insecurity.”
In fact, as Kontorovich pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, if any party is guilty of apartheid in the Holy Land, it is the Arabs.
“The defining characteristic of apartheid — what distinguishes it from generic racial discrimination — is the rigid separation of groups in public spaces and positions of power. This is the apart in apartheid,” Kontorovich pointed out.
He added that while Arabs who are willing to peacefully live alongside their Jewish neighbors are accepted, there are no Jews in areas controlled by those who claim Israel is merely an occupying force of colonial barbarians.
Apartheid and the “Inversion of the Truth”
Kontorovich also stated that any claims that Israel is an apartheid state are actually “an inversion of the truth.”
“In all areas controlled by Israel, Jews and Arabs mix openly. Yet the Palestinian Authority has for decades ruled over Gaza and about half the West Bank — and all the areas under its jurisdiction are Jew-free.
“There isn’t a single Jewish community living anywhere under Palestinian control. This isn’t because of Jewish preferences. Jewish communities exist across the world; they would certainly exist 10 minutes from Jerusalem if it weren’t for the Palestinian Authority’s policies of excluding Jews and inciting violence and prejudice against them.”
While Israel welcomes peaceful Arabs, in areas under Palestinian control, merely selling property to Jews is punishable by death.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board also weighed in on the apartheid claims last year in a takedown of Amnesty International’s selective reporting of the decades-long conflict in the region and its libel of Israel.
The board wrote of claims Israel engages in systematic discrimination.
“This is a libel that distorts history. Israel was founded in the wake of the Holocaust with broad international support. The Jews who settled in historic Palestine had to fight to survive against Arab militias and national armies that wanted to push them into the sea.”
In 2021, writing for the newspaper, Warren Goldstein blasted critics of Israel for appropriating the term “apartheid” by using the word removed from its original context in South Africa. Goldstein cited claims from the far-left group Human Rights Watch and systematically dismantled them.
Goldstein commented: “‘Apartheid’ has a sacred historical meaning, sanctified by the blood and suffering of millions of South Africans who were oppressed and discriminated against on the basis of race. In appropriating the word, Human Rights Watch presents a grotesquely distorted picture of both South African history and the current reality in Israel.”
He also wrote, “No one who truly understands the systematic racism and denial of basic human rights that made apartheid infamous could, with any integrity, apply the term to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a complex political, religious and cultural dispute concerning national identities.”
He concluded Israel’s critics use vague and unfounded accusations of apartheid against Israel because they are motivated by “bigotry” at a minimum.
“The irony is that this itself is a form of prejudice,” Goldstein noted. “Unjustly applying the apartheid canard to the Jewish state falls squarely within the widely accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, which includes ‘claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor.’”
The Israeli people have for decades made every effort to peacefully live on and share their historic land while their state neighbors and groups such as Hamas have sought their murder and expulsion from the region.
There are systems of oppression in Gaza and the West Bank against Jews, but such systems will not be found across Israel that broadly target Muslims.
Claims to the contrary are not only false but are actually designed to drum up support for the complete elimination of Israel and its people.
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