The repetition of a lie turns it into truth for many people, especially if no one has ever told them the historical reality.

A series of maps of Israel are circulating on the Internet with slight variations that serve to simplify and caricature the history of the only Jewish state in the world and paint it as an aggressor and genocidal country. They are maps that respond perfectly to Goebbels’ maxim: the repetition of a lie makes it true for many people, especially if no one has ever told them the historical reality. Some of those who share it are ignorant: I was ignorant in the 1990s before I became interested in the subject. Many others simply hate Jews for the fact that they are Jews and the only Jew they appreciate is the one who died in the Holocaust, because he could not defend himself or fight for his survival as Israel does. And as with the best lies, these series of maps contain enough verifiable truth to pass for the truth.

The first and biggest lie is that they invariably start with a map of Israel in which 100% of the territory is painted as “historic Palestine”. The problem is that Palestine never existed as an independent Arab nation until the Oslo accords of the 1990s. Palestine exists today thanks exclusively to Israel, which ceded land conquered in war for the Palestinians to play at building a state. A failed state, indeed, incapable of guaranteeing peace, security and prosperity for its inhabitants, a state divided into two shortly after its birth and governed by terrorists from different factions.

To go back a long way, since Judea lost its independence to the Romans, the region has been a Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman and British province, with a couple of centuries as an independent Christian kingdom. Its borders, of course, were never what is painted to us today as “historic Palestine”. It was with the division of the Ottoman provinces into regions divided more or less arbitrarily by the United Kingdom and France during and after World War I that the British created something resembling that historic Palestine as an administrative division of the territory they came to dominate, which also included Jordan and southern Iraq. To give you an idea, those who claim to champion the Palestinian cause want Arabs to rule over a land whose borders were delineated by British officials and politicians by segregating it from “Transjordan”, today’s Jordan, in 1921 and which existed for a quarter of a century in the early to mid-20th century. That is what they call historic Palestine and that is the less than inalienable right they claim.

The partition of 1947

Another map that often accompanies it is that of the UN-sponsored partition of 1947 in which they divided the British mandate in two: roughly speaking, the Jews received the territories where they were in the majority, the Arabs those where they were in the majority and both a part of areas that were essentially empty. The presence of Jews in the region was due to the Zionist movement born in the 19th century, which claimed that the reason they were hated everywhere was because they did not have a country of their own like the other peoples of the world, so they decided to create one. After considering different possibilities, they ended up buying land in Palestine and making it prosper. It was especially in the interwar period that Jewish immigration, largely composed of the Marxist atheists who invented the kibbutz, changed the demographics of the region and attracted more Arab population than was there before their arrival, because a deserted and wasteland could suddenly offer jobs thanks to its higher productivity compared to local ways of cultivating the land.

Israel was born a year later with the end of the British Mandate and was immediately attacked by the surrounding Arabs. Their territory was completely indefensible and yet, outnumbered and almost by a miracle, they won the war and expanded into the territories they conquered by repelling the invasion. It was in the wake of the approval of the partition and the war that numerous Arabs living in Jewish territory left, some expelled by the Jews and others fleeing the violence, many of them convinced by the promises of their local leaders and the invading countries that they would exterminate their enemies in a very short time and be able to return. They never did. The 20% of the population of today’s Israel are mainly the descendants of those who in spite of everything decided to stay.

It is the descendants of the Arabs who left then who are still called “refugees”, giving rise to one of the many double standards that exist with regard to Israel. According to the international legal definition, refugee status is not passed on to your descendants, except in the Palestinian case. When we hear about the refugee camps in Jenin or other Palestinian localities, we are never told that there are no refugees there because they have all died of old age.

Another detail that these maps do not tell us is that after the Israeli victory in 1948, dozens of countries expelled their Jewish populations, some of them more than a thousand years old, and given the anti-Semitism reigning around the world at that time, they had no choice but to emigrate mostly to Israel. After the Holocaust, it is a decisive historical fact that explains why the Israelis will always maintain as non-negotiable their status as a Jewish state, a state of refuge for the Jews of the world. It also explains another of the double standards: those who clamor for a supposed “right of return” for the descendants of the Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 never argue for a similar right for the descendants of the Jews who had to leave their homes at practically the same time.

From this moment when Israel was born and earned its existence on the battlefield, the very definition of Zionism changed. They already had a country of their own and it was undeniable that they still hated them in spite of it. From then on, Zionist is the one who considers that Jews have the right to have and defend their own state. Anti-Zionist is therefore the one who thinks that the Jews are the only people in the world who do not have that right. Another double standard, the clearest and most blatant. That is why it is impossible to have an anti-Zionism that is not accompanied by Judeophobia, the hatred of the Jew for the fact of being a Jew, what has traditionally been called anti-Semitism. Because anyone who declares himself an anti-Zionist is saying that the Jewish people lack a right that they do not deny to others.

The Six-Day War and the beginning of the occupation.

Another common map in this series is that of the 1949 armistice. It shows the borders we know today between Israel and Palestine, with Gaza and the West Bank separated, following Israel’s withdrawal from part of those territories in exchange for peace. What these maps do not show is that these territories were not considered Palestinian or independently governed either. No, Egypt ruled Gaza and Jordan ruled the West Bank. And so it remained until 1967 when armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria and even Iraq massed on Israel’s borders. The Jewish state decided not to wait to be invaded and launched a rapid offensive known as the Six Day War in which it conquered the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

It was then that alliances in the area began to change on a global level and the continuous resolutions against Israel at the UN began. Israel began to stop being seen as a victim, because it had made it clear that it was the main military power in the region. The Western left began to shift to the Palestinian side and to treat Israel as the villain of the region. And together with the left, of course, Israel also lost the media, which turned from then on to a clearly anti-Israeli bias. That is why I, like so many others, shared the view that the Israelis were the culprits and the Palestinians the victims, because that was what was being sold by all the media and that is, therefore, what everyone who does not care too much about the issue thinks.

And so another map is born, in which the occupied territories are included as if they were Palestine when they were not: they went from being occupied and governed by Egypt and Jordan to being governed by Israel, and the Sinai peninsula is excluded to hide a key fact: that in 1978 it was returned to Egypt in exchange for a peace treaty. It is a fundamental event that ruins the whole narrative of an insatiable Israel that seeks only to occupy and dominate more territory and grow at the expense of its neighboring countries: how to maintain that fiction if the Jewish state gave up a region that was much larger than itself? How to paint Israel as the bad guy if the Jews concluded an agreement in which they gave up tens of thousands of square kilometers while the Egyptian dictator was assassinated for renouncing the war to recover them?

Egypt, of course, did not just enter into such an agreement. It had previously had to suffer yet another defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 50th anniversary of which was being celebrated when Hamas decided to carry out the worst terrorist attack in its history. As now, that joint Egyptian-Syrian invasion caught Israelis off guard when they were celebrating their holiest holiday and put them on the ropes, making them fear for their survival for the first time since 1948. The Israelis were short of ammunition, while their enemies enjoyed the support of the USSR. It was then that the United States, the great Satan, saved Israel with massive military aid and Israel became, of course, the little Satan.

The invention of the Palestinian nation

It was also in that decade between the Six Day War and the agreement with Egypt that Arafat invented the Palestine Liberation Organzation (PLO), gave a veneer of resistance and nationalist struggle to what until then had been a war between Arab states and the Jewish state. For the so-called Palestinians had never been or considered themselves a distinct and separate people from the other Arabs. That is why the British never offered the creation of an Arab state in Palestine as they did with the Jews in 1917: that Arab state already existed, Transjordan. Those we call Palestinians are as Palestinian as the Jews, Christians, Druze and other inhabitants of the area. Palestinian Muslim Arabs differ from Jordanians simply because they lived and live west of the Jordan. Nothing more. Arafat took it upon himself to invent a historically non-existent nation, a consciousness and a struggle waged in terms of national liberation that Westerners could understand and even support, something that religious and ethnic hatred, which is what really drives the Palestinian Arabs, could not achieve.

Apart from killing Israeli athletes in the Olympic village, the PLO took it upon itself through hijackings and bombings to ruin the flying experience for all of us, turning an experience equivalent to taking a bus into the nightmare of security checks and carry-on baggage bans that airports now are. After decades of terrorist campaigns, it expanded its actions beginning in 1987 with the so-called intifada, a widespread revolt that led Israel, again, to give up territory in exchange for peace. The Oslo Accords of 1994 gave birth for the first time in history to a Palestinian nation. This and no other is the only “historic Palestine”. But the quid pro quo, the renunciation of violence, never materialized, so that the gradual cessions of power that were to take place were halted. In 2000, Israel offered an agreement giving the Palestinians full control over Gaza and almost the entire West Bank, but Yasser Arafat, Nobel Peace Prize winner, chose to launch a second intifada.

Since then, the situation in the West Bank has remained in a sort of stable instability, if you will pardon the oxymoron. The violence has never disappeared, but it has been brought under control. The West Bank is divided into three zones, one dominated by Arabs, one by Israelis and a third with Palestinian political control but with security in Israeli hands. A map with only some areas of the West Bank marked as Palestinian, either only those it fully controls or these and the mixed ones, making us believe that this is the end point of a series in which the Palestinians have done nothing but lose territory. But the truth is quite the opposite. The Palestinians have today the first state in their history, with the largest amount of territory they have ever directly controlled.

In Gaza, the story is different. In 2005, Ariel Sharon ordered Israeli troops to evict Israeli settlers living in Gaza and then to leave the area completely. The idea was that, since Gaza was no longer occupied, it could go its own way without resorting to the violence that activists and leftist media still insist today was due to the “occupation”. But we know it didn’t work. Hamas won the elections the following year in the purest “one man, one vote, one time” style and turned it into a terrorist state. Correspondingly, in 2007 Israel moved to control as best it could everything coming into the country by land and sea, with the exception of Gaza’s border with Egypt, in a not entirely successful effort to prevent both Hamas and the other Islamist terrorist groups from arming and attacking them. The invention of the so-called Iron Dome has enabled Israel to limit the damage from rockets fired from Gaza, thus reducing, though not eliminating, its armed responses to Palestinian attacks.

The attack on Saturday, October 7, 50 years and one day after the start of the Yom Kippur war, was the culmination of the failure that has been the Gaza retreat and will change Israel’s strategy again. But whoever claims that this happened because of the occupation either knows nothing at all, or simply considers that Jews, just because they are Jews, have no right to be there and that their presence in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Haifa is in itself an occupation. And those people are not good people.