Coleman Hughes's Museum of Misrepresentations

Debunking His Disinformation on Israel-Palestine

Coleman Hughes recently wrote a rather puffed-up piece for Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, conceitedly framed as a coldly factual corrective to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s allegedly identity politics corrupted take on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Hughes faults Coates for “hasty research” and sloppiness. It is ironic then—but not surprising, in view of his record of disinformation on this issue, and others—that Hughes’s piece itself is a museum of factual errors.

This piece will highlight five illustrative examples of Hughes’s misrepresentations, including clear examples not only of “hasty research” but outright dishonesty on his part.

I. Arab Citizens of Israel Enjoy Legal Equality with Jews

In response to a passage from Coates’s new book The Message, which depicts Israel as a "two-tiered society" analogous to Jim Crow, Hughes argues that it is “simply not true” that “Israeli law treats Arab Israelis differently than Jewish Israelis.” This is already a dishonest framing, insofar as the Coates passage from which Hughes is quoting doesn’t refer specifically to Arab Israelis, but to all Palestinians in Greater Israel (especially occupied, non-citizen Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza):

However, even if we accept Hughes’s bogus framing, and focus entirely on the situation for Israeli Arabs, his claim of equality for Arab citizens under Israeli law is an outrageous lie. From political rights to civil rights to land rights, Palestinian Israelis live under a range of discriminatory laws.

On the subject of land, Israeli law aims at “Judaization,” which results in blatant discrimination against Arab Israeli (and other non-Jewish) citizens. For example, a full 13% of land in Israel is owned by the Jewish National Fund, a quasi-governmental entity that prohibits any non-Jew from renting or leasing its land. Under Israeli law, the JNF and its right to exclude any non-Jews from its land are protected, and vast amounts of Israeli land has been transferred by the state to the JNF, representing the state’s endorsement of the JNF’s ethnically-exclusivist land policies.¹

The ban on Palestinians accessing JNF land is just the beginning of the issue of land discrimination. As of 2006, about 80% of land in Israel was off-access to Palestinian Israelis, due to a labyrinth of obscure policies, laws, and regulations that aim at “Judaization.” Judaization also takes the form of targeting legally “unrecognized” Arab and Bedouin communities for eviction and demolition; for example, in July 2023, residents of the Arab village of Ras Jrabah in the Negev were ordered by an Israeli court to leave their homes so that their village could be demolished and their land used to expand the predominately Jewish city of Dimona. Similarly, a 2015 Israeli Supreme Court decision approved the demolition of Umm el-Hiran village and the eviction of the Arab-Israeli citizens living there to establish a Jewish town called Hiran.²

The Judaization process has gone on from the founding of the State of Israel, at which time the new state stole the land of over 700,000 Palestinians it had ethnically cleansed, and also confiscated about half the land of Arab-Israeli citizens for Jewish use. The history and ongoing practice of Judaization and the demolition of villages exposes Hughes’s portrayal of Israeli Arab citizens as enjoying equal rights as a bad joke.

II. Hughes’s Defense of Discriminatory Israeli Immigration Law

As part of his absurd quest to claim Arab Israelis enjoy total legal equality, Hughes defends the 2003 Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law as 'non-discriminatory.' This law largely prevents Israeli nationals from bringing their spouses to Israel, if those spouses live in West Bank/Gaza. Hughes argues—with what we are supposed to assume is a straight face—that the law is both non-discriminatory and solely about fighting terrorism.

Regarding the motivation behind the law, Hughes has fallen for the “hasbara” explanation, intended for Western consumption, that it was only about counter-terrorism. In fact, the law is principally about maintaining the ethnic demographics of Israel, and the terrorism of the Second Intifada was largely used as a political pretext to pass it. This was confirmed by former Israeli Foreign Minister, and current Leader of the center-Left Opposition to Netanyahu Yair Lapid, who said of the law in 2022:

There’s no need to shirk from the essence of this law. It is one of the tools to ensure a Jewish majority in Israel, which is the nation-state of the Jewish people. Our goal is for there to be a Jewish majority.

The fact that the law not only prevents the husbands but wives of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories from moving to Israel with their Israeli-Arab spouses calls the counter-terrorism rationale into question. For Palestinian women are extremely unlikely to be involved in a terrorist attack.

Even more pathetic than his claim that the law is solely about combating terrorism is Hughes’s refusal to admit that the law is discriminatory. Why not admit the law discriminates against Palestinian Israelis but defend it, as Israelis like Lapid do, on demographic (or counter-terrorism) grounds? The law cannot be said to exclude people based on geography rather than ethnicity, because Jewish settlers in the West Bank are exempted its provisions. This exclusion gives away the game and shows the law is not about excluding residents of the West Bank but about excluding a particular ethnic group: Palestinians, who are effectively banned from living with their Israeli spouses.

Worse still, Hughes misrepresents the facts in his attempt to defend this anti-Palestinian law. Hughes specifically claims that 155 Palestinians brought into Israel from the West Bank or Gaza “have been involved in terror attacks” since 2001.

Hughes provides no source for this claim, but I was able to track the 155 figure to Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service agency, which has a long history of torture and deceit. But even taking Shin Bet at face value, Hughes is misrepresenting what Shin Bet said.

According to Haaretz, Shin Bet claimed in 2018 that since 2001 155 Palestinians who held residency through marriage “were involved in some way in terror activity,” but that only 47 were involved in “terror attacks.” Notice the difference between this claim and Hughes’s claim that 155 were involved in “terror attacks.”

It’s not clear what participation in “terror activity” means if one did not participate in an actual act of terrorism. (Could it mean political support for groups like Hamas or Hezbollah?) But these are clearly different categories for Shin Bet, as evidenced by the fact that its figure for participation in terrorist attacks was only 47, versus 155 for “terror activity.”

To defend Israel’s discriminatory law, Hughes has therefore relied on a dubious source (the incorrigible torturers of Shin Bet), neglected to cite the source, and misrepresented its figures. He also omitted to mention the clear and publicly stated demographics based motive behind the law. He did all this in pursuit of a crackpot hasbara narrative that Israel does not discriminate under the law against its Arab or Palestinian citizens.

III. The Second Intifada

The third example of Hughes’s dishonesty and misrepresentation comes in his discussion of the Second Intifada. While Hughes is certainly correct to emphasize Palestinian and Hamas terrorism against Israeli civilian—including suicide bombings and bus bombings—as part and parcel of the Second Intifada, his overall discussion of the history is bent by misrepresentation and omission of important facts.

In the domain of factual errors, Hughes contends over 1,000 Israeli civilians died, when in fact slightly over 1,000 refers to the entire Israeli fatality figure. About a third of killed Israelis in the Second Intifada were in fact combatants, according to B’Tselem:

In attempting to portray the Second Intifada simply as a tale of Palestinian terrorism, Hughes also omits to mention the far greater number of Palestinian civilians killed in the Second Intifada (which was at least twice as large as the Israeli figure, and possibly three times as large). This is misleading by omission.

Hughes also misrepresents the causes of the Second Intifada and the radicalization of Palestinian opinion (which, according to a range of polling, was overwhelmingly anti-terrorism in the 1990s after Oslo, but before the outbreak of the Intifada) that fuelled it. Specifically, Hughes absurdly suggests that the cause of the Intifada was that “Israel had offered a historic two-state solution.” To avoid obstructing the flow of this piece, I will describe the actual causes of the Second Intifada in an Appendix at the end of this piece, and move on now to Hughes’s fourth misrepresentation.

IV. Lydda and Deir Yassin

Hughes blatantly lies about the views of historians on the massacres in Lydda and Deir Yassin, claiming that the historicity of these massacres are “subjects of ongoing dispute among historian.” The obvious goal here is to promote denialism of these massacres as a valid opinion, while shielding himself from under a veneer of “just asking questions.” In fact, denial of either massacre is an utterly fringe position; nowadays there are many more historians who (disgracefully) deny the Armenian Genocide, and nobody would suggest this denialism is mainstream.

The leading Israeli historian Benny Morris is a passionate supporter of Israel’s war in Gaza, and an open anti-Palestinian racist to boot. Yet Morris is also a genuine historian, and cares enough about the historical method to deprecate Israeli deniers of the Lydda massacre such as Martin Kramer as politically motivated, noting that Yiftah HQ had ordered “anyone seen on the streets” shot.

As to Deir Yassin denial, the only quasi-academic publication I’m aware of that promoted this view recently (before the opening of the Israeli archives in the 1980s and the emergence of the methodologically serious “New Historians,” fake Israeli historians, “chroniclers” and “propagandists” in the words of Benny Morris, denied the massacre) was a book by Eliezer Tauber, “The Massacre That Never Was,” and various other writings by Tauber. Tauber’s argument, which relies in large part on a bizarre semantical redefinition of the term “massacre,” was considered to be so ludicrous that it wasn’t even worthy of rebuttal; you’ll struggle to find more than one or two (derisory) mentions in academic journals.

This isn’t to say the traditional Palestinian-Arab version of Deir Yassin—of a pre-determined Yishuv policy to massacre the villagers there, and of hundreds of deaths—is completely accurate. As Morris (who of course accepts the historicity of the massacre) has said, Deir Yassin was not Srebrenica. But no serious historian disputes that large numbers of civilians and other non-combatants were purposefully killed at Deir Yassin, i.e. were massacred, including after all fighting had stopped. Hughes is lying when he suggests that it is an open question whether this was just a “battle.”

Relatedly, Hughes is also intentionally misleading when he says that “the Jewish civilians suffered many massacres in this war: at Kfar Etzion and Haifa Oil Refinery, to name two.” This is not false: Arabs massacred Jews during the war. But it misleadingly implies the scale of these massacres was remotely equivalent. In fact, in the closing chapter of his 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War, Benny Morris estimates that the Arabs carried out three massacres during the war, versus at least 24 for the Yishuv militias/IDF.

V. Genocidal Intent by the Arabs in the “Israeli War of Independence”

Hughes takes for granted that in 1948 the invading Arabs intended to exterminate the Jews, writing that the Jews “had every reason to expect another genocide” if they laid down their arms. But this claim is discredited by the work of the New Historians, and for that matter belied by the actual record of Arab violence against Jewish civilians during the war. The fact is that the five invading Arab armies committed zero massacres against Jewish civilians,³ despite overrunning multiple Jewish civilian settlements. In other words, they did not murder Jews who had “laid down their arms” (or never had arms to begin with).

There is no reason to think that if the Yishuv had given up on their dream of transforming Palestine (or part of Palestine, through partition) into a Jewish state, that the invading Arabs would have exterminated them. This particular piece of hasbara is all the more ludicrous when one considers that some of the invaders, namely the Jordanians, were not even consistently opposed to the establishment of the Jewish state, but flip-flopped on the question of Zionism.⁴ When partition was under consideration in the UN in 1947, the Arab leaders proposed to UNSCOP⁵ a policy for single state in Palestine where all current Jewish residents would enjoy citizenship, equal civil rights, and Jews as a group would have minority status (although all future Jewish immigrants would be banned).⁶

While one is more than entitled to scepticism about whether Jews would have enjoyed equal rights in practice, or whether a ban on future immigration is compatible with equal rights, the preferred policy of Arab statesmen in 1947 and 1948 was not mass murder. Hughes’s insistence on the traditional hasbara narrative of an Arab plan or intent for genocide in 1948 is unsupportable.

Conclusion

As with so many other pundits of his ideological type and set, Hughes has become an agent of disinformation when it comes to Israel. Despite an obviously surface understanding of the history and facts on the ground, he confidently asserts that this brutal ethno-state—with its 57-year occupation of its indigenous population, its ceaseless land theft and “Judaization,” its torture chambers, and its razing of the Gaza Strip—is a liberal democracy.

Appendix: The Causes of the Second Intifada

Hughes contends that the Second Intifada was caused because “Israel had offered a historic two-state solution.” The actual causes were twofold.

First, at a general level, the failure of the peace process to end the Occupation and create a Palestinian state, especially at Camp David in 2000, led to a state of hopelessness among the Palestinians, who concluded that the occupation would never end. This hopelessness led to an empirically measurable radicalization of Palestinian public opinion.

The second, more proximate cause of the Second Intifada was Ariel Sharon’s flamboyant appearance at Haram al-Sharif on 28 September 2000, which was interpreted both as a religious affront and a secular expression of Israeli expansionism into East Jerusalem. This gesture was all the more inflammatory since Sharon himself was well known as a mass murderer of Palestinians: his Unit 101 had gone door to door intentionally shooting women and children in the Ben-Gurion-ordered Qibya massacre of 1953.⁷

Palestinians rioted in response to Sharon’s appearance, throwing stones at Israeli security forces; the ISF responded with both rubber bullets and live fire, killing four and wounding 200 Palestinians. Out of this clash emerged the Second Intifada.

1. A 2009 Israeli Supreme Court decision theoretically allowed Palestinian Israelis to access JNF land. In practice, this can only occur if the land is transferred from JNF to the State first, and if compensatory land is also transferred to the JNF (compensation apparently is necessary for the injury endured by the JNF in allowing the indigenous population of Israel access to Israeli land).

2. For a description of the case, see Hadeel S. Abu Hussein, The Struggle for Land under Israeli Law (Routledge, 2022), p. 189.

3. Indigenous Palestinian-Arab militias committed three massacres against Jews during the civil war period (1947). Hughes could invoke these massacres as an argument for genocidal intention on the part of the Palestinian Arabs, but he is talking about 1948 specifically in the passage where I quote him. The argument would in any case be very weak given how many more massacres the Yishuv and later the IDF would commit against Palestinians.

4. Jordan had actually conducted a secret modus vivendi with Israel prior to the war, which set the stage for the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank. (The historian Avi Shlaim has unravelled this sordid history, which included a secret negotiation between King Abdullah I and Golda Meir weeks before the war.)

5. The Arab Higher Committee boycotted UNSCOP, but Arab leaders outside of Palestine made their submissions.

6. See Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Border: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 92-3.

7. See Benny Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford, 1993), pp. 258–9.