Four History Tricks, and How Zionists Started the 1947 Palestine Civil War

To look like victims, Zionists hope you won’t notice the Shubaki family massacre

Irgun poster for distribution in central Europe, ca. 1931–38. It depicts “Erez Yisrael” in the borders proposed by the Balfour Declaration.

For most of my life, I thought there were three rules for lying about the past:

1. Invent what cannot be confirmed.
2. Omit what cannot be rationalized.
3. Rationalize what cannot be omitted.

But recently I noticed another:

4. Start histories where the other side looks worst.

I saw that when Israel’s apologists talked about Hamas’s October 7 attack as though everything had been fine until then. Focusing on October 7 erased the previous year, the worst year in Israel’s history, the deadliest year on record for children in the occupied West Bank, the year when the Israeli Defense Forces committed what an IDF officer called a pogrom. The brutal year before October 7 was the logical consequence of the Zionist implementation of Plan Dalet in 1948, when over 80% of the people living on land that Zionists wanted were expelled from their homes and Gaza became the world’s largest concentration camp. Starting the story before October 7 makes Israel look like a bully who blames its victim for striking back, but starting the story on October 7 reverses the…