The Argument Guide

The record

Palestine was never empty: at the time of the Balfour Declaration (1917) more than 90% of its people were Arabs who owned about 97% of its land, and as late as 1945 Jews owned only 5.67% of it — the 'empty land' was a slogan, not a demography.

The record

Plan Dalet, issued by the Haganah high command on 10 March 1948, instructed commanders on 'destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously,' and, in the event of resistance to a search, that 'the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.' It was issued two months before any Arab state army entered Palestine, and by the time they did, Israel's own intelligence service counted around 391,000 Palestinians already displaced.

The record

Israel's own intelligence service concluded in June 1948 that about 70% of the Palestinian exodus was caused by Jewish military action and only some 5% by orders from Arab institutions — and no blanket Arab-leadership evacuation order has ever been found in the archives examined by Israeli and other historians.

The record

The Palestine National Council accepted Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and declared Palestinian statehood on 15 November 1988, an offer to settle on 22 per cent of historic Palestine; the Arab Peace Initiative of 28 March 2002 offered Israel, from every Arab state, an end to the conflict and 'normal relations' in exchange for withdrawal to the 1967 lines, a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a 'just and agreed solution to the Palestine refugee problem in accordance with United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 (III).' Both stood unanswered. Meanwhile the settler population Israel maintains in the occupied territory reached about 465,000 in the West Bank and 230,000 in East Jerusalem by 2023.

The record

Return was blocked by decision and by demolition. Major General Avraham Tamir described the policy in a recorded interview later sealed by Israel's Defence Ministry: 'Ben-Gurion lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the villages] so they won't have anywhere to return to... within 48 hours I knocked all those villages to the ground. Period. There's no place to return to.' The Absentees' Property Law of 1950 then vested the refugees' land, homes and bank accounts in a state Custodian, and UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948, which resolved that refugees wishing to return 'should be permitted to do so,' has never been implemented.

The record

The idea is in the movement's founding documents. Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary on 12 June 1895 that the movement should 'spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country,' adding that 'both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.' David Ben-Gurion recorded in his diary on 12 July 1937 that 'the compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had.' The Jewish Agency created a Transfer Committee in 1937, another in 1948.

The record

Apartheid is a defined crime, not an epithet. The Rome Statute, Article 7(2)(h), defines 'the crime of apartheid' as 'inhumane acts... committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.' Israel's own B'Tselem (January 2021), Human Rights Watch (April 2021) and Amnesty International (February 2022) each concluded that the definition is met, and on 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice held that Israel's legislation and measures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem 'constitute a breach of Article 3 of CERD,' the article that condemns racial segregation and apartheid.

The record

The Knesset's own English text of Basic Law: Israel — the Nation State of the Jewish People (2018) states at clause 1(c) that 'the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People,' at clause 7 that 'the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation,' and at clause 4 that Hebrew is 'the language of the State' while Arabic has only 'a special status.' It is a Basic Law — constitutional rank — and it contains no equality clause. Adalah's database lists more than 65 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens and residents.

The record

UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948 resolved that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace 'should be permitted to do so,' and the right to return to one's own country is also codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 13(2)) and the binding ICCPR (Art. 12(4)).

The record

One side holds sovereignty over the other. On 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice found, by eleven votes to four, that 'the State of Israel's continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,' and by fourteen to one that Israel must 'cease immediately all new settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers.' In Area C — over 60 per cent of the West Bank — a UN OCHA factsheet produced in October 2018 recorded some 300,000 Palestinians living in 532 residential areas — figures its own charts label 2013 — alongside 400,000 Israeli settlers in about 230 settlements, with less than 1 per cent of Area C covered by an approved Palestinian planning scheme and under 3 per cent of Palestinian building permit applications approved between 2009 and 2016.

The record

Palestine was a cultivated, exporting country long before Zionist settlement: the Mandate's own 1945 statistics show Arabs holding 84.7% of the cultivable land to the Jews' 12.8%, and Zionism's own Ahad Ha'am reported in 1891 that it was 'hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled.'

The record

An ancient connection is documented, but so is its limit: the Israelite kingdoms ruled parts of the land for some centuries ending in 586 BCE, the land was continuously inhabited by others for the two and a half millennia since, and no legal system treats a 2,500-year-old sovereignty as a deed to displace a country's living population.

The record

Resolution 181 (II) awarded 56% of Palestine to a Jewish community that was 32% of the population and owned about 6% of the land, and the proposed Jewish state would itself have held nearly as many Arabs as Jews — rejection by the two-thirds majority was the predictable democratic response, and a General Assembly recommendation cannot extinguish a people's rights.

The record

The evidence is in the Israeli state's own archives, which is why Israel has been removing it. The Akevot Institute documented, and Haaretz reported on 5 July 2019, that Malmab — the Defence Ministry's security department — has withdrawn hundreds of documents on 1948 from Israeli archives, including material previously cleared by the military censor and in some cases already published. Yehiel Horev, who headed Malmab for two decades until 2007, acknowledged launching the project and defended concealing the events of 1948 on the grounds that uncovering them could generate unrest among Israel's Arab population.

The record

Using human shields is a war crime under IHL, but it does not suspend the attacker's own duties of distinction, proportionality and precaution — and the UN's 2009 Gaza fact-finding mission, while documenting that Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians as shields, found no evidence that Palestinian armed groups forced civilians to shield their operations.

The record

Palestinian citizens of Israel do vote, but the state's own laws document a different structure: automatic immigration rights for Jews only (Law of Return, 1950), confiscation of refugee property (Absentees' Property Law, 1950), a 2018 Basic Law reserving national self-determination 'unique to the Jewish people,' and over 65 laws Adalah classifies as discriminatory.

The record

Occupation is a question of effective control, not troop locations: after 2005 Israel kept control of Gaza's borders, airspace, territorial waters, population registry and economy, which is why the UN Security Council (Res. 1860, 2009), the ICRC, Human Rights Watch and the ICJ continued to treat Gaza as occupied.

The record

Self-determination is universal, but it is not a license to extinguish another people's rights: in 1975 the UN General Assembly determined that Zionism, as practiced, was 'a form of racism and racial discrimination' (Res. 3379) — a resolution repealed in 1991 as Israel's condition for attending the Madrid Conference, not because the underlying question had been resolved.

The record

Disproportionate force has been stated as doctrine by the officers who designed it. Major General Gadi Eisenkot, then head of Israel's Northern Command, said in October 2008: 'What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on... We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases... This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.' The UN fact-finding mission that recorded the statement noted he made it while in active service in a senior command position.

The record

Israel's own senior leaders later said otherwise on the record: Prime Minister Begin listed 1967 among Israel's wars of choice and admitted 'we decided to attack him,' and Chief of Staff Rabin said of Nasser, 'I do not think Nasser wanted war... He knew it and we knew it.'

The record

Self-determination is the right of each people in its own country, not an interchangeable commodity by language group — the UN recognized the Palestinian people's inalienable rights, including return to their homes, in Resolution 3236 (XXIX) of 1974, and no state would accept the same argument for itself.

The record

Antisemitism — hatred of Jews as Jews — is real and must be fought, but the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Stern, himself warns it was never meant to police political speech, and the Jerusalem Declaration, signed by hundreds of scholars of Jewish and Holocaust studies, states that evidence-based criticism of Israel, including comparisons to settler-colonialism or apartheid, is not in itself antisemitic.

The record

The documented record shows an Arabic-speaking Palestinian society with its own press, politics and institutions long before 1948 — the newspaper Falastin was founded in Jaffa in 1911 — and the claim mostly confuses the (normal) modernity of all national identities with non-existence.