By Andrew Tucker, Director thinc.
The horrific scenes over the past days of Hamas militants proudly handing over Israeli hostages – alive and dead – to the Red Cross have shocked the world. It is hard to imagine any more brutal or grotesque infringement of international law and morals. But why is there no international outcry? Why is Israel pressured to beg to get back its citizens, forced to release hundreds of convicted Palestinian killers and terrorists in return for dead bodies of innocent civilians?
One reason is that many people have the idea that, while the atrocities of October 7th are to be condemned, Hamas is legitimately fighting to liberate the Palestinian people from a cruel and illegal occupation of Palestinian land. Underlying this is a narrative that is pushed in the media and in the United Nations that Israel itself is established on Palestinian territory.
This “occupation” narrative quickly morphs into the “genocide” narrative peddled by the likes of the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese – who argue that Israel itself is a colonial, genocidal enterprise.
The occupation/colonialism myth was invented when the UN was hijacked by anti-Western states in the mid-1970s. Since then, the United Nations has actively promoted the historically and legal false narrative that the Jewish State of Israel has no right to exist. In essence, the UN is seeking to destroy one of its own members – the Jewish State of Israel.
This “occupation” narrative was presented by the Islamic, Arab and African states to the International Court of Justice last year (2024). That resulted in a biased and one-sided advisory opinion declaring that Israel’s “occupation” of “Palestinian territory” has become illegal. According to the Court, no Israeli person (military or civilian) may be present in East Jerusalem, or Judea and Samaria (known as “the West Bank”) or the Gaza Strip.
The “occupation” narrative is a myth because it is based on lies. It pretends that the Palestinians are a people who have exclusively lived in the land “since time immemorial”. It denies the unique, deep and strong connection between the Jewish people and the land going well back before Islam conquered the territory in the 7th century AD. It denies the Jewish right to self-determination, and it ignores the mandate for Palestine, which is a binding instrument of international law.
