Argument Β· heard on both sides
βTheir leader isn't even from here: Netanyahu is Polish, Arafat was Egyptian.β
Look at who leads them. Israel's founders came from Poland and Russia, and Netanyahu's family is Polish; Arafat was born in Cairo and spoke with an Egyptian accent. A people whose leaders come from elsewhere doesn't really belong to the land.
Is this an actual argument? We haven't yet found it in a public source
Traps in play:β Judging by origin
Why people find it convincing
- Most of Israel's founding leaders were born in Eastern Europe: David Ben-Gurion in PΕoΕsk (1886), Golda Meir in Kyiv (1898). Benjamin Netanyahu's father, the historian Benzion Netanyahu, was born in Warsaw (1910) as Benzion Mileikowsky.
- Yasser Arafat was born in Cairo in 1929 and grew up partly there; he later claimed to have been born in Jerusalem.
- Both national movements were in part created by people from elsewhere, with ideas from elsewhere: European nationalism for the Zionists, Arab nationalism for the Palestinians.
What's true
Both founding generations were often born elsewhere.
Zionism was organised in Europe, and most of its leaders until the 1970s were immigrants. Palestinian nationalism's leaders also often lived or were born outside the land, in Cairo, Beirut, Damascus or Kuwait, especially after 1948, when the movement was built in exile. Both facts are real, and each side's arguments use the other's.
What's left out
A leader's birthplace says nothing about a people, and both leaders had roots in the land.
Netanyahu himself was born in Tel Aviv in 1949; most Israelis alive today were born in the land, and about half of Israeli Jews descend from Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, who were never Polish. Arafat's mother came from a Jerusalem family, and after her death he spent part of his childhood in Jerusalem with relatives; Mahmoud Abbas was born in Safed. Most Palestinians alive today were born in the land or in the camps around it. Judging a people by its leader's birthplace, or his father's, is the genetic fallacy (see 'Judging by origin'), and it proves nothing either way.
Traps here:β Judging by origin
Where it leads if pressed
The 'real locals' contest, whose logic removes both peoples.
Pushed further, the argument becomes a contest over who are the 'real' natives (see 'Only a small share of ancient Jews ever left; Palestinians are the real descendants of the ancient inhabitants, and today's Jews are mostly Europeans.' and 'Most Palestinians are descendants of recent Arab immigrants who came for the jobs Zionism created; the real locals were only a few villagers and tribes.'). Applied fairly, it disqualifies both: millions of Israelis whose families came in the last century, and many Palestinians whose families arrived in the 19th and 20th centuries too. Its only consistent conclusion is that someone has to leave, which is where the solutions that need a people to disappear begin. The honest version stops earlier: both peoples are there now, most of them born there, and neither is going anywhere.
Traps here:β The strict enemy frame