By

 Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

July 15, 2026

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Jeremy R. Hammond 

To this day, defenders of Israel’s crimes recycle the tired myth of Zionist propaganda that the Palestinians aren’t native to the land. Here are the facts to confront them with.

The world has a huge problem. Since before the creation of the self-described “Jewish state” in 1948, a violent conflict has been ongoing between Zionist Jews and Palestinians, the destabilizing influence of which extends throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s joint war of aggression against Iran is inextricably tied to the Palestine conflict, for instance.

 

As an example of the conflict’s global reach, Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians were cited as justification by Osama bin Laden, the head of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, for the plane hijackings and suicidal crashes into the World Trade Center towers and Pentagon on September 11, 2001 (the “9/11” attacks).

The conflict is widely perceived to be intractable, unsolvable. And under current conditions, it is. But this is only true because the policies that perpetuate the root causes have persisted since before Israel’s creation in 1948.

The US federal government’s longstanding policy has been to support Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, including the ethnic cleansing by which the Jewish supremacist state came into being, the illegal occupation and Jewish settlement ongoing since 1967, the apartheid regime enforced by Israel from the river to the sea, and now the genocide in Gaza.

This criminal US policy has persisted for so long because so many Americans either openly support or silently consent to it.

The Influence of Christian Zionism

Americans support the policy for various reasons. People have their own confirmation biases. Prejudice against Arabs and Muslims among Christian Zionists, for example, causes them to refuse to see any impropriety in Israel’s actions. They choose to believe what they want to believe, deluding themselves as described in the book of 2 Thessalonians Chapter 2, versus 9 through 11.

Having no love of truth, they blind themselves to reality and refuse to believe what’s right in front of their eyes when it comes to Israeli violence against Palestinians.

Indeed, Christian Zionism preexisted modern political Zionism, and many Christians today view the establishment of Israel in 1948 as a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy; they believe that they “must support Israel no matter what.”

The more extreme Christian Zionists even hope to see Jewish extremists in Israel obtain an unblemished red heifer to conduct a purification ritual required to enable construction of the Third Temple on what Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call Haram al-Sharif (“the Noble Sanctuary”) or the Al-Aqsa Compound, located in the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem.

This plan envisions the destruction of the Islamic holy sites of the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque, which offense is eagerly anticipated to trigger the “end times” war of Armageddon that will usher in the return of Jesus the Christ (Yeshua HaMaschiach).

 

The Causes of Silent Consent

The religious beliefs of many Americans—including Congresspersons and other government officials—sufficiently explain their support for the US government’s criminal policy.

On top of that, there’s the monetary influence of the powerful “Israel lobby”, most prominently the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

However, AIPAC money isn’t required to explain the attitudes of Congresspersons toward the conflict when members of Congress are themselves ideologically Zionist.

The silent consent among the American public, by contrast, occurs primarily for two other distinct reasons.

The first is that properly informed Americans are too intimidated by the vitriolic attacks on anyone who dares to criticize Israel, such as the senseless equation of anti-Zionism with “anti-Semitism”—an ad hominem fallacy representing the height of intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice.

The second reason is that many Americans—probably most of them—are simply too dis-informed about the nature of the conflict to know any better. They do not speak out in opposition to the US government’s policy because they have no comprehension of its extraordinary criminality.

They simply do not grasp how their tax dollars are being forcibly expropriated and redistributed toward the perpetration of gross violations of international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and the Supreme Law of the United States of America.

Americans do not understand this because the mainstream media by and large fail to fulfill the function of journalism. Instead, the media serve the propaganda function of manufacturing consent for criminal government policies.

The Role of the US Mainstream Media and State Religion

In fulfillment of their propaganda function, and in alignment with predominant cultural prejudices, the US media still tend to archaically portray the Israel-Palestine conflict through the biased lens of Western civilization versus Oriental barbarism.

When not attributable to religious and cultural bigotry, the a priori assumption in the establishment media remains that while the government can do bad things sometimes, it is only because “mistakes” are made with the best of intentions.

Malevolent deeds are only attributable to individuals within the government, not a recognized consequence of the system of government itself.

Criticisms of ill intent may be leveled at whomever is president, for example, but only within the confines of partisan discourse: the false paradigm of “Democrat” versus “Republican” and narrow linear spectrum of “left” versus “right”—and support for the policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians is firmly bipartisan.

The administrations of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, for instance, have provided uninterrupted support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza; and the media establishment—epitomized by the coverage of the New York Times—has dutifully accommodated, such as the Times’ description of ceasefires as inexplicably “breaking down” as though both parties were equally responsible in instances where Hamas was honoring agreements brazenly violated by Israel.

The unquestionable premise in mainstream media coverage is that, despite well-intended mistakes or the actions of a few bad apples, the institution of government in Washington, DC, is a benevolent force for good in the world.

This is the state religion, which Americans are indoctrinated into since early childhood, particularly via the government school system; and journalists—or the professional propagandists who masquerade as such—are no exception.

This statist belief system completely warps Americans’ perception of the nature of the conflict and the US government’s role in it.

To solve that conflict and realize a just peace, therefore, most Americans need to forget what they think they know about the Israel-Palestine conflict. They need to be made aware of the conflict’s true nature.

Indeed, even describing it as a “conflict” is misleading as it’s really a violent settler-colonial project to dispossess Palestine’s native inhabitants that’s been ongoing for over a century, with the Jewish supremacist state still pursuing the Zionist dream of completely wiping Palestine off the map.

 

Popular Myths of Zionist Propaganda

One historical fiction many Americans delude themselves into believing—particularly, again, Christian Zionists—is that when waves of Jewish immigration into Palestine occurred under the League of Nation’s post-World War I “Mandate” system, the Jews encountered a land that was mostly uninhabited.

The oft-repeated Zionist slogan that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land” is believed to be literally true.

The documentary historical record is irrelevant to Americans indoctrinated into such Zionist mythology, except to the extent that they choose to believe claims by hoaxers who vainly cherry pick from or grossly mischaracterize primary sources to sustain their self-delusion.

Common arguments made by the unapologetic defenders of Israel’s barbarity against the Palestinians include the following:

• The name “Palestine” was invented by the Romans as a derivative of “Philistine” and applied to the province of Judea as humiliating retribution against Jews for the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 AD, which was preceded by the Jewish revolt of 66–74 AD, with the Romans having destroyed the Second Temple in 70 AD.
• The Palestinians are not indigenous inhabitants of the land.
• Palestine did not exist as a distinct territory under the Ottoman Empire.
• When the Jews immigrated into the territory called “Palestine” under the League of Nations’ Mandate, the area was mostly uninhabited, and Arabs only thereafter immigrated en masse to take advantage of the Jews’ economic development of the land.
• Because the land was devoid of inhabitants sharing a cultural and national identity, “Palestinians” are modern invention and hence do not constitute a people.

These ignorant and bigoted beliefs are easily dispelled by any serious examination, however precursory, of the historical record.

The Shared Ancestry of Jews and Palestinians

To start with, the Palestinians are indigenous to Palestine. DNA studies have revealed that they are descended from Canaanite tribes that inhabited the land before the ancient kingdom of Israel ever existed.

Moreover, contrary to the Biblical narrative of the Hebrew Tanakh, or what Christians call the “Old Testament”, the Israelites were not foreigners to Canaan but were themselves Canaanites. Scholars today distinguish the Israelites from Canaanite tribes not by genetic dissimilarity but by the Israelites’ separate cultural self-identity.

Consequently, Jews and Palestinians are highly genetically related. The Palestinians, Bedouin, and Druze are the three peoples most highly related to Jews because they share this same ancestral origin in the Levant.

 

The True Origin of the Name “Palestine”

Contrary to Zionist mythology, the modern name “Palestine” was not invented by the Romans to humiliate Jews but is derived from the common name for the region since the end of the Bronze Age (3300–1200 BC). Ancient Egyptian inscriptions from the twelfth century BC referred to “Peleset”, and ancient Assyrian texts referred to “Palashtu” or “Pilistu”.

For centuries before the Romans, the Greeks called the whole region “Palestina” or some variant, such as the name “Palaistine” used by the historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC.

Ironically, with Hebrew being a revived Canaanite language, some scholars believe “Palestine” is derived as a combination of the Hebrew word “Peleshet”, itself a derivative of the Egyptian Peleset, and the Greek word “Palaistês”, which can mean “wrestler”. This is interesting since in the Tanakh, after wrestling all night with an angel, Abraham’s grandson Jacob is given the new name of “Israel” by Yahweh (whose name in Christian Bibles is typically replaced with “the LORD”).

The word Peleshet appears more than 250 times in the Hebrew Bible and is transliterated as “Philistia”. It was used to describe a confederation of city-states in Canaan that included the city of Gaza and encompassed the area known today as the Gaza Strip.

Prior to the Jewish revolts in the first and second centuries AD, the Romans called the broader region surrounding the province of Judea “Syria Palaestina”. After the Bar Kokhba revolt, Judea was incorporated into a widened district of “Palestine”—a Latinized form of the common name for the region predating the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judea.

Under later Ottoman rule, Palestine was divided into five provincial districts, or “sanjaks”: Safad, Nablus, Jerusalem, Lajjun, and Gaza, which were administratively linked to Damascus under the larger province, or “eyalet”, of Syria.

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In 1872, the territory was reorganized into the locally administered sanjaks of Acre, Beirut, and Nablus, while the area from Jaffa southward became part of the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, which was under Istanbul’s direct control.

An administrative reorganization in 1887 resulted in Palestine being divided into the districts of Nablus and Acre, which were administered from Beirut, and the district of Jerusalem, which continued to deal directly with Istanbul.

While not an official territorial description under the Ottomans, the area continued to be popularly known as “Palestine” both locally and in Europe, as illustrated by the following examples:

• William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) referred to “Palestine” in his plays “Othello” and “The Life and Death of King John”.
• In 1865, the “Palestine Exploration Fund” was established in Great Britain.
• In 1911, the Arabic-language newspaper Falastin—the Arabic form of the geographical name “Palestine”—was established and went on to become the most prominent newspaper in Palestine through the 1920s.
• In a letter to Falastin, the governor of the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem called himself “governor of Palestine”.
• In 1932, The Palestine Post was founded, the name of which was changed in 1950 to The Jerusalem Post, now an Israeli newspaper.
• At the outset of World War I in 1914, the Ottoman government issued a military handbook titled Filastin Risalesi, which provided a demographic and geographic survey of Palestine, a territory identified as roughly comprised of the districts of Acre, Nablus, and Jerusalem.
• In 1915, British naval intelligence issued The Handbook of Syria and Palestine.

The fact that the region was known as “Palestine” under Ottoman rule is of course also attested in the language of the infamous 1917 “Balfour Declaration” itself, which was a promise from the British government to support the Zionist movement’s settler-colonial project to establish a “national home” for the Jewish people “in Palestine” (emphasis added).

Further illustrating the point, the Zionists likewise adopted the common name for the territory by referring to it as “Palestine”. A sufficient example is how in 1929, during the Mandate era, the World Zionist Organization established the “Jewish Agency for Palestine”—the name of which was not changed to the “Jewish Agency for Israel” until after the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel in May 1948.

Under Ottoman rule, most of Palestine’s inhabitants were Muslim or Christian Arabs, with a Jewish minority. Starting in the 1840s, there was a considerable influx of Jewish immigrants from central and eastern Europe. The population in 1850 is estimated to have been around 350,000, with about 85% Muslim Arabs, 11% Christian Arabs, and 4% Jews. By the early 1870s, the Jewish population had grown to about 25,000.

By 1907, due mainly to immigration, which at the time was only partly driven by political Zionism, the Jewish population of Palestine had grown to about 80,000, most of whom lived in Jerusalem, where there was a Jewish majority.

Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews had generally amicable relations. Practitioners of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam co-existed peacefully in what is often described as the Holy Land. This changed dramatically, however, because of the rise of the Zionist movement.

Zionism was initially rejected by many Jews who had assimilated into European cultures, and many Orthodox Jews likewise opposed Zionism because they viewed the secular political movement as heretical, an attempt by mortal men to reestablish Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel, in defiance of God’s punishment of exile for having violated His Covenant, without awaiting the redemption foretold to arrive with the Messiah, or anointed one.

(Yeshua, of course, is not recognized by practitioners of Judaism as the prophesied Messiah, which has led to Christian bigotry against Jews in addition to deep enmity toward Muslims, whose religious text the Quran more tolerantly describes both Jews and Christians as “people of the Book” and does recognize Yeshua as the Messiah.)

To this day, there are Orthodox Jews who are anti-Zionist and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom from Israel’s barbaric oppression.

 

How Great Britain Facilitated the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

In 1917, to gain Jewish support for the war effort, the British government issued its infamous “Balfour Declaration” in the form of a private letter from British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a member of the prominent Jewish family of international bankers. The letter promised British support for the Zionists’ settler-colonial project to reconstitute Arab Palestine into a demographically “Jewish state”.

With Rothschild himself proposing a draft of the statement to Balfour, the British insisted on modifying the language to avoid offending Arab populations in the Middle East, whose support for the war effort Britain had also sought to acquire with the promise of helping them to obtain independence from Ottoman rule. Thus, the phrase “Jewish National Home” was used in lieu of “Jewish state”, and lip service was paid to the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”—but not their political rights, i.e., the right to self-determination.

The significance of the Balfour Declaration is that it set Great Britain on a policy course that ultimately facilitated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by armed Zionist forces; namely, by the Haganah, the Zionist movement’s official paramilitary organization, in coordination with the Jewish terrorist organizations Lehi (a.k.a. the Stern Gang) and Irgun (a.k.a. Etzel).

After the Great War, the wording of the Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, which lent the color of law to Britain’s belligerent occupation of Palestine, the purpose of which was to prevent the Palestinians from exercising their right to self-determination in order to facilitate the Zionist’s settler-colonial project—a patent violation of the League’s own founding Covenant and ostensible raison d’être.

The implementation of that policy inevitably caused conflict in Palestine, and major outbreaks of violence against Jews occurred in 1920, 1921, and 1928. Apologists for Israel’s crimes attribute the Arab rioting to anti-Semitism, but as the British noted in each of their commissions of inquiry into the root causes, there was no inherent hatred of Jews among Palestine’s Arab inhabitants. On the contrary, the formerly peaceful relations that had once obtained were shattered because of the Zionists’ transparently stated goal of politically disenfranchising and dispossessing the land’s indigenous inhabitants.

That is to say, the root cause of the unrest was not anti-Semitism but anti-Zionism.

In 1937, the British Peel Commission Report proposed partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states and endorsed what it called a “compulsory transfer” of populations, which mostly meant the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arabs out of the territory proposed for the Jewish state.

As noted by Israeli historian Benny Morris, “The fact that the Peel Commission in 1937 supported the transfer of Arabs out of the Jewish state-to-be without doubt consolidated the wide acceptance of the idea among the Zionist leaders.” From then onward, there was “a virtual consensus” among the Zionist leadership in favor of ethnic cleansing.

“I am for compulsory transfer”, David Ben-Gurion told the Jewish Agency Executive in June 1938, for example. “I do not see anything immoral in it.”

The logic of the Zionists was succinctly stated by Benny Morris in 2004, when he told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore, it was necessary to uproot them.”

The idea of partition was resurrected after World War II by the United Nations’ Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which admitted the plan’s inherent inequity. The partition plan, the committee’s report conceded, would “run counter to” the “principle of self-determination” enshrined in the UN’s founding Charter.

The prejudicial partition plan was endorsed by the UN General Assembly in Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947. While the Zionists themselves cited that resolution in what they called a “Declaration of Independence”, contrary to popular myth, Resolution 181 neither legally partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, by which time a quarter million Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed from their homes in Palestine.

 

The Requisite Deindoctrination from Zionism

To conclude, if we ever hope to see peace in the Middle East, prevailing Zionist myths must be relegated to the dustbin of history and replaced with historical truths that many Americans may find discomforting, but knowledge of which they must gain to remediate the mass delusion.

That process of deindoctrination is a necessary step to achieving the paradigm shift required to render it politically infeasible for the criminal organization in Washington, DC, to persist in its longstanding policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.

Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent researcher and writer exposing state propaganda that manufactures public consent for criminal government policies. Sign up for his free newsletters at JeremyRHammond.com.

 

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics and logic in South Korea.

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VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

$280+ BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation
150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

 

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