1. “Israel has the right to defend itself.” True, if Israel was indeed defending itself, but since at least as far back as 1948 Israel has oppressed the Palestinians in a particularly vicious way and has tried with unusual persistence to restrict a people’s freedom. The Palestinians have a right to defend themselves against Israeli oppression. Since they don’t have a regular army, nobody who doesn’t live under Israeli oppression has any right to quickly condemn their methods of resistance at all times.

2. “Hamas uses human shields.” Even if true – the evidence is flimsy at best – this still makes the people who drop bombs on those supposed human shields mass murderers and still guilty of the most insane violence unleashed upon a population with 1 million children. Even if true, it never even made tactical sense to erase whole neighbourhoods and tear children’s limbs to shreds. So not only is Israel’s strategy outrageously immoral, it’s also been a strategic faillure. Palestinians now have even more reasons to resist and long term Israel is now more isolated, more despised and far less safe. The old guard who as a reflex defended Israel no matter what is dying (bye bye L. Graham) and the younger generations have time lines full of dead children murdered by Israel, even during a ceasefire.

3. “There is no genocide.” You can only claim that if you are uninformed enough to think that genocide only means ‘everybody has to be dead for it to genocide’. The modern interpretation of what is genocide was inspired by a jew and essentially it means you’re trying to stamp out the conditions for a people to develop as a people. What is happening in Gaza is one of the clearest cases of genocide ever.

4. “The Gaza death toll is Hamas propaganda.” Hamas would be ridiculously dumb if it did NOT help spread images of the horrific effects of Israeli bombs and drones on children, women and defenseless men. Amazingly they did not have to inflate the numbers. International organisations have confirmed that the casualty figures are mostly accurate. But if you really fall apart confronted by Israeli barbarity you can of course cling to the hope that all international organisations are merely anti-semitic and you can ignore all the amputee kids again.

5. “Israel left Gaza in 2005.” They pulled back circa 6,000 settlers and then injected hundreds of thousands of settlers in the West Bank. Israel had zero altruistic motivations when it ‘pulled back’ from Gaza. It used that withdrawal as a smoke screen to grab more of the West Bank. The truth is that at the time Israel lacked the stamina to hold on to Gaza, which would have required more troop presence and risked turning Gaza into a population time bomb. Imagine Gaza becoming de facto part of Israel and so many Palestinians threatening the majority status of jews in Israel. You have to be easily duped to believe that Israel broke down a few of its settlements in Gaza out of the goodness of its heart. It was a carefully calculated tactical move that went down well in front of the international cameras.

6. “Criticism of Israel is just antisemitism.” Yaaaaawn. This is the lamest one of all. If you talk about Catholic Spain or Catholic Belgium’s brutal colonial history it doesn’t make you ‘anti-catholic’, but if you dare disagree that little girls in tents deserve to have their bellies cut open by Israeli schrapnel you are somehow a jew hater. Suspiciously there is only one case where opposing someone’s violence automatically gets you accused of simply hating the religion/group identity of the murderer.