For much of the 20th century, traditional Zionist historiography served as the dominant narrative in Israel. It placed greater emphasis on cultivating national unity, securing political legitimacy, and forging a heroic collective identity than on rigorously following empirical evidence.
Many scholars have characterized this approach as a form of „selective memory” or even „national mythology,” which often trivialized, ignored, or even reversed responsibility for critical events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Pappé, 2006; Ram, 1998; Zerubavel, 1995).
The gradual declassification of Israeli and British government archives from the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s enabled a new generation of Israeli historians – collectively known as the „New Historians” (including Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev and Baruch Kimmerling) – to examine these fundamental narratives using rigorous critical methods and previously unavailable primary sources (Morris, 2004; Shlaim, 2000).
Below are ten of the most common myths, each with relevant scientific evidence that challenges them.
The ten myths
1. Myth: Jews have always been in the majority or held a dominant demographic position in Palestine. Reality: Historical population data shows otherwise:
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In 1800: The proportion of Jews was about 2–3% (about 6–7 thousand people out of a total population of 275 thousand).
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In 1880: The proportion of Jews was approximately 3–5% (24 thousand out of 500 thousand).
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In 1914: The proportion of Jews was approximately 81% (60 thousand out of 750 thousand).
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In 1931: The proportion of Jews was 17% (174 thousand out of 1.035 million).
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By 1947, on the eve of the planned partition: The proportion of Jews was 32% (630 thousand out of 1.97 million), of whom more than 70% were immigrants who arrived after 1919 (McCarthy, 1990; Bachi, 1977; Morris, 1999). Jews never reached a majority in Palestine before the large-scale ethnic cleansing of 1947–49.
Myth 2: The rights of the Arab Palestinian population were consistently respected. Reality: Contrary to standard accounts, the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination was never respected. During the British Mandate, and especially in 1948, the indigenous population was neither consulted before the decision to establish the State of Israel, nor was it allowed to exercise sovereignty over the land. Consequently, the Palestinian Arabs opposed both the partition plan and the establishment of the Jewish state from the outset. After the establishment of Israel, a series of measures were taken that disproportionately harmed the Arab population:
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Land expropriation: The 1950 „Property of Absentees” Law allowed the state to seize the property of refugees and so-called „present absentees” – Palestinian Arabs who remained inside Israel. Many of them lost their lands without compensation.
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Denial of the right of return: Despite UN Resolution 194, this right was never implemented, leaving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians as perpetual refugees.
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Institutionalized discrimination: Arab citizens of Israel faced systemic inequalities compared to Jewish citizens in education, housing, and political participation. Many Arab villages were neglected or destroyed.
Myth 3: Systemic violence and terrorism were always started by Arabs. Reality: The earliest examples of organized terrorism targeting civilians in modern Palestine were carried out by Zionist paramilitary groups:
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1924: Assassination of Zionist leader Haim Arlosoroff (widely attributed to revisionist elements).
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1937–1939: The Irgun carried out a series of bombings in Arab markets (e.g. Haifa, 1938 – 39 dead; Jerusalem, 1938 – dozens dead).
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1944–1948: The Irgun and Lehi carried out significant attacks, including the 1946 King David Hotel bombing (91 dead) and the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948 (100–250 civilian deaths). Although the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 was a violent reaction to mass Jewish immigration and land confiscation, it did not mark the beginning of organized terrorism in the region (Kimmerling & Migdal, 2003; Morris, 1999).
4. Myth: Hebrew has remained a living language, spoken continuously throughout history. Reality: Hebrew ceased to function as a mother tongue between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD. It was gradually replaced first by Aramaic and then by Greek. From the 4th century until the end of the 19th century, there is no authentic historical record of Jewish children learning Hebrew as a first language; it survived only as a sacred liturgical language (leson ha-kodesh) (Fellman, 1973). Its revival is a unique project in the history of linguistics: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda coined more than 4,000 new words, and his son Itamar Ben-Avi became the first known modern native speaker. As late as 1914, 70-80% of Jewish schoolchildren in Palestine spoke Yiddish, Ladino, or Arabic as their primary language (Harshav, 1993).
5. Myth: Jaffa oranges were originally and always were a Jewish industry. Reality: The Shamouti variety and the Jaffa citrus industry were developed and controlled by Palestinian Arab horticulturists and traders from the mid-19th century onwards. In 1939, Arabs owned 63% of citrus groves and handled over 75% of exports. After the ethnic cleansing of 1948, these groves were largely confiscated and given to kibbutzim. The iconic brand, originating from Palestinian producers, was subsequently repurposed as a symbol of Zionism (Karlinsky, 2005).
6. Myth: „Jordan was the Palestinian state,” and Palestine belonged exclusively to the Jews. Reality: The 1922 League of Nations Mandate was for a single, indivisible territory. It aimed to create a „Jewish national home” while explicitly protecting the civil and religious rights of „non-Jewish communities.” The 1922 Churchill Memorandum, which excluded Transjordan from the provisions of the national home, was a pragmatic administrative move to satisfy Hashemite interests, rather than a formal partition into two separate states. The claim of „Jordanian Palestine” is a later political construct that is widely rejected by international historians and legal experts (Khalidi, 2020; Shlaim, 1990).
7. Myth: Jerusalem has been predominantly Jewish for the past 3,000 years. Reality: From the Umayyad conquest in 638 until about 1860, Jews remained a minority in Jerusalem. There were long periods of Muslim (638–1099 and 1187–1917) and Christian (1099–1187) majorities. The contemporary Jewish majority in Jerusalem is a relatively recent development, the result of Zionist and Sephardic immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries (Ben-Arieh, 1984).
8. Myth: Israel was born from a purely defensive and morally justified war. Reality: In 1947–1948, Jews constituted only 321% of the population of Palestine, mostly recent European immigrants. Although the civil war broke out with Arab attacks following UN Resolution 181, Jewish forces launched systematic offensives from December 1947. The „Dalet Plan” formulated in March 1948 specifically called for the „cleansing” of Arab villages. Before the Arab armies entered, Jewish forces had already occupied 251% of the territory designated for an Arab state and had expelled over 250,000 Palestinians (Morris, 2004).
Myth 9: Official Israeli historiography has always been scientific and impartial. Reality: Until the late 1970s, the archives of the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) and the Israeli state were largely inaccessible. School history textbooks routinely erased the Arab presence before 1882 or simply depicted Palestinian villages as „abandoned ruins.” It was only after the opening of the archives and the work of the „New Historians” that Israeli scholarship began to employ systematic source analysis (Podeh, 2002).
10. Myth: Palestinians voluntarily left their homes in 1948. Reality: The Nakba was a deliberate and systematic ethnic cleansing carried out by Zionist forces. It was not a voluntary exodus, nor was it ordered by Arab leaders. The Palestinian population was expelled by direct force or fled in fear in a widespread campaign of terror that included numerous documented massacres:
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Deir Yassin (April 9, 1948): 100–250 civilians dead, mutilated bodies.
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Saliha (October 30, 1948): 60–70 people were locked in a house and killed with grenades.
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Al-Dawayima (29 October 1948): 80–100 dead, including children. Benny Morris has documented 24 massacres and concluded that in the vast majority of cases the expulsion was a direct result of the Jewish military attack (Morris, 2004). Ilan Pappé, using the same archives, shows that the destruction of over 530 villages and the expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians stemmed from the Dalet Plan and explicit instructions to „clear the area” (Pappé, 2006).
Conclusion These myths were part of a broader narrative framework that helped justify the creation and territorial expansion of the State of Israel for decades, while rendering Palestinian history invisible and obscuring Israeli responsibility for the mass expulsions of 1948. The emergence of critical Israeli historiography in the 1980s—made possible by newly declassified archives—provided strong empirical evidence that exposed the weaknesses of these founding stories.
1. The basic works of the „New Historians” (based on Israeli archival sources)
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Benny Morris: The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
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This work established the scholarly consensus that the Palestinian refugee issue cannot be traced to a single cause, and refutes the myth that Palestinians fled at the behest of Arab leaders.
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Ilan Pappe: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006).
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Pappé, a professor at the University of Exeter, uses detailed documents from „Plan Dalet” to prove that the expulsion of Palestinian villages was a systematic, premeditated military strategy.
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Avi Shlaim: The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000).
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Shlaim is a professor at Oxford University who has extensively analyzed Israel's security doctrines and diplomatic failures surrounding the founding of the state.
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Tom Segev: 1949: The First Israelis (Henry Holt and Co., 1998).
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Segev is one of the most important figures in Israeli journalism and historiography, examining socio-historical aspects and contemporary Israeli political decision-making.
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2. Sources of demographic and historical data
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Justin McCarthy: The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (Columbia University Press, 1990).
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McCarthy is a demographer who compared Ottoman and British census data with statistics often used in modern historiography.
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Walid Khalidi: All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992).
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This work is the most basic reference work on the more than 500 Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948, based on archival and field documentation.
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3. Linguistic and cultural resources
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Chaim Rabin: A Short History of the Hebrew Language (Jewish Agency, 1973).
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A fundamental linguistic work describing the history of the revitalization of the Hebrew language, detailing how Hebrew evolved from a liturgical language into a modern spoken language.
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Daphna Stein: The Development of the Citrus Industry in Palestine (1984).
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The study demonstrates that orange cultivation was largely established through Palestinian Arab economic networks in the 19th century.
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