My notebook: 15 essential facts about Israel-Palestine, plus 3 thoughts about the prisoner/hostage swaps
Not all facts, ideas, insights, and experiences are created equal. Here are the best things I encountered, learned, experienced, or thought about recently.
Three thoughts about the Israel-Palestine prisoner/hostage swaps
- Thought number one: It appears like Israel is trading roughly three prisoners for every hostage it gets back. In reality, it is trading no prisoners for hostages, because all of the prisoners it is releasing will either be killed or re-arrested once the IDF renews the fighting.
- Thought number two: I do not believe the IDF will stop until they have scoured every inch of Gaza, nor should they in my view, pending someone proposing an alternative course for Israel that actually makes sense. So far I’ve only heard a lot of mouth-artistry on the subject of an alternative Israeli policy. Everyone wants the killing to stop, but no one has a good idea about an alternative strategy for Israel to defend itself.
- Thought number three: The real price Israel will pay for the swaps is the death of more IDF soldiers as Hamas uses the cease-fires to rebuild its defenses.
15 essential facts about Israel-Palestine
I’m working on a number of articles about Israel-Palestine, and here are some basic facts that will inform what I’m writing. I will also be creating other fact sheets about other aspects of the issue, including the settlements on the West Bank, various peace proposals of the past, and the Arab Israeli wars. If this interests you, please subscribe.
#1: There are roughly 16 million Jews worldwide. Seven million of them reside in Israel, of which about 500,000 are in the disputed West Bank (the infamous settlements). Another 6 million Jews live in America, while the remaining 3 million are spread around the world.
#2: There are 22 nations in the Arab League, including ersatz Palestine, with a combined population of nearly half a billion people. Most Arab nations are autocracies with limited human rights. By comparison Israel is a democracy where Arabs have the same civil rights as Jews.
#3: Arab countries cover more than 5 million square miles, whereas Israel covers less than 9,000 square miles. The size of Israel is essentially a rounding error when compared to the land ruled by Arabs.
#4: A little over 3 million Arabs live in the West Bank and 2 million live in Gaza. Some sources I found report numbers that are the reverse of this.
#5: Two million Arabs are Israeli citizens with full civil rights.
#6: More than 100 Arabs have served in the Knesset (Israel’s legislature) and 10 serve there currently.
#7: Nearly 8% of Israeli judges are Arab, as is one member of the Supreme Court.
#8: Arab citizens are not compelled to serve in the military the way Jewish citizens are, but some Arabs do serve and the benefits attached to military duty are also open to Arabs through other types of service.
#9: Numerous opinion polls and studies suggest that Arab-Israelis are strongly supportive of Israel, though with some reservations.
#10: The number of Jews and Arabs in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza is roughly equal at 7 million for each side, although Arab birth rates are much higher than Jewish birth rates.
#11: Gaza is 140 square miles in area, about half the size of Singapore. Some people claim Gaza is the most densely populated area in the world, but its density is actually similar to London, or Tel Aviv. Gaza has been described as an open-air prison, but it could also be described as some of the best beachfront property in the world.
#12: Israel has been accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide, but it’s a strange kind of genocide where the population of those who are being ethnically cleansed — Palestinian Arabs — keeps rising. Meanwhile, minority populations in the West Bank, Gaza, and most Arab countries, have almost completely vanished. If any ethnic cleansing is happening it’s being conducted by Arabs against non-Muslims.
#13: Israel has also been accused of being an apartheid regime, but it’s a strange kind of apartheid where the supposedly persecuted minority — Arabs — have the same rights as the supposed persecutors, Israeli Jews. There are definitely walls and checkpoints that restrict the movements of Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank, but that’s because some of the people there have recruited their children to conduct suicide bombings against civilians in Israel proper. These bombings have killed both Jews and Arabs. The walls and checkpoints have ended this practice.
#14: The Hamas charter calls for the complete destruction of Israel. This would be ethnic cleansing writ large. Since it might also involve the murder of half of the world’s Jews, it might also be appropriate to call that genocide.
#15: The president of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas, has asserted that the Jews deserved the Holocaust. Abbas also recently claimed that the Israelis, not Hamas, caused most of the death and destruction against Israeli civilians on October 7th. Can you perhaps understand why a “two-state solution” has not yet occurred, and probably never will? You can’t make a deal with people who want to murder you.
Coming up in a future article: “What is anti-Zionism and what do anti-Zionists want?” If that interests you, please subscribe.
Copyright © Perry Willis 2023
Thank you to John McAlister for making my work possible.
Perry Willis is the co-founder of Downsize DC and the Zero Aggression Project. He co-created, with Jim Babka, the Read the Bills Act, the One Subject at a Time Act, and the Write the Laws Act, all of which have been introduced in Congress. He is a past Executive Director of the national Libertarian Party and was the campaign manager for Harry Browne for President in 2000.
