9.1 Israel: Who is the Oppressor?
This lesson is the first of a series of lessons about Israel meant to answer the propaganda against Israel that is in our schools, universities and media. The main propaganda now (April 2025) is that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. That propaganda is debunked in lesson 9.20.
Since Jews are accused of oppressing Palestinians this lesson addresses the question of who are the oppressors and who are the oppressed? The Jews have been oppressed for thousands of years.
According to the Bible, 3,323 years ago the Jews fled oppression by the Egyptians. Disney made a movie called the Prince of Egypt based on the Bible. The movie starts with a song of the Jews crying out for God to deliver them from oppression by the Egyptians.
In 720 BC there were two Israelite kingdoms the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah.
In 720 BC the Neo-Assyrian empire conquered Israel and forced many Jews out of the Kingdom of Israel and into captivity. They also brought in foreign people into the lands where the Jews had been deported from. In 586 BC the neo-Babylonian empire conquered the Kingdom of Judah, and forced Jews into captivity and exiled many to Babylon.
In 539 Persia conquered Babylon. King Cyrus of Persia was a benevolent king who allowed the Jews to return to Israel and rebuild the destroyed temple. In 330 BC the Greeks invaded Israel. Greeks initially allowed Jews to practice Judaism. From 168–167 BCE, Antiochus IV issued decrees officially suppressing the Jewish religion; subjects were required to eat pork and violate Jewish dietary law, work on the Jewish Sabbath, cease circumcising their sons, and and worship Greek Gods. The policy of tolerance of Jewish worship was at an end. The Jews, led by the brave Maccabees revolted and gained independence for eighty years. Then the Romans conquered Israel. The Jews rebelled against Roman rule and the Romans in 70 AD destroyed Jerusalem and the Jewish temple. Masada the last rebel stronghold, fell to the Romans 3 years later.
62 years later the Jews rebelled again, led by the fearless Bar Kokhba, only to be crushed again. The Roman emperor Hadrian barred Jews from Jerusalem and renamed the country Palestina, after the Grecian Philistines. Jews in the rest of the country, denied their temple built synagogues. The Eastern Roman empire which controlled Israel became known as the Byzantine empire. The Jews joined the Persians and ousted the Byzantines in 614, The Arabs destroyed Jewish communities living in the Arabian Peninsula and then conquered Israel in 636. Arabs expropriated Jewish houses and property, uprooted Jewish farmers from their soil and colonized Israel. In 691 the Arabs built the Dome of the Rock mosque over what was left of the Jewish temple. Muslims like to say that Israel stole the land of the Palestinians but they stole the land from the Jews. This was followed by the crusades. The crusaders were ousted by Muslims led by Saladin. Those Muslims were conquered by the Mamluks who in turn were booted out by the Ottomans. In 1516 Jerusalem was conquered by the Muslims of the Ottoman empire. There are texts recording what life was like for the Jews living under Ottoman rule. Here are just 2 of them.
W. B. Lewis, 1824: The Jews at Jerusalem, (I speak even of European Jews) are liable to be stopped by the lowest of the country, who, if he pleases, may demand money of them as a right due to the mussulman ; and this extortion may be practised on the same poor Jew over and over again in the space of ten minutes. The Jews are fond of frequenting the tombs of their forefathers, especially on particular days, to read their prayers of remembrance of the dead. Here advantage is taken of them again. They are rudely accosted and pilfered, and if resistance is made, they are beat almost to death...
From Remarks on the present condition and future prospects of the Jews in Palestine, by Arthur George Harper Hollingsworth, 1852: This Jewish population is poor beyond any adequate word ; it is degraded in its social and political condition, to a state of misery, so great, that it possesses no rights. It can shew no wealth even if possessed of it, because to display riches would secure robbery from the Mahometan population, the Turkish officials, or the Bedouin Arab. ... He creeps along that soil, where his forefathers proudly strode in the fulness of a wonderful prosperity, as an alien, an outcast, a creature less than a dog,
The Ottomans gave incentives to Muslims to colonize
Israel while imposing severe jizya taxes
on the Jews and brutal punishments if the Jews couldn’t pay. Ottoman
persecution forced entire Jewish communities to leave Israel.
The Ottomans
were defeated in World War 1 and the British gained control in 1917.
Throughout the history of conquests of Israel, terrible persecutions happened to Jews in Europe, Russia
and Asia.
When bad things happened Jews were blamed for those events and killed. If
there was bad water in a well Jews were accused of well poisoning, if there was
a disease spreading such as the Black plague in the 1400s Jews were blamed for
that. After the Russian tsar Alexander II was killed (by non-Jews) Jews
were blamed and there were extensive anti-Jewish riots in which many Jews were
killed. One bad event that occurred was that military secrets of
the French were sold to the Germans. In 1894 (129
years ago counting from 2023) Colonel Dreyfus a Jewish member of the French army was accused of selling French military secrets to the
Germans. Dreyfus was found guilty by the anti-semitic
French court and imprisoned on Devil's Island. Theodore Herzl was a
reporter who was sent to report on the trial. Mr. Herzl saw that the
trial was very unfair and realized that Dreyfus was innocent. He turned out to
be right, the real villain was a French army major named Ferdinand Esterhazy who
had a lot of gambling debt. Major Esterhazy sold French military secrets
to the Germans to get the money to pay off the people who wanted the money he
owed them. Many Frenchmen believed that Dreyfus was guilty and antisemitic
attacks on Jews increased in France. Jews were unfairly blamed for what
Dreyfus didn't do. Here are links to an excellent series of videos on
Herzl and on the Dreyfus affair.
Theodor Herzl
Part 3: The Zionist Congress
Theodor Herzl Part 4: "The Uganda Proposal: Herzl realized that
antisemitism was behind the
unfair trial of Colonel Dreyfus and that the Jews of
Europe needed their own home country where they wouldn't be persecuted. He joined other Zionists with
the idea of returning the Jews to their biblical homeland of Israel. At
the time the powerful nation of Turkey was in control of the Jewish homeland and was against Jews
returning to their land. Much of the land was desert or swamps with
mosquitos that spread Malaria. Arabs who lived in the area were hostile to
Jews and many attacked the Jews who lived there. Most Jews thought a Jewish state was an
impossible dream. Herzl's advocacy for the immediate establishment of a
Jewish state and the exodus of Jews to it, was perceived by most as utter folly.
A friend of Herzl's told him that he was insane and that he should speak to Dr.
Nordau, a psychiatrist. Dr. Nordau told Herzl, "If you are mad then I am
mad as well. I'm behind you and you can count on me." Herzl
understood the challenges facing him but he also understood the danger facing
the Jews if they did not return to and rebuild their ancient homeland. He believed it could
happen and told his fellow
Jews, "If you will it, it is no dream." Turkey was defeated in World War 1 and the Allies gave
Britain a mandate to advise and assist the areas of Palestine and Trans-Jordan
until they could stand alone and govern themselves. The mandate required
that Palestine be a national home for the Jewish people. The mandate also
required the British to encourage Jewish immigration and settlement but the
British violated that requirement. The British allotted 87,500 acres of
the 187,500 acres of cultivable land to Arabs and only 4,250 acres to Jews.
The British placed restrictions on Jewish immigration while allowing Arabs to
enter the country freely at least in part because the Muslim Arabs were against
Jews returning to their homeland, they wanted Israel for themselves. The British
also required that Jewish immigrants pay them 1000 pounds sterling with the
result that many Jews couldn't afford to enter and were killed in Europe. In 1933 Nazi Germany created concentration
camps where Jews, liberals, communists, people who opposed Hitler and other
undesirables were imprisoned and murdered. In 1935 a record number of Jews
tried to escape to Palestine but the British limited the number that could
enter Starting in 1939, hundreds of thousands of German citizens with
mental or physical disabilities were murdered
in hospitals and asylums. Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 which started
World War II. Germany conquered much of Europe.
Einsatzgruppen paramilitary death
squads accompanied the German armed forces inside the conquered territories
and conducted the genocide of millions of Jews and other Holocaust
victims. Hitler's plan was the total annihilation of the Jews.
He called that plan the Final Solution. After the Nazis were defeated in World War 2, the allied
powers, the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union, formed an
international tribunal in order to try Nazi leaders for the atrocities the Nazis
committed in the countries they overran. They held the trials in the city
of Nuremberg in Germany but many of the Nazis responsible for those atrocities
were missing. One of the missing was Adolph Eichmann, the man Hitler
appointed to oversee the Holocaust against the Jews. During the Nuremberg
trials, Eichmann's assistant, Dieter Wisliczeny, testified that the mufti of
Jerusalem, had: "repeatedly suggested to the
Nazi authorities - including Hitler, von Ribbentrop and Himmler - the
extermination of European Jewry...He was one of Eichmann's best friends and had
constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures." The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, also
called upon the Nazis to prevent Jews from escaping to Palestine. In
return for Nazi cooperation the Mufti called upon the Muslims to fight the
British. The Mufti raised up a Muslim SS company, which was responsible
for killing ninety percent of the Jews in Bosnia. The
gates of Palestine remained closed for the duration of the war, stranding
hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe, many of whom became victims of Hitler’s
Final Solution. After the war, the British refused to allow the survivors of the
Nazi nightmare to find sanctuary in Palestine. On June 6, 1946, President Truman
urged the British government to relieve the suffering of the Jews confined to
displaced persons camps in Europe by immediately accepting 100,000 Jewish
immigrants. Britain's Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin, replied sarcastically that
the United States wanted displaced Jews to immigrate to Palestine “because they
did not want too many of them in New York.” There was truth to that statement. During the
Holocaust United States
rules limited the number of Jews that could immigrate. Two Jewish paramilitary organizations, the Irgun and the
Lechi revolted against the British. In 1948 Israel declared its
independence. Six Arab nations promised to drive Israel into the sea
once it declared independence. King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia said there
are 50 million Arabs what does it matter if we lose 10 million to kill all the
Jews, the price is worth it. The grand Mufti of Jerusalem said "I declare
a holy war, murder them, murder them all." There is a movie called
Cast a Giant Shadow about what the situation was like for the Jews whose
choice was fight or be annihilated and who it appeared would be annihilated even
if they fought. In 1695 a geographer named Hadrian Relandi, who knew
Hebrew, Arabic, classical Greek and other languages
went to Israel. He found out that not one place in Israel had a name
that originates in Arabic. He found that place names were Hebrew, Greek or Roman
(Latin). The country was a wasteland. Its few inhabitants were
concentrated in cities like Jerusalem, Acre, Safed, Jaffa, Tiberias and Gaza.
Most of the city folk were Jewish or Christian, and only a few Muslims, usually
Bedouins. Nablus (Shechem)was an exception, home to some 120 Muslims and 70
Shomronim (Samaritans). Natzeret (Nazareth), capital of the Galilee, was
inhabited by 700 Christians. Some 5000 people lived in Jerusalem, most of them
Jews. The population of Gaza was equally divided between Jews and Christians.
The Jews raised grapes, olives and wheat crops (Gush Katif), while the
Christians were occupied in commerce and transportation of goods. Safed and
Tiberias also had Jewish communities, but the only occupation mentioned is
fishing in the Sea of Galilee. Relandi wrote a
book about his travels, the cover of which you can see below.
The Jews made a beautiful home out of a country that was
mostly desert and swamp. The Jews drained the swamps that were full of
mosquitos and malaria. They built big cities in
what was desert. The picture below is of the founding of the Israeli city
of Tel Aviv.
Notice you don't see any Palestinian Arabs in the picture. Arab
propaganda tells us that the Israelis invaded and drove out the Palestinians.
Israel was mostly empty and desolate. Mark Twain visited Israel in 1867.
He wrote that
Palestine is desolate and unlovely and that" “The further we went the hotter the sun got, and the
more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became…There was hardly
a tree or a shrub any where. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends
of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country” The picture below is Tel Aviv today as seen from the
Mediterranean. Jews have turned the desert shown in the picture above into
the beautiful city you see below.
The city of Eilat is another example.
I visited Eilat many years ago and the moment I swam
underwater in the Red Sea I saw colorful fish everywhere. The Jews have made the desert bloom.
The picture below is a part of the Negev which used to be
desert.
The Jews made Israel a place worth living in and then the
Arabs immigrated en mass. Ladislas Farago another man who traveled through
Israel wrote a book about it called Palestine at the Crossroads that was
published in 1937. He wrote: " One always finds in Palestine Arabs who have been
in the country only a few weeks or a few months...Since they are themselves
strangers in a strange land, they are the loudest to cry: 'Out with the
Jews!...Amongst them are to be found representatives of every Arab country:
Arabs from Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Egypt, the Sudan and Iraq. "
In 1939 Winston Churchill
challenged the
common notion that Jewish immigration into Palestine had uprooted its Arab
residents. To the contrary, according to him, “Far from being persecuted,
the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied."
Joan Peters in her book, From Time Immemorial wrote:
“…the British – a ‘civilized’ people – were willing to see Jews in Europe
put to death by the Nazis; for ‘fear’ of ‘Arab comment, the British claimed that
‘Palestine’ had ‘no more places’ for Jews, while at the same moment the British
were importing ‘illegal’ Arab immigrants by tens of thousands into Palestine to
do ‘necessary’ work – work and place they denied the Jews. Schools and the media tell us that Israelis are illegally
occupying Palestinian land but it is the Palestinian Muslims who since they
invaded Israel in 635 have driven out Jews and
occupied Israel. The Muslims didn't just drive Jews out of Israel.
In the years following the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948
the Arabs
expelled Jews living in their lands. Many of those Jews fled to
Israel. Many fled to India from Afghanistan and Yemen. Here is a
screen shot of the beginning of a New York Times article about this.
More than 850,000 Jews were forced to leave their homes in Egypt,
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, and several other Arab countries in
the 20 years that followed the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Here is a trailer for a video about the expulsion of Jews
from Iraq. Here is a short video about the expulsion of Jews from
Arab lands. Another
major forced migration took place from Iran in 1979–80, following the Iranian
Revolution and the collapse of the Shah’s regime, adding 70,000 more Jewish
refugees to this number. There are tens of thousands of refugees from the North of
Israel who had to flee south so as not to be killed by the rockets and missiles of Hezbollah
and to prevent Hezbollah invaders for repeating the massacre of October 7 2023.
You can see a discussion of that in the video below. I I wrote the following paragraph on April 9 2023
after reading about 2 young women, Maya and Rina, 15 and 20 years old who were
shot while in their car by Palestinian Muslim Arabs.
Jonathan Feldstein a man who lived in their community
wrote that: When the girls’ death was announced, Palestinian
Arabs celebrated by handing out candy in their communities, while our community
responded by spontaneous prayers. The prayers continued through Saturday night:
reciting Psalms, singing, and tears... I was out in meetings on Friday when my phone started
to blow up with messages asking if we were OK. The names of the victims had not
been released until relatives overseas could be informed, but friends heard that
a family from my town had been targeted. Israelis reached out, as did Christian
friends from all over the world. It’s not the first time terror has hit close to home.
I have sent my children to the funerals of others whose children have been
murdered. In one case, all but two children of an entire family were butchered
to death by terrorists who broke into their home on a Friday night. The mother
who was murdered was the oldest sister of a girl in my daughter’s 12th grade
class. The mother and her baby, husband, and two other children were all buried
together... There have been more. Despite the threat of terror and war being
real here, there’s an indescribable sense that our children are actually safer
here than in most parts of the world. A recent survey revealed that Israel is
the fifth safest place in the world for tourists, far more so than the US. In
addition, year after year, Israel is ranked in the top ten happiest countries on
Earth.
There are important lessons in what Jonathan Feldstein
wrote. Israelis are human beings who care for each other. Arabs
rejoice when they kill innocent Israelis. That tells you a lot about who
is responsible for the fighting in the Middle East. In October 2023, Hamas fired thousands of rockets into
Israel and breached the border fence by flying over it with paragliders and
bulldozing through a fence. They killed about 1500 of Israelis including
entire families. Here is a picture of a family that they murdered.
They took at least 150 families
hostage including children and toddlers. 5-year-old Raz and 3-year-old Aviv are among the hostages
being held by Hamas. Who is oppressing whom? Israel has warned the inhabitants in Gaza to move south
so that they don't get bombed when Israel bombs terrorist targets. That
makes it possible for Hamas to know when to leave. Hamas
has
shot inhabitants of Gaza who tried to go south so that civilians will be
afraid leave. That way if Israel tries to bomb Hamas, civilians will be hurt and
that will make people all over the world hate Israel. Israel's solution
was to send in troops to open safe corridors for civilians to travel through so
they could be safe. Here is a video about that. People excuse the atrocities Hamas committed by denying
them and by saying that anything Hamas did do was just resistance against
oppression. Is that why Hamas fights, to resist oppression? Military
historian John Spencer speaks about why Hamas fights in the video below. Most Muslim countries go to war with Israel when they think
they are strong enough to win and drive Israel into the sea. In the case
of the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, called Al Aqsa Storm the terrorists of Gaza
struck believing that Israel couldn't do anything about it because of the hostages
they hold and because the hundreds of miles of tunnels they built would protect
them from Israeli bombs. Their tunnels have shafts everywhere from which
Hamas terrorists can emerge, fire at Israeli
soldiers and then disappear from view. Hamas believes that even
if the Israelis kill them they'll go to heaven. Arab propaganda portrays Israel as a powerful oppressor of poor Palestinians
but Israel is vulnerable, it is a small country surrounded by hostile countries
and terrorists armed with enormous amounts of weapons who are determined to
destroy it. Click here
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Israel declared its independence and the surrounding Arab states attacked. Israelis fought
desperately to save their country and won. If they hadn't won Israel
wouldn't exist. Infuriated Arab countries reacted by expelling their
Jewish populations. More than 850,000 Jews were
forced to leave their homes in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya,
Morocco, and several other Arab countries in the 20 years that followed
the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Another major forced migration of 70,000
Jewish refugees took place from Iran in 1979–80, following the Iranian
Revolution.
