Israel and Palestine: The Lie As Strategy

The Accusation Zionists Are The New Nazis, Reveling In Atrocities

This is a guest post from the JPF family by published author, Gregg Rosenberg. His latest book is Zionism and Anti-Zionism, a very personal work occasioned by the 2023/2024 war in Gaza. It discusses in detail current events and also the history of Israel and Palestine with an explicitly critical eye on the ideological claims made about events.

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Israel and Palestine: The Lie As Strategy

Photo by shavnya.com on Unsplash

I am writing this sentence a few days after Israel eliminated Yahya Sinwar in October of 2024. He was the leader of Hamas overall, of Hamas in Gaza, and we are told he was the mind behind the October 7th attacks, mass murderer of both Palestinians and Jews. He was a great villain and his death is an achievement.

No one knows what the immediate future holds, but some have a cautious optimism that this might mark the beginning of the end to the war in Gaza. The day after Sinwar’s death, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, offered a general amnesty to anyone involved in the hostage taking, and an end to the war, in exchange for release of the Israeli hostages. The new Hamas leadership immediately turned down the offer, but we will see where that all goes.

What of the aggressive accusations of ‘genocide’? The entirety of the definition of genocide in the United Nation’s Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, to which Israel is a signatory, is in Article II of the convention. Here is the full text,

Article II

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; © Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Here is a link to the full document,

Go deeper: The articles of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention of Genocide

Genocide is not triggered by civilian deaths or scope of destruction. The key is the intent to destroy a whole people or part of a people “as such”, i.e. simply because they are who they are. Also, it is not enough that a soldier or a platoon of bigots commit racist war crimes during the course of the war. Genocide must be the intent of the nation in going to war or in carrying out the war.

As of December 2024, fourteen months into the war, the population of Gaza has actually increased, as reported births have outnumbered reported deaths about 60,000 to 40,000. Almost alone this is a conclusive indicator Israel is not in Gaza to exterminate the population “as such”.

Of course, the war itself was launched as a just war of self-defense, invoking the UN Charter’s granted right of self-defense to all member states. Israel has taken thousands of specific actions inconsistent with an interpretation they intend to destroy the group because of their ethnicity, actions such as moving civilians out of battle areas, warning civilians of impending bombings, calling off strikes because of civilians in an area, and allowing in large quantities of food ( which they have allowed others to try to deliver but are not responsible for delivering themselves ).

The very facts that Israel has announced its war aims publicly — to destroy Hamas and retrieve the hostages — and that there is a public record of Israel’s leadership offering to end the war if Hamas surrenders and releases the hostages, does a good job of demolishing any case that its aim is to destroy the population of Gaza “as such”.

The controversial extent of the physical destruction in Gaza is acceptable given the tactical difficulties of the war according to pretty much every military expert who has been there and commented publicly on what they have seen. There’s no need to interpret some sneaky form of “genocide” going on, conspiratorially supposing the many overt acts of preservation are supposed to be a deceptive cover for a hidden intent to “slowly” kill everyone because of their ethnicity.

Go deeper: John Spencer, Chair of West Point’s Institute For the Study of Urban Warfare, discusses how Israel is methodically achieving its stated goals under trying conditions

There has been no genocide, not here near the end and at no point since the beginning. However the false charge of genocide was not the only successfully corrupted perception associated with the war. In its very conception, it was meant to corrupt people’s perceptions of justice, as it was designed as a cruel mutilation of the liberal tool of civil disobedience. About civil disobedience, Gandhi advised, “Disobedience without civility, discipline, discrimination, non-violence is certain destruction.”

In its proper form, civil disobedience uncloaks the violent injustice of a governing power by confronting it with non-violent protest of its behavior or violence targeted at specific tools of injustice, provoking undeserved violence in return; in the process exposing the violent heart of an unjust regime, shocking the conscience of a nation and hopefully provoking change.

Hamas’s actions on October 7th corruptly inverted this paradigm. It followed no form of Ghandi’s methods, it targeted no instruments of injustice or oppression, it was indiscriminately, wantonly, proudly violent against the innocent, violating every decency, yet it succeeded in activating the perception associated with civil disobedience nonetheless. I can count the ways.

Hamas was already a governing power. It did not need to confront power to gain power. In reality, it confronted another, different sovereign power by trespassing on its territory rather than negotiating its interests.

Rather than non-violent disobedience, it committed the most monstrous and terrifying violence possible, making sure to film and release it so everyone knew what it had done and how gleeful its people were about having done it.

It then snatched innocent citizens of the violated sovereign and retreated into its own sovereign domain, where it had prepared more violence for its neighbor from a subterranean army of 30,000–40,000 soldiers. Far from demanding justice, it knew it had left the neighboring power no choice but violence.

Its leadership then told the press it would do the same, over and over again, until Israel was destroyed. It was everything civil disobedience is supposed not to be.

Despite this being an act of war, twisted and corrupted into presenting itself as a version of the civil disobedience paradigm, the act’s corruption somehow failed to rob it of its power in the eyes of many watching. Rather, the corruption of Hamas’ design transferred to every other moral perception which followed, such as the false accusations of genocide.

How did they succeed in inverting the frame? Why was the October 7th act so successful at insinuating itself into people’s perceptions as something else entirely, something to which it in reality was the antithesis? The answer is the road to this false reality had been paved and it was in the works for a very long time.

This chapter and the next are about the paving of that road.

1948 and the Deir Yassin “Massacre”

On May 15th, 1948 five nations of the Arab League declared war on Israel, and invaded Israel with the intention to massacre the Jews and split the land between them. At the time, the Israelis had already been at war for six months, a civil war between the Jewish people in Israel and the Arabs of Palestine. A month before the Arab League invaded, two dissident Jewish guerilla groups had taken a small Arab village near Jerusalem named Deir Yassin with the permission of the much larger, main Jewish defense forces named the Haganah.

A military briefing of some Jewish forces at Deir Yassin

Among people who pay attention to this history, Deir Yassin is infamous as a Jewish terrorist massacre. Here is the generally repeated version of the story. Deir Yassin was a small village of about 700 people, sleepy and peaceful. The Jewish terrorist groups Irgun ( also known as Etzel ) and Lehi ( also known as The Stern Gang ) invaded it in April of 1948, lined civilians against walls and massacred them, killing women and children, raping women, and beheading people, including children. Afterwards, they paraded their prisoners like trophies through Jerusalem.

That is what people generally believe happened in Deir Yassin, but it isn’t in fact what happened. The story of how the general beliefs about Deir Yassin became so incredibly detached from the historical reality helps us to understand the foundations for how the same thing has happened around the October 7th massacre.

In reality, Deir Yassin was not a sleepy and peaceful village. It had seven or eight crow’s nests on top of houses in the village. From these nests, they were sniping at two neighboring Jewish villages ( they had an agreement to leave alone a third neighboring village ). It also overlooked the road to Jerusalem, and residents were sniping at supply convoys trying to get food and other supplies to Jerusalem, which the Arab forces of Palestine had under siege and whose residents they were starving.

Deir Yassin was also supplying soldiers to the Arab units in a large battle not too far away. Finally, the Jewish forces wrongly but sincerely believed that foreign forces were housed there ( in reality, those forces were housed in a nearby Arab village, not Deir Yassin ). So, Deir Yassin was a legitimate target for a military operation and, in fact, the Jewish forces who conquered it found storehouses with a great deal of weaponry on hand when they got there.

The Jewish forces took the village by surprise but were themselves very inexperienced. The battle in its entirety was a comedy of errors, but the Jewish forces had orders to warn the villagers to flee before attacking ( which they tried to do using a loudspeaker that tragically was toppled on its approach to the village, by a defensive fortification on the village road ) and to treat prisoners according to the Geneva conventions.

The Arabs fought from their houses, which had iron doors the Jewish forces could only blow open with grenades. To gain entry to the village, the Jewish forces were forced to use grenades to blow open the doors of front-line houses firing on them, and then throw another grenade into the house before entering. Families were inside the houses and in at least several instances whole families died in the grenade blasts and crossfire, as the Jewish forces tried to take out shooters inside the houses.

One hundred and nine villagers died in the fighting. The Jewish forces suffered four deaths and thirty-two casualties as well. The only war crime we know actually happened was when one family trying to surrender, consisting of about twenty people, was shot by a Jewish teenager guarding a bleeding, wounded friend. It’s unclear whether this teenager was panicked or vengeful or both.

Outside of this one family, it seems everyone else who died, died in the fighting. There were no rapes or other atrocities. The higher death toll among the villagers was caused by the villagers shooting at the Jewish troops from within their homes, through windows and from rooftops, where family members were easily caught in the crossfire. The information on what really happened at Deir Yassin comes from the very carefully researched 2021 book, The Massacre That Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem by Eliezer Tauber. What makes Tauber’s book different is he looks at the testimonial and physical evidence on both the Palestinian and Israeli side to reconstruct a picture of what actually happened from mutually consistent accounts, combined with physical and documentary evidence. The picture which emerges is much different from the generally believed account.

Go deeper: The Massacre That Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem

Yet, for decades what people generally believed happened at Deir Yassin was of a sleepy village attacked by Jewish terrorists, who massacred the innocent out of sheer cruelty and raped the women. Where did the myth of a massacre and atrocities come from? It came from the Arab leadership of Palestine, and from residents of Deir Yassin following orders handed down to them by the leadership. After establishing there was no massacre and there were no rapes, Tauber writes,

So what was the source for all the stories of rape? One of the first to meet with the fugitives of Deir Yassin when they arrived in Arab Jerusalem was Hazim Nusayba, the Arabic News editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service. He asked Husayn al-Khalidi, the senior Arab authority in Jerusalem at the time, how to cover the story. “We must make the most of this,” Khalidi answered. “I think we should give this the utmost propaganda possible because the Arab countries apparently are not interested in assisting us and we are facing a catastrophe.” “So,” Khalidi said, “we are forced to give a picture — not what is actually happening — but we had to exaggerate a little bit so that maybe the Arab countries would become enthusiastic to come and assist us.” Khalidi also hoped such stories would strengthen Palestinian sumud (determination to resist). He issued Nusayba a strongly worded communiqué containing stories of rapes and all kinds of other atrocities, which was quickly published all over the country. Some of the fugitives were summoned to Khalidi’s headquarters. “We want you to say that the Jews slaughtered people, committed atrocities, raped and stole gold,” he said to them. When the fugitives protested against the false accounts of rape, Khalidi insisted that they had to say so in order to pressure the Arab armies to free Palestinie from the Jews. Sa’d al-Din ‘Arif, a prominent Arab activist and a member of the Jerusalem National Committee, was also of the opinion that they had to attribute brutal crimes to the attackers.

Khalidi went all in on the lie. According to Taubman, a day or two later Khalidi “trembling with rage” told the American general-consul that the Jews were using the “worst Nazi tactics”, and convened a press conference attended by more than forty foreign and local correspondents. At this press conference,

Khalidi felt that, in order to pressure the Arab states to intervene and to strengthen the Palestinian sumud ( resistance ), he had to exaggerate. Khalidi was going to commit a grave, fatal mistake, which he did not realize at the time. … The main bulk of his speech, however, dealt with the “massacre”. The Jews, living among the Arabs for 1,300 years ( and one million Jews were still living among them, he noted ) were exercising against the Arabs the same methods the Nazis had used against the Jews. Two hundred and fifty Arabs had been killed [ the true number was 109 ], among them 25 pregnant women, 50 breast-feeding mothers, and 60 other women and girls, all “slaughtered like sheep”. Although Khalidi believed the 250 death toll to be an accurate accounting, the other numbers were simply an invention….At 9:30 pm, the Jerusalem radio broadcast Khalidi’s statement…He instructed Hazim Nusayba, the Arabic news editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service, to give the affair “the utmost propaganda possible.” … He issued Nusayba a strongly worded communique to broadcast, alleging the rape of pregnant women, murder of children, mutilation of bodies and numerous other atrocities. The idea was to broadcast it without prior screening by the British censorship. The impact of the broadcast was overwhelming, …

We are going to discuss the consequences of these lies but before doing that, please make a note for later discussion of his reference to Jews “living among the Arabs” for 1,300 years and nearly one million living among them today. He is referring here to all Arab lands, not Palestine. In his account, there is no hint of consciousness of a Palestinian people. He thought of himself and those he represented as Arabs who were part of the larger Arab nation. This will be worth speaking about again later. Khalidi continued with his smear campaign against the Jews, to cement it in the minds of everyone,

Khalidi was one of the first to visit the refugees from Deir Yassin in Jerusalem. He summoned some of them to his headquarters to convince them to exaggerate their accounts of the affair. “We want you to say that the Jews slaughtered people, committed atrocities, raped and stole gold,” he told them, overriding any objection..Some of the refugees obeyed, sending telegrams to that effect to the Arab kings and governments. [ An Arab mother said they ], “put the children on the road and put the mothers in a truck and drove over the children” … Rumors also spread that an Arab photographer took pictures in Deir Yassin of mutilated bodies. When the Arab Higher Committee published such photos, a Haganah intelligence man identified the bodies as actually being Jewish victims of mutilation by Arabs. …

The two Arab dailies appearing in Palestine at the time, al-Difa and Filastin, played a key role in spreading the story. Under the headline, “The Jews committed a savage crime in Deir Yassin,” al-Difa related to its readers how the Jews had stripped the women of Deir Yassin naked as well as torturing women and children, the sick and the elderly. … The newspaper also reported Khalidi’s press conference in detail, …”

The papers went on and on in this vein. This then is the source of the world’s belief in the Deir Yassin “massacre”. None of it was true. The lie of Deir Yassin was a tactical choice by the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee ( the group of Arabs led by Nazi Muhammad Amin al-Hussayni and his lieutenants, who directed parts of the Palestinian side of the civil war ). His main goals by lying were to incite surrounding Arabs to help in the fight and to incite more local Arabs to join the fight. Having done his damage, Khalidi left Palestine behind along with the Arabs who would do the fighting, eventually settling in Egypt for the duration of the war where he could lead from the rear.

This report from the Palestinians was soon picked up by the British, who took it at face value. It was also then amplified by the main Jewish defense forces, the Haganah, who wanted to use it to discredit the small forces of Irgun and Lehi, whom they viewed as dissidents and terrorists and wanted to be rid of. At that point, the lie invented by the leading Arab in Jerusalem, who orchestrated it on his way out the door, became a part of official historical truth for a long time.

It was a tactical disaster for the Arabs. Khalidi had intended to rouse the population but instead he caused it to leave. Nusayba, the journalist whom Khalidi had brought into his deception later wrote, “This was a decisive moment. This particular strong communique when I think about it now was one of the main reasons for the collapse of the armed resistance in Palestine. We did not understand the mentality of our own Palestinian people. This turned out to be the highest, most expensive mistake that we made. It had a traumatic effect.”

The lies about Deir Yassin triggered a mass panic. Taubman quotes Yunus Radwan, a survivor of Deir Yassin, writing five years after the battle, “The other villages started to leave one after the other, without resistance, out of fear and apprehension of another similar massacre.” He wrote that the exodus of Palestinians happened “because of a mistake committed by our leaders and those responsible for the spreading of rumors who overstated the crimes of the Jews.” ‘Adil Yahya, a Palestinian researcher who interviewed many refugees in the late 1990s, reached the conclusion that most of them clearly stated that “the Deir Yassin affair was the main cause for the 1948 exodus.”

Taubman writes,

Muhammad Mahmud Radwa, another survivor, declared, “Instead of working in our favour, the propaganda worked in favour of the Jews. Whole villages and towns fled because what they heard had happened at Deir Yassin.” Other survivors concurred. As one Palestinian researcher summed it up, “The Palestinian people paid dearly for a communique issued without a sober estimate of the situation.”

The key error Khalidi made were the rape allegations. Arab men would risk their own lives but the shame of not being able to protect their women was too much to risk. Those allegations were universally believed, leading perhaps hundreds of thousands of Arabs to conclude the only choice they had to protect their women was to leave. Otherwise, they likely would have fought. Taubman writes regarding interviews with the refugees,

The impact of the fear of rapes was overwhelming, as attested to by many Palestinian refugees, both men and women. A refugee woman told an interviewer that the Arabs of Haifa left because of this. Another refugee woman related that she heard that girls were raped in front of their families and then murdered. Since they did not want the same to happen to them, they fled. Another woman related that her father wanted to fight. However, since he was afraid about their honor, he decided that they should leave instead.

We will never know for sure about the exact numbers but these stories are ubiquitous, both in contemporaneous reporting after the war and decades later. The fear of rapes which never happened, invented by Khalidi and pushed out by his confederates, is conceivably responsible for the bulk of the displaced Palestinians after the war.

If the name Khalidi sounds familiar to you, it is because he is the uncle of a currently famous Khalidi, Rashid Khalidi, professor at Columbia University in New York, whose best-selling book, “The 100 Years War on Palestine” is a much more sophisticated version of what his uncle was up to during the war. Indeed, as you can see the Khalidi family and others in the Arab Higher Committee had been working hand-in-hand with the Arab newspapers and media for decades to tactically plant false stories about Jewish aggression and atrocities, intended both to arouse and justify Arab aggression against the Jewish immigrants. We have already seen this once before in a previous chapter when Amin al-Hussayni planted false stories in Arab newspapers about Jewish plots to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque, which led to the Hebron massacre and associated 1929 Arab riots. Now, among other things Rashid Khalidi is mining those same false stories to create false history, for further propaganda in the current era.

The Khalidi family is probably single-handedly responsible for the existence of more Palestinian refugees than all the Zionists who have ever lived. Burdened with this guilt, Rashid Khalidi is part of an effort to take the family business of lying about the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine, the family business his uncle started, and get it right this time.

Understanding what it means to “get it right” is what we are really here to understand, because that is what is relevant to today. It is the only way we can understand why the world was so primed to perceive Hamas’s inversion of civil disobedience as something real. Eventually, the Palestinians decided tactical lying would not get them to the goal they desired, the destruction of Israel. They needed to learn to lie strategically.

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This essay is part of a larger resource for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.