By Richard Forer

If the scales that mask Israel’s unfairness and inhumanity were to fall from their eyes, Zionists would be confronted with those exact qualities within themselves.

One of the most common “historical” arguments a majority of Zionists make in defense of Israel’s unceasing violations of international law, and the generations it has occupied the Palestinian people, is that the Jewish side accepted the 1947 United Nations partition plan while the Arab side rejected it. Therefore, it’s the Palestinians’ fault there’s no peace; it’s their fault they’re under occupation; it’s even their fault Israel’s military has spent the past year in Gaza “defending” its country against mostly women and children.

Zionists don’t want to know the history. For them, it’s a malignancy. Thus, specious arguments pretty much represent the sum total of their knowledge of the UN partition plan or of any of the other incriminating events whose accounts they automatically distort in order to deny or rationalize Israeli oppression of the indigenous people.

Zionists interpret as mortal threats to their self-imagery anything that challenges the one or two-sentence sound bites they cling to that are meant to signify Israeli innocence and Palestinian culpability, and they will do or say anything to create the illusion that they have at least temporarily extinguished the threat, including accusing anyone of antisemitism whose research depicts Israel as unfair and inhumane.

On that basis, they can convince themselves the criticism is untrustworthy and can be dismissed out of hand. But they cannot evade responsibility for their roles in the suffering of an entire people because, to their unconscious minds, the possibility they could be wrong evokes the same fear of death they would experience if they were facing a Nazi firing squad.

I’ve never met a defender of Israel who is reasonably knowledgeable about the history. That’s because they don’t want to know the history. More revealing is the reality that the Israel they are defending does not exist. It is an idealistic image in their minds that they project onto the Israel that does exist, the Israel that from the moment of its birth has been expelling, dispossessing, murdering and character assassinating Palestinians.

Likewise, they don’t care about Israel. What they care about is maintaining, at all costs, their idealistic images of Israel.

Israel is a surrogate for themselves. When they defend or care about “Israel,” they are really and merely defending their presumed, limited and mortal identities, their self-imagery. And since, consciously and unconsciously, they interpret criticism of Israel as a mortal threat—which is why they don’t want to know the history—there is no limit to what they will do to defend the beliefs and images that emanate from and reinforce their presumed identities. They will send their children to war before inquiring into their identities.

I’ve told some of these people that if I had been kidnapped as a baby and raised as a Muslim in Saudi Arabia, it is unlikely I would have been the defender of Israel I once was. I would have had the same body with the same genes but with a completely different worldview.

They don’t care. None of that matters to them. Their unfettered loyalty is to their presumed identities regardless of the fact that to a large extent, their identities are a product of whatever conditions they were brought up in.

Incorporating Israel into their presumed identities, Zionists see the Jewish state the way they want to see themselves, as fair and humane, and since they have convinced themselves they would never defend unfairness and inhumanity, Israel is, ipso facto, also fair and humane.

If the scales that mask Israel’s unfairness and inhumanity were to fall from their eyes, Zionists would be confronted with those exact qualities within themselves.

In all but the rarest of cases, one’s self-imagery, or ego-identity, will interpret a confrontation of this nature as a mortal threat; and contemplating mortality is unbearable because it evokes existential fear; and because existential fear is the prism through which they see Israel-Palestine, confusion arises.

The need to avert an inner confrontation that elicits this fear and confusion is why it is so difficult to persuade Zionists to educate themselves on the documented history. Not only are they too frightened to grasp that a sincere commitment to learning the documented history could alleviate their confusion and restore their humanity, they don’t know they are confused. Nor can they contemplate their inhumanity.

They can’t even admit they’ve never studied the history. This confusion is also why Zionists insist they want peace while simultaneously rationalizing the genocide Israel promised to perpetrate more than a year ago.

Determined to seize all of Palestine, since 1948 Israel has ignored numerous peace opportunities that could have made today’s hostilities unnecessary, but Zionists don’t want to know that. Nor do they want to know that, rather than waging a defensive war, Israel has been deliberately murdering, starving, torturing, and ethnically cleansing a mostly helpless population, and that its preferred outcome is death because dead Palestinians cannot raid kibbutzim.

Denial is vastly preferable to taking responsibility for their roles in the suffering of millions of Palestinians or for their roles in the conditions that contributed to Hamas’ assault on October 7, 2023.

Everyone is capable of rationalizing their behavior, even Hitler, Biden, Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, the last three of Israel’s ruling coalition whom former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert calls “butchers, killers, murderers, and terrorists.”

Here are key facts about the partition that Zionists want nothing to do with.

In 1947, the UN formed UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) to decide if partition was a valid solution to the Jewish-Arab impasse. The Committee concluded that partition would deprive the Palestinians of their right to self-determination. Aware that Britain wanted to end its mandate and leave Palestine, and that the Jewish terrorist gangs (Irgun, Stern Gang) were so vicious that opposing partition could lead to increased violence, it nonetheless approved partition.

For more than a decade Jewish leaders had made clear that partition would be the first step toward capturing all of Palestine.

Israel’s first president Chaim Weizmann: “The Jews would be fools not to accept [partition] even if [the land they were allocated] were the size of a table cloth.”

Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion: “After we become a strong force, as the result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand into the whole of Palestine.”

The UN partition plan gave 56 percent of Palestine and 80 percent of the coastline to the Jewish side, placed Jerusalem and Bethlehem, one percent of Palestine, under a corpus separatum to be administered by the UN, and left the remaining 43% of their homeland to the Palestinians. Within a week of its passage, the Jewish side violated the agreement by relocating the chief rabbinate in Jerusalem.

On the basis of Jewish “acceptance” and Palestinian rejection of partition, Zionists insist Israel has always wanted peace and the Palestinians have never wanted peace.

How can anyone believe that Israel would have been satisfied with 56 percent of Palestine and no Jerusalem when it has never been satisfied with the 78 percent of Palestine it stole—to use Ben-Gurion’s word—in 1948? Zionists conveniently ignore Ben-Gurion’s declaration that partition was instrumental to the Zionist dream to “expand into the whole of Palestine.”

Initially, the Palestinian population would have equaled 49 percent of the partitioned Jewish state’s total population. With a higher birth rate, they would have become a majority within a few years. It is utterly naïve to think that Israel would have accepted such an outcome.

As an alternative to partition, Arab nations had proposed a single state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. The Jewish side spurned their proposal, chiefly because it gave the same rights to Palestinians it gave to Jews.

To the surprise of some, future prime minister Menachem Begin worried that the Arab side would accept partition. Why? Since the Jewish side never intended to honor partition it would be easier to justify Israel’s expansion “into the whole of Palestine” if it was not stealing a Palestinian state the Arab nations had already agreed to.

The Zionist worldview is deceitful and dishonest. Zionists deceive themselves with easily refuted claims. Then they promote those claims to anyone who will listen. Worst of all, their worldview denies the humanity of the Palestinian people. To avoid coming face to face with their inhumanity, Zionists would consign the entire world to endless suffering.

A way out of this dilemma is to not take anything for granted, to study the history with a commitment to uncovering the truth, and to ponder who one would be without beliefs and images that accept one people’s right to self-determination while rejecting another’s.