Most people never got the other half of the story. Here it is, with the receipts attached.
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.
The word that does the most work against Israel is “colonisers”. 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 actually lives in Israel, and where they came from, and decide whether the picture fits.
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.
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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.
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.
Sixteen dates. Every one has a card with three parts: what happened, what is genuinely still argued about, and where to read the document yourself. The middle part is the one nobody else gives you.
Pick any two places. Same questions, both columns, a source on every row. You don't have to take a position to read a table.
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.
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.
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.
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Read the left column first, the same way you did in Section 07. Two of the five entries in it come from Israel's own courts and Israel's own investigators.
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.
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We are accusing institutions of sloppy sourcing. So every number here links to a UN document, not to a commentary about one.
Five tells that a claim hasn't been verified. They work in every direction, including on us.
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.
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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.
Read the left column first. If you cannot state the case against Israel accurately, you have no business answering it.
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.
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.
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.
The 1988 Covenant is a public document. You do not need us to characterise 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.
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.
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.
The criticism goes first here too, because the argument in this section is the one most often pushed a step too far.
Every card: the claim, the strongest possible version of it, the evidence, and where the honest answer is complicated.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the part nobody builds, and it is the only part that changes anything. None of it is about the post.
Everyone else built a library. This is the gym. A hostile line lands, you get 20 seconds, you pick your response, and you find out whether it would have held.
Every answer in this app, collected on one screen. Tap Copy and it is on your clipboard, ready to paste into the argument you are already in. Screenshot them if you would rather have them offline.
Most of what you actually meet online is not one claim. It is four or five welded together, with the true ones placed on the outside. It works because agreeing with the true part makes it feel rude to check the rest. Here is the method, and then a real post from July 2026 run through it.
You will forget most of the numbers on this site. Do not forget these.
We publish this because a page that accuses others of sloppy sourcing had better show its own work.