Palestinians were erased
or demonized—first as feudal obstacles to “progress”, later as
terrorists whose very existence threatened the apartheid, Zionist ethno
state.
By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.
For almost eight decades, a meticulously crafted false Zionist
narrative has dominated Western understanding of Palestine, portraying
it as a barren land, sparsely populated by nomadic Arabs, miraculously
transformed by pioneering European Jews into a modern democracy. This
story—endlessly repeated in Western classrooms, newsrooms, and
parliaments—rests on a single, staggering falsehood that Palestinians,
as a people with deep historical roots, never truly existed on the soil
of historic Palestine, and don’t constitute a people. That claim is not
an oversight. It is a political weapon used to promote a lie built upon a
foundation of lies, designed to justify the violent dispossession and
ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population of Palestine that had
lived, farmed, traded, and worshipped on that land for centuries.
The truth, irrefutably documented in Israel’s own archives, is that Jews constituted a small minority in historic Palestine for well over 2,000 years, only becoming a majority through the systematic ethnic cleansing of 1947–1949 and the mass importation of diaspora Jews into territory seized from its Palestinian owners.
The demographic record is unambiguous. In 1800, the population of Palestine stood at approximately 275,000, of whom only 6,000–7,000 (2–3 %) were Jews. By 1880, after the first faint stirrings of Zionist immigration, Jews still numbered no more than 24,000 out of half a million inhabitants (3–5 %). On the eve of the First World War in 1914, the Jewish community had grown to roughly 60,000 in a total population of 750,000—barely 8%. Even the accelerated immigration of the British Mandate period did not overturn this reality. The 1931 census recorded 174,000 Jews against 1,035,000 total residents (17%), and by November 1947, on the eve of partition, Jews comprised 32% of the population, of whom more than 70% were recent immigrants who had arrived after 1919.
These figures are drawn from Ottoman registries, British Mandate censuses, and the meticulous work of researchs. They demolish the Zionist claim of centuries of Jewish demographic dominance in Palestine. For almost two millennia—from the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE until the late nineteenth century—Jews remained a small, mostly urban minority in a land whose villages, orchards, and ports were overwhelmingly Palestinian Arab.
That population of Palestine was not a transient collection of Bedouin or Ottoman-era migrants, as Zionist propaganda has insisted. It was a settled, multilingual, multi-religious society whose roots reached back to the Canaanites, Jebusites, Philistines, and the Arab conquests of the seventh century. By the sixteenth century, under Ottoman rule, more than 80% of the inhabitants were Palestinian Muslims, 10–11 % were Palestinain Christians, and 5–7% were Jews, most of them Arabic-speaking Sephardim who considered Palestine their home long before Herzl ever dreamed of a Jewish state. Western travellers from the 1830s to the 1880s—Mark Twain’s travelogue notwithstanding—described thriving towns (Nablus, Gaza, Jaffa, Hebron, Jerusalem), terraced hillsides heavy with olive and fig orchards, and a citrus industry centered on the Palestinian-invented Shamouti orange that would later be rebranded as the iconic “Jaffa Orange” after the Zionist dispossession of Palestinian orchards.
This was no wilderness awaiting redemption. It was a living civilization with its own dialects, folklore, land deeds, and centuries-old family lineages. The transformation of this Muslim-Christian majority country into a Jewish-majority state required violence on a scale that Zionist mythology has spent decades concealing and lying about.
Between December 1947 and May 1948—before a single soldier from any regular Arab army crossed the borders of Palestine—Zionist forces expelled at least 250,000 Palestinians and seized large swathes of territory allocated to the Palestinian state under the UN partition plan. The master blueprint for the conquest of Palestine was Plan Dalet, adopted by the Haganah high command in March 1948. Declassified Israeli documents reveal that the plan explicitly authorized the “destruction of villages,” the “expulsion” of inhabitants, and the “encirclement” of Palestinian urban neighborhoods to prevent any return.
Over the following eighteen months, more than 530 Palestinian villages—totalling two-thirds of all existing villages—were razed or repopulated with European Jewish immigrants. The human toll was staggering. More than 750,000 Palestinians—over half the Arab population—became refugees, and at least 70 documented massacres punctuated the campaign. The Deir Yassin, Lydda, Saliha, Al-Dawayima and Safsaf massacres, and dozens more are not Palestinian fairy tales. They are acknowledged in the war diaries of Israeli officers and intelligence reports of the Israel Defense Forces themselves.
This was not a war of self-defence against overwhelming Arab aggression, as perpetuated in the myth told to Israeli children. The combined Arab armies that entered Palestine on 15 May 1948 were poorly equipped, uncoordinated, and often more interested in achieving their own geopolitical agendas than in defending Palestinian rights. By that date, the Yishuv’s fighting strength already outnumbered all Arab forces inside Palestine combined, and the Haganah possessed tanks, aircraft, and a unified command structure that the Palestinians and their reluctant allies utterly lacked.
The “David and Goliath” legend (with Israel as David) collapses under the weight of the information contained in the Israeli archives. For decades, these truths were suppressed. Until the late 1970s, Israel kept its military and state archives sealed. Israeli school textbooks portrayed Palestine before 1882 as a desolate wasteland dotted with ruins, and when indigenous Palestinian inhabitants were mentioned at all they were reduced to generic “Arabs” who “sold their land willingly” or “fled on orders from their leaders.” Only when the thirty-year classification rule began to expire, and when a generation of Israeli scholars—Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Baruch Kimmerling—gained access to the files, did the scale of Israel’s deception become undeniable. Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004) lists 24 confirmed massacres by Zionist forces, and admits that in the majority of cases, the decisive cause of Palestinians fleeing was terror attacks by Haganah, Irgun, or Lehi.
Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) demonstrates that the expulsions were not “collateral damage” but the deliberate implementation of Plan Dalet to conquer territory that had belonged to Palestinians for generations. Avi Shlaim’s work on the collusion between Zionist leaders and King Abdullah of Jordan further exposed the myth of a united Arab invasion bent on “driving the Jews into the sea.”
Yet the West swallowed the original narrative whole. From the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to Hollywood epics like Exodus (1960), from the front pages of The New York Times to the speeches of American presidents, the story was always the same—a persecuted people returning to an empty homeland, making the desert bloom, defending Western civilization against barbarism. Palestinians were erased or demonized—first as feudal obstacles to “progress”, and later as terrorists whose very existence threatened the apartheid, Zionist ethno state. Palestinian American academic Edward Said diagnosed this phenomenon as “Orientalism”— the systematic de-humanization of the Muslim and Arab “other” to justify colonial domination.
Seventy-seven years after the Nakba, the consequences of that erasure are everywhere. Israel maintains more than sixty-five laws that privilege Jewish citizens over the 20% of its population that is Palestinian, not unlike the Jim Crow laws of the US south in the pre-civil rights era that oppressed Black Americans. More than six million Palestinian refugees and their descendants are still denied the right of return guaranteed by UN Resolution 194. The West Bank is fragmented by walls and settlements. Gaza is an open-air prison turned genocidal killing field. And whenever Palestinians resist, the same tired myths are trotted out to demonize Palestinians—“there’s no partner for peace,” “they teach their children to hate,” “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.”
It is long past time for a reckoning. The archives are open and the evidence is overwhelming. The New Historians—many of them Jewish Israelis who love their country enough to demand it face the truth—have done the heavy lifting. What remains is for Western societies to undertake a deliberate, institutional re-education and reveal the truth behind Israeli propaganda. Curricula must centre Palestinian historians—Rashid Khalidi, Nur Masalha, Walid Khalidi—alongside the Israeli revisionists. Western news media outlets must abandon the false equivalence that treats occupier and occupied as moral equals. Politicians must stop reciting talking points written in Tel Aviv and start acknowledging that Israel was not “born in purity” but forged through a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that have never ended.
Only when the West confronts the foundational lie—that Palestine was a land without a people—can there be any hope of justice. Palestinians are not interlopers on someone else’s supposed biblical birthright. They are the descendants of the people who harvested the olives, tilled the land, and prayed in the churches and mosques of that land for centuries before the ethno-supremacist ideology of Zionism decided their presence was an inconvenience to its colonial project. Recognizing their history, and supporting their right to self-determination and freedom from a suffocating and brutal Israeli occupation, is not anti-Semitism. It is the bare minimum required for an honest accounting of the past and a viable path toward coexistence.
The Israeli myths are crumbling. Let us finish the job of tearing them down, and bring justice and peace to Palestinians—a people that should rightfully be seen as the most persecuted and brutalized minority in the world today.
© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
The truth, irrefutably documented in Israel’s own archives, is that Jews constituted a small minority in historic Palestine for well over 2,000 years, only becoming a majority through the systematic ethnic cleansing of 1947–1949 and the mass importation of diaspora Jews into territory seized from its Palestinian owners.
The demographic record is unambiguous. In 1800, the population of Palestine stood at approximately 275,000, of whom only 6,000–7,000 (2–3 %) were Jews. By 1880, after the first faint stirrings of Zionist immigration, Jews still numbered no more than 24,000 out of half a million inhabitants (3–5 %). On the eve of the First World War in 1914, the Jewish community had grown to roughly 60,000 in a total population of 750,000—barely 8%. Even the accelerated immigration of the British Mandate period did not overturn this reality. The 1931 census recorded 174,000 Jews against 1,035,000 total residents (17%), and by November 1947, on the eve of partition, Jews comprised 32% of the population, of whom more than 70% were recent immigrants who had arrived after 1919.
These figures are drawn from Ottoman registries, British Mandate censuses, and the meticulous work of researchs. They demolish the Zionist claim of centuries of Jewish demographic dominance in Palestine. For almost two millennia—from the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE until the late nineteenth century—Jews remained a small, mostly urban minority in a land whose villages, orchards, and ports were overwhelmingly Palestinian Arab.
That population of Palestine was not a transient collection of Bedouin or Ottoman-era migrants, as Zionist propaganda has insisted. It was a settled, multilingual, multi-religious society whose roots reached back to the Canaanites, Jebusites, Philistines, and the Arab conquests of the seventh century. By the sixteenth century, under Ottoman rule, more than 80% of the inhabitants were Palestinian Muslims, 10–11 % were Palestinain Christians, and 5–7% were Jews, most of them Arabic-speaking Sephardim who considered Palestine their home long before Herzl ever dreamed of a Jewish state. Western travellers from the 1830s to the 1880s—Mark Twain’s travelogue notwithstanding—described thriving towns (Nablus, Gaza, Jaffa, Hebron, Jerusalem), terraced hillsides heavy with olive and fig orchards, and a citrus industry centered on the Palestinian-invented Shamouti orange that would later be rebranded as the iconic “Jaffa Orange” after the Zionist dispossession of Palestinian orchards.
This was no wilderness awaiting redemption. It was a living civilization with its own dialects, folklore, land deeds, and centuries-old family lineages. The transformation of this Muslim-Christian majority country into a Jewish-majority state required violence on a scale that Zionist mythology has spent decades concealing and lying about.
Between December 1947 and May 1948—before a single soldier from any regular Arab army crossed the borders of Palestine—Zionist forces expelled at least 250,000 Palestinians and seized large swathes of territory allocated to the Palestinian state under the UN partition plan. The master blueprint for the conquest of Palestine was Plan Dalet, adopted by the Haganah high command in March 1948. Declassified Israeli documents reveal that the plan explicitly authorized the “destruction of villages,” the “expulsion” of inhabitants, and the “encirclement” of Palestinian urban neighborhoods to prevent any return.
Over the following eighteen months, more than 530 Palestinian villages—totalling two-thirds of all existing villages—were razed or repopulated with European Jewish immigrants. The human toll was staggering. More than 750,000 Palestinians—over half the Arab population—became refugees, and at least 70 documented massacres punctuated the campaign. The Deir Yassin, Lydda, Saliha, Al-Dawayima and Safsaf massacres, and dozens more are not Palestinian fairy tales. They are acknowledged in the war diaries of Israeli officers and intelligence reports of the Israel Defense Forces themselves.
This was not a war of self-defence against overwhelming Arab aggression, as perpetuated in the myth told to Israeli children. The combined Arab armies that entered Palestine on 15 May 1948 were poorly equipped, uncoordinated, and often more interested in achieving their own geopolitical agendas than in defending Palestinian rights. By that date, the Yishuv’s fighting strength already outnumbered all Arab forces inside Palestine combined, and the Haganah possessed tanks, aircraft, and a unified command structure that the Palestinians and their reluctant allies utterly lacked.
The “David and Goliath” legend (with Israel as David) collapses under the weight of the information contained in the Israeli archives. For decades, these truths were suppressed. Until the late 1970s, Israel kept its military and state archives sealed. Israeli school textbooks portrayed Palestine before 1882 as a desolate wasteland dotted with ruins, and when indigenous Palestinian inhabitants were mentioned at all they were reduced to generic “Arabs” who “sold their land willingly” or “fled on orders from their leaders.” Only when the thirty-year classification rule began to expire, and when a generation of Israeli scholars—Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Baruch Kimmerling—gained access to the files, did the scale of Israel’s deception become undeniable. Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004) lists 24 confirmed massacres by Zionist forces, and admits that in the majority of cases, the decisive cause of Palestinians fleeing was terror attacks by Haganah, Irgun, or Lehi.
Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) demonstrates that the expulsions were not “collateral damage” but the deliberate implementation of Plan Dalet to conquer territory that had belonged to Palestinians for generations. Avi Shlaim’s work on the collusion between Zionist leaders and King Abdullah of Jordan further exposed the myth of a united Arab invasion bent on “driving the Jews into the sea.”
Yet the West swallowed the original narrative whole. From the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to Hollywood epics like Exodus (1960), from the front pages of The New York Times to the speeches of American presidents, the story was always the same—a persecuted people returning to an empty homeland, making the desert bloom, defending Western civilization against barbarism. Palestinians were erased or demonized—first as feudal obstacles to “progress”, and later as terrorists whose very existence threatened the apartheid, Zionist ethno state. Palestinian American academic Edward Said diagnosed this phenomenon as “Orientalism”— the systematic de-humanization of the Muslim and Arab “other” to justify colonial domination.
Seventy-seven years after the Nakba, the consequences of that erasure are everywhere. Israel maintains more than sixty-five laws that privilege Jewish citizens over the 20% of its population that is Palestinian, not unlike the Jim Crow laws of the US south in the pre-civil rights era that oppressed Black Americans. More than six million Palestinian refugees and their descendants are still denied the right of return guaranteed by UN Resolution 194. The West Bank is fragmented by walls and settlements. Gaza is an open-air prison turned genocidal killing field. And whenever Palestinians resist, the same tired myths are trotted out to demonize Palestinians—“there’s no partner for peace,” “they teach their children to hate,” “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.”
It is long past time for a reckoning. The archives are open and the evidence is overwhelming. The New Historians—many of them Jewish Israelis who love their country enough to demand it face the truth—have done the heavy lifting. What remains is for Western societies to undertake a deliberate, institutional re-education and reveal the truth behind Israeli propaganda. Curricula must centre Palestinian historians—Rashid Khalidi, Nur Masalha, Walid Khalidi—alongside the Israeli revisionists. Western news media outlets must abandon the false equivalence that treats occupier and occupied as moral equals. Politicians must stop reciting talking points written in Tel Aviv and start acknowledging that Israel was not “born in purity” but forged through a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that have never ended.
Only when the West confronts the foundational lie—that Palestine was a land without a people—can there be any hope of justice. Palestinians are not interlopers on someone else’s supposed biblical birthright. They are the descendants of the people who harvested the olives, tilled the land, and prayed in the churches and mosques of that land for centuries before the ethno-supremacist ideology of Zionism decided their presence was an inconvenience to its colonial project. Recognizing their history, and supporting their right to self-determination and freedom from a suffocating and brutal Israeli occupation, is not anti-Semitism. It is the bare minimum required for an honest accounting of the past and a viable path toward coexistence.
The Israeli myths are crumbling. Let us finish the job of tearing them down, and bring justice and peace to Palestinians—a people that should rightfully be seen as the most persecuted and brutalized minority in the world today.
© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
