10 Myths Repeated by Zionist Propaganda… and Disproved by Historiography

 

Palestinian Historiographical Research

 

Palestinian Historiographical Research is a platform dedicated to the academic study of Palestine’s history, memory, and narratives.

10 Myths Repeated by Zionist Propaganda… and Disproved by Historiography

Introduction

Traditional Zionist historiography, dominant in Israel until the late 20th century, functioned as a foundational narrative that prioritized national cohesion, political legitimization, and the construction of a heroic collective identity over empirical rigor.

This narrative was described by several scholars as a “selective memory” or even a “national mythology” that omitted, minimized, or inverted responsibilities in key episodes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Pappé, 2006; Ram, 1998; Zerubavel, 1995).

Starting with the large-scale opening of Israeli and British state archives in the late 1970s and during the 1980s, a group of Israeli historians—known as the “New Historians” (Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Baruch Kimmerling)—applied for the first time critical methods and declassified primary sources to systematically question the foundational myths (Morris, 2004; Shlaim, 2000).

The following are ten of the most persistent myths, along with the corresponding academic evidence.

The Ten Myths

1. Myth: Jews were always a majority or a dominant demographic presence in Palestine

Reality:

–1800: Jews ≈ 2–3% (6,000–7,000 of 275,000 inhabitants).

–1880: Jews ≈ 3–5% (24,000 of 500,000).

–1914: Jews ≈ 8% (60,000 of 750,000).

–1931: Jews 17% (174,000 of 1,035,000).

–1947 (on the eve of partition): Jews 32% (630,000 of 1,970,000), of whom more than 70% were immigrants who arrived from 1919 onward (McCarthy, 1990; Bachi, 1977; Morris, 1999).

They never constituted a majority before the massive ethnic cleansing of 1948–1949.

2. Myth: The rights of the Arab Palestinian population were always respected

Reality:

Contrary to the official narrative, the rights of self-determination of the Palestinian people were never respected. During the British Mandate and especially in 1948, the native population was not consulted on the creation of the State of Israel, nor allowed to exercise popular sovereignty over its territory. For this reason, the partition and the establishment of the Jewish state were rejected by Palestinian Arabs from the outset.

After the creation of the State of Israel, policies were implemented that systematically affected the Arab population:

Land expropriation: The 1950 Absentees’ Property Law allowed the state to confiscate land both from the displaced and from the so-called “present absentees,” meaning Palestinian Arabs who remained in Israel. Many of these citizens saw their land expropriated without compensation, consolidating unequal territorial control.

Denial of the right of return: UN Resolution 194, which recognized this right, was never implemented, consolidating the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Institutionalized discrimination: Arab citizens of Israel have limited rights that are not equal to those of Jewish citizens, facing restrictions in education, housing, urban planning, and political representation. Many Arab villages were marginalized or destroyed, preventing the full development of the community.

3. Myth: Systematic violence and terrorism were always initiated by the Arabs

Reality:

The first acts of organized terrorism against civilians in modern Palestine were perpetrated by Zionist groups:

–1924: assassination of Zionist labor leader Haim Arlosoroff (attributed to revisionists).

–1937–1939: Irgun launches a campaign of bombings in Arab markets (Haifa 1938: 39 killed; Jerusalem 1938: dozens).

–1944–1948: Irgun and Lehi commit major attacks (King David Hotel 1946: 91 killed; Deir Yassin 1948: 100–250 civilians murdered).

The Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 was a brutal response to mass immigration and land loss, but it was not the origin of organized terrorism (Kimmerling & Migdal, 2003; Morris, 1999).

4. Myth: Hebrew never ceased to be a living language spoken daily

Reality:

Hebrew ceased to be a mother tongue between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE, when it was first displaced by Aramaic and later by Greek in the Hellenistic diaspora and in Judea.

From the 4th century until the late 19th century, there is not a single reliable historical testimony of Jewish children acquiring Hebrew as a first language.

It survived exclusively as a liturgical language (leshon ha-qodesh), for Talmudic study, and for written correspondence among rabbis (Fellman, 1973; Sáenz-Badillos, 1993).

The revitalization was a deliberate and unique act in linguistic history:

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922) created more than 4,000 neologisms and forced his family to speak only Hebrew; his son Itamar Ben-Avi (1882–1943) was the first documented modern native speaker.

The Va‘ad ha-Lashon (1890) and later the Academy of the Hebrew Language institutionalized the process.

Even in 1914, 70–80% of Jewish schoolchildren in Palestine still used Yiddish, Ladino, or Arabic as their mother tongue (Harshav, 1993; Spolsky & Shohamy, 1999).

5. Myth: The Jaffa orange was always a Jewish industry

Reality:

The Shamouti variety and the entire Jaffa citrus industry were created and dominated by Palestinian Arab farmers and merchants from the mid-19th century onward.

In 1939 Arabs owned 63% of citrus groves and controlled more than 75% of exports.

After the ethnic cleansing of Jaffa and Lydda in 1948, these plantations were massively stolen and expropriated; Arab groves were transferred to kibbutzim and Jewish companies. The “Jaffa Orange” brand, originally Palestinian, was appropriated as a Zionist symbol (Karlinsky, 2005; Reichman & Yehuda, 2009; Stein, 1984).

6. Myth: “Jordan was the Palestinian state and Palestine was destined exclusively for the Jews”

Reality:

The British Mandate (approved by the League of Nations in 1922) established a single indivisible territory under British administration to facilitate the “national home for the Jewish people” without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the “non-Jewish communities” (Articles 2, 4, and 6).

The administrative exclusion of Transjordan from the application of the national-home policy (Churchill Memorandum, 1922) was a practical measure to placate the Hashemites, not a partition into two sovereign states.

Transjordan remained under British mandate until 1946, and its population was mostly Bedouin and Transjordanian, not Palestinian.

The interpretation that “Jordan is Palestine” is a political construction that emerged after 1967, rejected by international historians and jurists (Khalidi, 2020; Shlaim, 1990; Wilson, 1988).

7. Myth: Jerusalem has been mostly Jewish for 3,000 years

Reality:

From the Umayyad conquest (638 CE) until roughly 1860, Jews were a minority in Jerusalem.

Periods of Muslim majority (638–1099, 1187–1917) and Christian majority (1099–1187).

–In 1800: Jews ≈ 2,000; Muslims ≈ 4,000; Christians ≈ 2,500.

–In 1844: Jews 7,120; Muslims 5,000; Christians 3,390 (first modern Jewish majority).

–In 1896: Jews 28,200; Muslims 8,560; Christians 8,750 (Ben-Arieh, 1984; Schölch, 1993).

The modern Jewish majority is a 19th–20th century phenomenon tied to Zionist and Sephardic immigration.

8. Myth: Israel was born from a purely defensive and moral war

Reality:

In 1947–1948 Jews were a 32% minority in Palestine, composed largely of recently arrived European immigrants.

Their main paramilitary organizations (Irgun and Lehi) were classified as terrorist organizations by the British government from 1946 onward.

Although the civil war began with local Arab attacks after Resolution 181, Jewish forces carried out systematic offensive operations from December 1947 onward.

Plan Dalet (March 1948) explicitly ordered the occupation and “cleansing” of Arab villages in areas assigned to the Jewish state and in strategic corridors.

Between December 1947 and May 15, 1948 (before the intervention of regular Arab armies) Jewish forces had already conquered 25% of the territory assigned to the projected Arab state and expelled more than 250,000 Palestinians (Morris, 2004; Pappé, 2006; Khalidi, 1992).

9. Myth: Official Israeli historiography was always scientific and objective

Reality:

Until the late 1970s, IDF and State archives remained closed.

School textbooks (Moledet series) systematically omitted the existence of an Arab population before 1882 or presented Palestinian villages as “abandoned ruins.”

Only after the opening of archives (1978–1985) and the work of the New Historians was the systematic use of primary sources introduced.

Benny Morris himself acknowledged in 1988 that before that date “there was no proper scientific historiography of 1948” (Morris, 2004; Podeh, 2002).

10. Myth: Palestinians left their homes voluntarily in 1948.

Reality:

The Nakba was a planned and executed operation of ethnic cleansing by Zionist forces.

It was not a “voluntary departure” nor a “flight ordered by Arabs.” The Palestinian population was expelled by force or fled to save their lives in the face of a systematic campaign of terror that included dozens of documented massacres:

Deir Yassin (April 9, 1948): 100–250 civilians killed, bodies mutilated and thrown into wells.

Saliha (October 30, 1948): 60–70 people locked in a house and killed with grenades.

Al-Dawayima (October 29, 1948): between 80 and 100 killed, including children beaten against walls (testimony of Israeli soldier Yosef Nachmani, IDF archive).

Sa’sa, Eilabun, Hula, Lydda (250 Palestinians machine-gunned in the Dahmash mosque), Safsaf (52 men executed with their hands tied), and more than 30 additional massacres acknowledged even by Israeli historians.

Benny Morris documented 24 confirmed massacres and admits that in the vast majority of cases the direct cause of expulsion was a Jewish military attack or the terror produced by these massacres (Morris, 2004). Ilan Pappé, using the same IDF archives, shows that the destruction of more than 530 villages and the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians was the deliberate result of Plan Dalet and explicit orders to “cleanse the area” (Pappé, 2006).

Conclusion

The myths analyzed form part of a narrative system that, for decades, served to legitimize the creation and expansion of the State of Israel at the cost of rendering Palestinian history invisible and obscuring Israeli responsibility for the mass displacement of 1948. Critical Israeli historiography, which emerged in the 1980s with access to declassified archives, has empirically demonstrated the fragility of these foundational narratives.

Recognizing these facts does not mean denying Israel’s right to exist or the historical suffering of Jews, but rather demanding the same standard of historical truth applied to any other national case.

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