ABSTRACT
The West’s benevolent assessment of Zionism and the State of Israel is due in no small measure to the success with which the ideologues of Zionism and the historiographers of the state hid from the public the real intentions of the Zionist enterprise and the realities surrounding the establishment of the state and its behaviour since. Despite the catastrophic consequences for the people of the region, Israeli propaganda, thanks to one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern times, has succeeded in masking the fact that the creation of the state resulted in the planned dispossession and dispersion of another people, and in claiming that this was forced upon it by circumstances. The fabricated Zionist history claims that Zionism’s birth was an inevitable result of Gentile pressures and persecution in Europe, that the Zionists intended no ill to the Arabs of Palestine, and that their intentions did not necessitate a clash or displacement; that, nevertheless, Israel was born into an uncharitable, predatory environment; that Zionist efforts at compromise and conciliation were rejected by the Arabs, who, though far stronger politically and militarily nonetheless lost the 1947–49 war; that, in the course of the war, the Palestinian leadership ordered their people to quit their homes, thus .laying the Jewish state open to charges of expulsion (see Morris 1990a: 4–5).
