A guide to the US-Israeli modus operandi to demonize and oppress Palestinians in 23 points Point 23 deals in more detail with the myth that Israel ever gave freedom to Gaza. 1. Let’s start with the most obvious one. A familiar response to criticism of Israeli policy is to accuse the critic of antisemitism. ‘You just hate Jews.’ If the critic happens to be Jewish, there’s another label ready: ‘self-hating Jew.’ Genuine antisemitism exists, and it should be confronted. But an accusation is not an argument. Criticism of a state, its government, its military and its occupation is not automatically hatred of a people. Claiming that Israel acts on behalf of all Jews does something especially ugly: it tries to make Jews everywhere answer for decisions they did not make. 2. As we have noticed, ad nauseam, October 7 is invoked as if it gave Israel an unlimited license to use force. The murder of civilians - some of which were killed by Israel itself per the Hannibal directive - and taking of hostages on October 7 were crimes. They do not cancel the laws of war, nor do they erase the history before that day. Yet reporting frequently starts the clock on October 7, as though the occupation, blockade, settlements and decades of Palestinian suffering had never existed. There was supposedly a ‘ceasefire.’ A ceasefire is not the same thing as freedom. 3. A ceasefire does not end an occupation. It does not stop settlement expansion, military raids, detention, land seizures or restrictions on movement. Such practices often continue without attracting international headlines. This slow destruction of the possibility of a Palestinian state has gone on for decades. It also helps explain why Gaza could not develop normally. Hamas’s spending priorities deserve scrutiny, but an economy cannot flourish when its access to markets, imports, exports and movement of people depends on permits and crossings it does not control. The West Bank, meanwhile, has been atomized into Palestinian enclaves surrounded by settlements, Israeli-controlled roads and military-controlled areas. We are told Gazans could have turned Gaza into a holiday resort. A holiday resort without control over its airport, seaport, borders, electricity supply or freedom of movement. Some holiday resort. 4. Talk of a two-state solution can serve as a distraction from what is happening on the ground. For decades, negotiations have coincided with expanding settlements and increasing fragmentation of Palestinian territory. Israel can promise a Palestinian state at some indefinite point, conditional on one more demand being met, while making that state harder to establish. A two-state solution is not impossible by definition; it is made less viable every time another settlement or outpost becomes a fact on the ground. The gap between diplomatic language and actual policy is what matters. 5. Maintaining a state where one religion or ethnic group must remain the majority carries an obvious risk of discrimination and coercion, especially when the same state rules over millions who lack equal political rights. Imagine Belgium declaring that Flemish people must always remain the majority, including in territories over which Belgium exercises control. You would rightly ask what happens to everyone else. That question cannot be avoided in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Palestinian citizens of Israel have citizenship and voting rights; Palestinians under occupation do not enjoy the same status. Erasing that distinction weakens the argument, not strengthens it. 6. The difference in how Israeli and Palestinian captivity is discussed reveals a hierarchy of attention. The Israeli hostages taken on October 7 are entitled to immediate release and humane treatment. Palestinians held without charge or trial, including under administrative detention, are also entitled to rights and due process. Reports of abuse in Israeli detention cannot be waved away, nor can hostage-taking be justified as resistance. More broadly, Palestinians in the West Bank live with the possibility of raids, arrest, settler violence and restrictions imposed by a power they cannot vote out. Calling them all literal hostages obscures this reality rather than clarifying it. 7. Israeli government spokespeople repeatedly promised that returning the hostages would end the 'war'. Yet the government's stated military objectives also included dismantling Hamas, and the release of hostages did not in itself guarantee an end to operations. The gap between the slogan and policy should have been examined every time. Hamas's hostage-taking was criminal, but that does not excuse bombing that endangers hostages alongside Palestinian civilians. Nor is there evidence for blanket claims that captives held by Hamas were well treated. Testimony points to profoundly different experiences, including severe abuse. 8. The media will emphasize that a small group of Palestinians ‘danced in the streets’ on October 7th, but will largely ignore the many, many instances of Israelis celebrating the death and destruction they are causing, mocking their victims, and claiming that they enjoy going to concerts more knowing that the Palestinians are suffering and languishing in tents. 9. Western politicians occasionally issue statements of concern while continuing military, diplomatic and economic support for Israel. The United States in particular has enormous leverage through military assistance, arms transfers and diplomatic protection. The reasons include strategic interests, domestic politics, military cooperation and historical commitments. You need not invent a secret financial explanation for every politician to see the contradiction between their stated concern for civilians and the policies they actually sustain. 10. Israeli military action is routinely described as self-defense; Palestinian violence is routinely described as terrorism. But the same standards should apply to everyone. Deliberately targeting civilians or taking hostages is unlawful regardless of the perpetrator. An occupying power cannot simply invoke security to justify every measure it takes, and Palestinians do not lose their rights because armed groups commit crimes. The labels should follow the acts, not decide the argument in advance. 11. U.S. officials are too often allowed to repeat claims about Israeli military operations without being pressed for evidence, while Palestinian advocates are asked to condemn October 7 before discussing anything else. That double standard deserves examination. Interviewers should scrutinize every factual assertion and every claim about civilian casualties, military necessity or the prospects for peace, regardless of who makes it. 12. Israeli violence will be swept under the rug with mysterious ‘blasts’ and ‘strikes’ appearing in headlines that do not assign blame. It’s almost as if godly forces intervene from the heavens to punish the enemies of the chosen people. 13. The resistance to the occupation uses terrifying words like ‘jihad’ and ‘intifada,’ but Israel gets away with labeling its operations in the most sinister ways, like ‘new order,’ and its AI kill machines get labeled ‘lavender’ or some such almost romantic-sounding name. What could be scarier? 14. Arguments about peaceful Palestinian resistance, Gaza's supposed freedom after 2005, and earlier peace negotiations are endlessly restarted from zero. The Great March of Return in Gaza in 2018–19, for instance, included large-scale civilian demonstrations and serious documented shootings of protesters, even while some participants engaged in violence. That is a more useful starting point than saying Palestinians never resist peacefully or are always peaceful. Likewise, previous proposals for peace were complex and contested; none should be advertised as a generous offer without examining borders, sovereignty, settlements, refugees and Jerusalem. The fundamental question is whether military domination can produce lasting security. A policy that perpetuates dispossession is unlikely to end resistance. 15. The U.S. will claim not to have known of Israeli plans to bomb some target, but that is a ridiculous argument to wash its hands in innocence. If they can’t be sure how Israel is going to use its weapons, then why do they keep supplying Israel with any weapon and any bomb it wants? 16. The U.S. presents itself as a mediator while continuing to arm Israel and shielding it in international diplomacy. That does not mean Washington controls every Israeli decision. It means American leaders have choices about the support they provide and the conditions they attach to it. ‘Our hands are tied’ is not a serious account of that relationship. 17. Many online defenders of Israeli policy do not attempt a serious discussion. ‘Cry harder.’ ‘Cope.’ Fantasies about opponents or Palestinians being killed. These are not arguments; they are attempts to make cruelty look like strength. The same goes for insults about people's appearance, gender or sexuality. That behavior is not exclusive to one political camp, but it is especially revealing when it accompanies a defense of civilian suffering. If the facts are on your side, use them. If all you have is an insult, you have nothing. 18. Republicans and Democrats differ over many issues, and they are not identical on Israel either. But bipartisan military aid and diplomatic support have survived administrations of both parties. The relevant question is why this support remains so durable even when American officials acknowledge serious humanitarian harm and settlement expansion. Obviously Israel has had noticeable success in essentially 'buying' US politicians via AIPAC and via withholding support to and via orchestrated media attacks on anyone who criticizes Israel a little too vocally and still hopes to run for office. 19. Anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia too often receive less attention than they deserve. Palestinian and Arab lives are treated as abstractions, their societies reduced to militants, religious slogans and security problems. Criticism of Israel is sometimes unfairly conflated with antisemitism; hostility toward Arabs and Muslims is sometimes excused as realism about the Middle East. Neither should be tolerated. The historical and political complexity of these societies deserves the same attention given to Western ones. 20. Palestinian and Lebanese armed leaders are often described without the history that shaped them: displacement, war, occupation, humiliation and loss. Context is not exoneration. Understanding why people take up arms does not require approving attacks on civilians. Nor does condemning such attacks absolve Israel of responsibility for conditions created by its policies. If the question is how to end violence, examining what produces it is indispensable. 21. The phrase ‘we are not your grandparents’ Jews anymore’ is sometimes presented as a declaration of strength. But why should the memory of Jews murdered in the Holocaust be turned into an argument for treating another population without regard to its rights? The Holocaust was a catastrophe inflicted on Jews, not a political blank cheque for a state. Invoking it to silence scrutiny of present-day policies cheapens the moral lesson one ought to draw from it. 22. Discussion gets trapped in endless arguments about terminology: terrorism, human shields, apartheid, self-defense, genocide, what October 7 was, what previous wars were. Some of these terms have precise legal meanings and must be investigated rather than casually asserted or dismissed. But an argument over labels must not become a substitute for the essential question: what arrangement would give Israelis and Palestinians genuine security, freedom, equal rights and a future? Any just solution must confront occupation, settlement expansion, displacement and the denial of Palestinian self-determination. 23. And then there is the claim that Israel ‘gave Gaza back’ to the Palestinians in 2005, as a great act of goodwill. First, Israel did not own Gaza to give it away. It occupied the territory in 1967. In August–September 2005, it removed about 8,500 settlers and its permanent ground forces; it did not transfer sovereign control of Gaza to a Palestinian state. The withdrawal was unilateral, not a negotiated peace settlement. Israel retained decisive control over Gaza's airspace, maritime access and most external movement, while Egypt also controlled its own border crossing. The International Court of Justice concluded in 2024 that Israel continued exercising important elements of authority over Gaza after 2005, with corresponding obligations under the law of occupation. The more comprehensive blockade dates to 2007, not 2005, although severe access restrictions already existed before and after withdrawal. Why withdraw at all? The settlements had become a costly security commitment. A few thousand settlers, surrounded by more than a million Palestinians and defended by soldiers, required checkpoints, fortified routes and enormous military resources. The Second Intifada and Palestinian armed attacks made protecting those settlements dangerous and politically expensive. This does not mean the Israeli army was literally incapable of holding Gaza. It means maintaining scattered settlements there had become an increasingly unattractive use of military power. The army could leave the settlements and defend the perimeter instead. And look at the West Bank. Sharon's own 2004 disengagement plan anticipated that substantial West Bank settlement areas would remain part of Israel in a final arrangement. His senior adviser Dov Weisglass described the withdrawal as a means of freezing the peace process and indefinitely postponing discussion of a Palestinian state. While Israel evacuated Gaza's settlements and four small settlements in the northern West Bank, the larger settlement project in the West Bank continued. It would be inaccurate to claim all the Gaza settlers were simply transferred to the West Bank; that is not what happened. The stronger argument is political: relinquish an expensive, isolated settler presence in Gaza while preserving and consolidating claims to much more consequential territory in the West Bank. A tactical retreat can serve a wider strategy of entrenchment. Calling that ‘giving Gaza back’ mistakes the evacuation of settlements for the granting of freedom. Sources for Gaza point 23, specifically: - Israeli Government, Over-All Concept of the Disengagement Plan, 15 April 2004: gov.il/en/pages/over-all-con… - Congressional Research Service, Israel’s Disengagement from Gaza, September 2005: everycrsreport.com/reports/R… - International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion, 19 July 2024: icj-cij.org/node/204176 - Dov Weisglass interview discussed in The Guardian, 7 October 2004: theguardian.com/world/2004/o… - UN OCHA, Gaza Strip Access Report, September 2005: un.org/unispal/document/auto…