Is Violence the Answer?
by Aron Moss
Question: How should I respond to a work colleague who accuses Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people for the past 75 years?
Response: Genocide is an easy throw-away accusation to make. But it needs to make sense. So let's just look at the facts.
Genocide means attempting to wipe a people out. For this to happen, the population of that group would dramatically decrease. This is where this accusation of genocide hits a small problem.
The Arab population of Israel and the Palestinian territories has increased rapidly in the last seventy five years. If Israel is committing genocide, they are doing a horrible job of it.
In 1948, the Arab population of Gaza was around 80,000. By 1967, when Israel conquered Gaza, the population had grown to 394,000. In 2005, when Israel unilaterally left Gaza, the population had reached 1,299,000. Today it is over 2 million.
In that same time span, the Arab population of the West Bank grew from 585,000 to 3,176,500.
And in the areas that became the State of Israel, there were 156,000 Arabs in 1948. They became Israeli citizens, and today Arab Israelis number 2,080,000. In fact, the growth rate of the Arab population in Israel is 2.2%, compared with a Jewish growth rate of 1.8%.
This would have to be the most unsuccessful genocide in history. The numbers are going the wrong way. By contrast, if honest people wish to look for evidence of genocide in the Middle East, perhaps they should investigate the plummeting numbers of Christians in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq and Syria. There is only one country in the region with a growing Christian community. Can you guess which country that is?
Truth can be hard to find these days. Our superficial world favours slogans over substance, vitriol over intelligent debate, and propaganda over accurate information. The bigger the lie, the more likes. That's why the Jewish sages called this world “The World of Falsehood.” And that was before TikTok even existed.
But those same sages envisioned a future world, “The World of Truth.” Because truth will prevail in the end. It always does.
