Bayit · The truth about Israel, and how to defend it

The full file

Everything, in order

Fourteen sections. Nobody needs all of this to hold their ground in an argument, which is what the board is for. This is here for when you want the whole thing.

Bayit

This is the place we're talking about.

Before the arguments, before the headlines. A country the size of New Jersey, with a coastline, a desert, and about ten million people living ordinary lives in it.

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Part one of five

The place, and the people in it

Before a single argument. Who actually lives there, counted by the state itself, and how the last three thousand years put them where they are.

Section 02

The land and the people

The word that does the most work against Israel is “colonizers”. It is a strong word, and it carries a picture with it: Europeans arriving somewhere they had no connection to, and displacing the people who were there. So look at who lives in Israel, and where they came from, and decide whether the picture fits.

Who lives there, by the state's own count

Every figure here comes from Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, published at the start of 2026. It is the government's own number, which cuts both ways: it is authoritative about its own population and it is a party to the argument. Where a category is contested, we say so on the card.

The Druze town of Majdal Shams in northern Israel — Majdal Shams, a Druze town in the north. The Druze are a distinct religious community with their own history, and in Israel the men are conscripted alongside Jewish Israelis. Photo: Staselnik, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Seven groups, and where each one came from

Tap through them. The point of this is not that Israel is a nice place. The point is that “a European colony” is a factual claim about who lives there, and it can be checked.

A market stall in the white market in the old city of Acre — A stall in the white market, old Acre. Acre is a mixed city, Jewish and Arab, Muslim and Christian, and has been for a very long time. Photo: Lizzy Shaanan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

How far back does this go

Two objects, both dug out of the ground, both older than most countries currently on a map. Read the honesty note under them before you use either one in an argument, because on its own an old stone loses to a good opponent.

Pocket answer · “Israelis are white European colonizers”

Ask them a question first. Which Israelis? About half of Israeli Jews descend from families who were living in Baghdad, Sanaa, Fez, Tunis, Cairo and Tehran, and who left or were driven out between 1948 and the early 1970s. Roughly 160,000 more came from Ethiopia. Then give them the other half of the answer: 21 percent of Israeli citizens are Arabs, they vote, they sit in the Knesset, and one of them sits on the Supreme Court. Colonizers do not usually run from the country they came from, and they do not usually give the vote to the people they supposedly displaced. That does not settle who should govern the West Bank. It does settle whether “colonizers” is a description or a slogan.

Section 03

The timeline

Sixteen dates. Every one has a card with three parts: what happened, what is still argued about, and where to read the document yourself. The middle part is the one nobody else gives you.

The Roman aqueduct running along the beach at Caesarea — The Roman aqueduct at Caesarea, built under Herod and extended by Hadrian. Canaanites, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and the British have all governed this coastline. That is the actual timeline, and it is why nobody gets to claim the map was blank when they arrived. Photo: Shai knaani, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What this timeline will not do. It will not tell you that one side was always right. Nineteen forty eight created a state and it also emptied more than four hundred Arab villages, and about 700,000 Palestinians became refugees. Some fled, some were driven out, and which happened where is still argued by serious historians with access to the same archives. We are not going to pretend that is settled, because it is not, and because a page that pretends it is settled will not be believed about anything else.

Pocket answer · “Israel has never accepted a Palestinian state”

Give them the list and let them check it. Nineteen thirty seven, the Peel Commission proposes partition, the Zionist leadership takes it to a vote and negotiates, the Arab Higher Committee rejects it. Nineteen forty seven, the UN votes for partition, the Jewish Agency accepts, the Arab League rejects and five armies invade. Two thousand, Camp David and then the Clinton Parameters, Barak accepts, Arafat does not counter. Two thousand and eight, Olmert offers roughly the whole West Bank with land swaps, Abbas does not respond. Then say the part that keeps you honest, because they will find it anyway. Israel has also never dismantled the settlement enterprise, no Israeli government since 2009 has put a full offer on the table, and the current one openly opposes a Palestinian state. Both of those are true at the same time.

Part two of five

The arguments everybody is having

Five of them, in order. Life under each government, how the war has actually been fought against the way everyone else fought theirs, how the news gets made, the settlers, and what Hamas says about itself in its own documents.

Section 04

The comparisons

Two decks, same grammar. Pick two places and read them side by side, or pick a war and read it against Gaza. Every row carries a source.

Sunset over the city of Umm al-Fahm in northern Israel — Sunset over Umm al-Fahm, a city of about sixty thousand in northern Israel. Nearly everyone who lives there is an Arab citizen of Israel. So is the photographer. Photo: Moataz Egbaria, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Pick any two places. Same nine questions, both columns, a source on every row. Every row also has a go deeper button under it with the long version, which is where the detail a single cell cannot hold has gone.

Pick a war. It opens against Gaza, on the same five questions: what kind of fight it was, whether civilians were warned, what the toll was and who counted it, what weapons were used, and what happened to anybody afterwards. Read the block at the bottom before you use any of it in an argument, because it is the part that keeps this honest.

Section 05

How Israel fights

Almost every argument about this is really an argument about four rules that most of the people arguing have never read. So the rules go first. Then the sequence. Then the part where it fails, which is in here too.

The rules everything turns on

Learn these five and you are already ahead of most people arguing about this in public, on either side. Every one links to the treaty text or to the Red Cross database, not to a commentary about it.

The sequence, one step at a time

This is the procedure Israel says it runs before striking a building in a populated area. Walk it yourself, all the way to the bottom. The last step is the one that matters.

Two Iron Dome interceptors meeting rockets in the night sky over Tel Aviv — Iron Dome intercepting two rockets over Tel Aviv, 24 July 2014. The most expensive way ever invented to shoot down a rocket, built because the alternative was letting it land. Photo: MathKnight-at-TAU, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Does any of that make a strike lawful? Both cases.

Read the left column first. Two of the five entries in it were produced by Israel's own courts and Israel's own investigators, which is worth noticing before you read a word of them.

Pocket answer · “Israel is bombing indiscriminately”

Indiscriminate is a legal word with a meaning. It describes an attack that is not aimed at a specific military objective, or that uses a method which cannot be aimed at one. So ask which strike, and what the target was, because that is the only level where the word applies. Then give them the sequence: intelligence, legal review, leaflets, phone calls, broadcast, roof knock. Then say the honest half before they do. A warning does not make the strike lawful, the proportionality test still has to be passed at the moment of firing, and Israel's own investigation into the aid convoy strike found Israel's own procedure had been broken. You lose nothing by saying that. You earn the right to be believed about the rest.

Section 06

How the story gets made

This section doesn't tell you what to believe. It teaches you how to check. Pick a case, start at the headline, and click your way to the bottom of it.

Tel Aviv skyline at night — Tel Aviv at night. Ordinary life is the part that never makes a headline. Photo: Okruz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The UN, counted

We are accusing institutions of sloppy sourcing, so every number here links to the thing you would need to check it. Some go to a UN document. Some go to UN Watch's resolution database, which is a filterable index of the resolutions themselves and is run by an organization that argues one side of this. The honesty block under the numbers says which is which and where each one can be pushed back on.

Read it yourself

Five tells that a claim hasn't been verified. They work in every direction, including on us.

Section 07

The settlers

This is the hardest section on the site, and the one most likely to be turned around on you. So it is also the one where we concede the most. Read all of it before you use any of it.

The hills of Gush Etzion — The Gush Etzion hills, between Jerusalem and Hebron. Jewish families farmed here before 1948, were killed or taken prisoner in the war, and their children came back in 1967. Photo: Yair Aronshtam, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Who they actually are

The picture in most people's heads is an armed man on a hilltop. He is real. He is also the smallest of these four groups, and he gets his own card, with nothing softened.

Is it legal? Both arguments, in full.

Read the left column first. An answer only holds if the accusation has been stated accurately, so the case against Israel goes on the left, at full strength, in its own words.

What is actually there

Wine, a university, industrial parks, and about 48,000 Palestinians with work permits. Every number below comes from the Palestinian Authority's own statistics bureau or from an Israeli court.

The part we are not going to skip

If you only read the section above, you will walk into an argument you lose. Here is the case against, at full strength, with nothing shaved off it.

Pocket answer · “The settlers are the problem”

Start with the part that is true. The violent fringe is real, it got worse, and Israel's own courts and its own Prime Minister have said so out loud. Then give them the facts they do not have. Nearly a third of settlers live in two ultra-Orthodox cities minutes from the Green Line, and moved there because the housing was cheap. The third largest settlement is a Jerusalem commuter suburb. And Israel has removed settlements twice, Sinai in 1982 and Gaza in 2005, which means they can be moved, because they have been. The settlements are an argument about where a border goes. They are not the reason there is no peace.

Section 08

The other side's doctrine

This section is about Hamas. It is not about Palestinians, and the difference is not a courtesy, it is the entire section. So we are going to do the hardest thing first, before a single charter quote.

Read this before anything else on this screen. About 2.1 million people live in Gaza. Roughly half of them are children. Nobody under the age of 19 has ever voted, because there has not been an election since 2006. Hamas has arrested, tortured and killed Palestinians who protested against it, and that is documented by Human Rights Watch, not by Israel. Every quotation below is Hamas speaking about itself. None of it tells you anything about the family in the next building, and nothing on this screen supports anyone who says otherwise.

What Hamas wrote down in 1988

The 1988 Covenant is a public document. You do not need us to characterize it, and you should not let us. Yale Law School hosts the full English text, so read the articles in place and in order rather than taking anyone's word for the shape of them.

What changed in 2017, and what did not

In 2017 Hamas issued a new document. It is real, it is different, and people who argue about this badly either ignore it or oversell it. Here is both halves. The text we are quoting is the one published in full by Middle East Eye, an outlet that is not remotely pro-Israel, so nobody can claim we picked a hostile translation.

Fighting from inside civilian space

This is the part that changes the legal arithmetic in Section 05, so it has to be sourced harder than anything else here. Every item below rests on a UN body, a UN agency's own press release, or Hamas saying it on camera. None of it rests on the Israeli army.

What this does and does not prove

The criticism goes first here too, because the argument in this section is the one most often pushed a step too far.

Pocket answer · “Hamas is just the resistance / Hamas moderated in 2017”

Take the 2017 document seriously, because it exists and it is a real change. It drops the antisemitic conspiracy material from 1988 and says in Article 16 that the conflict is with the Zionist project and not with Jews as Jews. Then read Article 19 of the same document: there shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity. Both sentences are in one text, published on the same day. And Hamas never annulled the 1988 Covenant, its leaders confirmed at the time that the new paper sits alongside it. So the honest answer is not that nothing changed. It is that the language changed, the position did not, and you can check both in about four minutes because both documents are public.

Part three of five

Every accusation, answered

The strongest version of the claim goes first, in its own best words, with nothing shaved off it. Then the answer, then the place the answer is weak. Six cards, then a searchable bank of forty-seven.

Section 09

UNRWA

A UN agency built for one refugee population, running schools and clinics inside territory governed by Hamas. It is the single most winnable argument on this site and also the one most often argued badly. Here is the whole record, the parts that help and the parts that do not, and every report so you can read them yourself.

First, what it actually is

Most people arguing about UNRWA, in both directions, cannot say what it does or how big it is. Start here so you are not one of them.

The case against it

Seven items, in the order they happened. Each one carries the document you would need to check it. Where the evidence is an allegation rather than a finding, it says so on the card, because a card that overclaims here costs you the whole section.

The document at the center of this section

UN Watch, UNRWA's Terrorgram, 29 January 2024. UN Watch obtained a Telegram group of roughly 3,000 UNRWA teachers in Gaza and profiled thirty of them by name. The group carried posts celebrating the 7 October attack within minutes of its start, praising the killers as heroes, urging the execution of hostages, and using the phrase “apes and pigs” about Jews. Alongside all of that sit UNRWA training instructions, staff bulletins and employee lists, which is how the group's membership was corroborated.

It is the strongest single document in this section. It is also written by an advocacy organization that argues this case for a living, which we say here rather than letting somebody else say it for us. Open it and judge it yourself, which is the entire point of putting the link in front of you.

Open the full report (PDF) →

The half you say before they do

This is the part that decides whether the section above survives contact with somebody who has read the file. Every item here cuts against the maximalist version of the case, and every one of them is real.

So what is actually true

The reading room

Every document behind this section, in one place, with who wrote it and what it is worth. Read the ones that argue against us as well as the ones that argue for us. That is the only way you end up able to hold this argument in front of somebody who has done the reading.

What to say

Four lines, drilled. Each one concedes the true part first, because on this subject the true part is large and pretending otherwise is how people lose.

The Gush Etzion hills — The hills between Jerusalem and Hebron. Every argument on this page is finally about who gets to live on ground like this, and under whose law. Photo: Yair Aronshtam, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Section 10

Myth vs. fact

Every card: the claim, the strongest possible version of it, the evidence, and where the honest answer is complicated.

Section 11

The answer bank

The deck above walks you through six. This is the rest of them. Type in whatever you just heard and it will find it. Every entry is built the same way: the strongest version of the accusation first, in its own best words, then the answer, then the part that is hard, then one line you can say without notes.

Why this is long. Most guides give you ten talking points. Ten is enough to lose an argument with, because the eleventh thing is the one you will actually be hit with. If you searched for something and it is not in here, that is a gap and it should be reported, not papered over.

Part four of five

The part that is not an argument

Ordinary life, six people worth listening to including the critics, and what to do when someone you love has gone somewhere you cannot follow. Nothing in here is trying to win anything.

Section 12

The small human things

Every other section on this site is an argument. This one is not. It is a set of ordinary and not so ordinary things that are true about the place, and it is here because ten million people live there and almost none of them appear in any story you have been shown.

Sunrise over Agamon Hula with thousands of cranes on the water — Sunrise at Agamon Hula, during the crane migration. The valley sits on the flight path between Europe and Africa, and the birds stop here twice a year on their way through. Photo: Tomere, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Sunset on the beach in Tel Aviv-Yafo — Tel Aviv-Yafo, sunset. The beach fills up every Friday afternoon, and it kept filling up through the war. Photo: Josh Adamski, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

What this section is not. None of this is a defense of anything. A country can run one of the best disaster medical teams in the world and still be answerable for how it fights a war, and both of those are in this app on purpose. Kindness is not a legal argument, and we are not offering it as one. It is just true, and leaving it out would be its own kind of lie.

Section 13

Voices

Real people, real attribution, and a link to where each one said it. Nobody here is speaking for anybody else, and several of them contradict each other. That is the point of the section.

Why the critics are in here. A page that only quotes people who agree with it is a page you cannot learn anything from. So this section includes Israelis who call their own government's policy a disaster, and it includes a Palestinian who says the same about Hamas. Reading the people who disagree with you is how you find out whether your own position actually holds.

Section 14

When it stops being an argument

Every other section here answers a claim. This one is about what to do when the thing in front of you is not a claim at all. It is a story that has already decided what every fact means before the fact arrives.

Read this before anything else on this screen. This section is not really about Israel. It is about somebody you like. A man you served with, or grew up with, or sat beside at work for six years, has started posting things that do not sound like him, and your two options feel like fight him or mute him. One of those ends the conversation and the other ends the friendship. Nothing below is a script for winning. It is a way of seeing what you are actually looking at, and a way of staying in the room.

The shape, in three moves

It does not much matter which version you are looking at. The moves are the same every time, and once you can name them you can watch all three happen inside a single paragraph.

This story is nine hundred years old

Two accusations do most of the work in the modern version. Neither one was invented on the internet. Both are older than the United States, and the nouns get swapped every century or so while the sentence underneath stays exactly the same.

And here is what that does not mean. It does not mean the man who shared the post is an antisemite, and if you open with that word you will lose him in one message and hand him proof that you could not answer the substance. Almost nobody builds these stories. They inherit them. A shape this old was sitting in the culture before he was born, and when his life got harder and nobody credible explained why, it was already there with an explanation and a name to blame. Knowing where the shape came from is for you, so you can see what is being repeated. It is not a weapon to hit him with.

The three claims, taken seriously

Each one gets the same treatment as everything else on this site. What is true in it goes first, in full, before any answer. Skip that part and we are doing the exact thing we are complaining about. If these three arrived welded into one sentence, which is how they usually travel, the stacked-post drill in the Toolkit takes a real post apart claim by claim.

What to actually do with a friend

This is the part nobody builds, and it is the only part that changes anything. None of it is about the post.

Pocket answer · “Israel controls America” / “it's all a cover for Epstein”

Do not chase the whole thing, it is built so that you cannot. Take the strongest single piece and let it be true. Yes, the United States has given Israel 174 billion dollars, more than any country on earth since the Second World War, and the Congressional Research Service says so in a report written for Congress. Then hand them the same report. In 2003 the United States cut Israel's loan guarantees by 289.5 million dollars because it kept building settlements, and cut another 795.8 million in 2005. In December 2016 Washington sat at the Security Council and abstained, letting a resolution pass fourteen to nothing that calls the settlements a flagrant violation of international law. A country that is controlled does not get fined by the country controlling it. Then ask the only question that decides anything. What would change your mind. If they can answer, go get that thing and bring it back. If they cannot, you are not in an argument, no link you send will land, so stop sending links and stay their friend instead.

One person, no funding, and everything checkable.

What did they say to you?