The Biggest Zionist Lies of All Time

Zionism has always relied on myths, distortions, and falsehoods to maintain support among Western audiences. ZBS (Zionist bullshit) has kept generations of Jewish Zionists and goyishe backers of that racist project thoroughly misinformed.

After two years of live‑streamed genocide on smartphones, we’ve seen what happens when Jews with open minds and hearts that Zionism hasn’t hardened finally confront the reality of that dishonest, racist, violent, and morally bankrupt movement: they tend to walk away. And once they leave, they rarely come back.

I was brought into Zionism at a young age, when I generally believed what authority figures told me. As a Baby Boom Jew, I didn’t have easy access to quality information about Palestine–Israel. We never heard Palestinian voices, and I don’t recall ever speaking with an anti-Zionist Jew. The story I received was entirely biased, one-sided, and, in retrospect, deeply offensive.

Due to the persuasiveness of Zionist propaganda, I spent more than half my life defending Israel. When I finally learned the actual history, I was appalled – and furious.

After years of making excuses for what I now know are Israel’s crimes against humanity, I want to help set the record straight. What follows are what I consider the biggest Zionist lies ever told, in reverse order, with #1 being the most destructive lie – the falsehood that has caused the most harm.

#17 – “Jews and Arabs have been at war with each other for thousands of years.”

This is a fine example of intellectual laziness. It treats a modern (and anachronistic) settler‑colonialist project as if it were some timeless desert blood feud that magically excuses whatever Israel does today because, “Hey, they’ve always hated each other.” In reality, Jews, Muslims, and Christians have lived together – mainly in peace – in that region for centuries. The current situation is rooted in an ethnic‑nationalist‑political movement, not some ancient DNA‑coded grudge. The “ancient hatred” myth is convenient because it tells Zionists the status quo is eternal and nothing can ever really change about Israeli oppression of Palestinians, so why bother condemning or even questioning it?

#16 – “Jews made the desert bloom.”

It’s a lovely fairy tale that erases generations of Palestinian farmers who were already cultivating olives, citrus, grains, and more, long before Theodor Herzl ever picked up a pen. It takes Palestinian labor, land, and water, rebrands them as barren wasteland, and then demands applause when the colonizer installs sprinklers. That’s not “making the desert bloom”; that’s stealing someone’s garden and calling yourself a genius. Wrapped inside it is the classic racist Zionist stereotype that the “barbaric” Arab was too backward to properly cultivate the land and needed the supposedly “civilized” newcomer to redeem it – a colonial script as old as time.

#15 – “Palestinians are an invented people.”

Look at every map of the Mideast printed in 1947, and you’ll see this word: “PALESTINE.” Every nation is “invented” in the sense that identities develop over time. But somehow, only Palestinians get told they don’t exist. This lie lets Zionists treat an entire people as a bureaucratic error instead of a nation with a rich history, beautiful culture, language, and legal rights. If you can convince the world that Palestinians are fake, it becomes way easier to make their towns, villages, homes, and bodies disappear. As a kid, I hardly ever heard the word “Palestinians.” They were called “Arabs,” which was very much the point – remove their name, eliminate their identity, and it becomes easier to erase their rights.

#14 – “Israelis are the truly indigenous inhabitants of that land.”

Zionism takes a theological, diasporic connection to a place and tries to convert it into a blank check for permanent domination over the people living there. Being indigenous doesn’t mean “my ancestors had a story about this place 2,000 years ago.” It means continuous presence, stewardship, and belonging – not parachuting in with a European passport and a rifle. And it certainly doesn’t mean making Aliyah after living in Brooklyn your entire life and having no traceable connection to that land. Yes, Jews had an ancient presence in Palestine – along with Muslims and Christians. The only ethical answer in Palestine–Israel is everyone living as equals, not one group claiming an exclusive, eternal landlord’s deed.

#13 – “Israel was a land without people for a people without a land.”

Every Palestinian family photo album, cemetery, and key on a necklace stands as a direct refutation of this lie. The slogan was propaganda from day one, designed to erase millions of Palestinians in a single sentence. You don’t need to invent an empty land unless you’re planning to empty it yourself. At least 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed during the original Nakba; entire towns were literally wiped off the map, and more than 400 villages were destroyed. I consider Nakba denial as disgusting as Holocaust denial, and both are about erasing a people’s trauma so you can keep abusing them without guilt.

#12 – “In 1948, Palestinians voluntarily gave up their homes.”

Sure, and people just “voluntarily” leave when militias are shooting over their heads, massacres are taking place in nearby villages, and they’re told if they cross a certain line, they’ll be killed. Calling this “voluntary” is like calling a mugging “charitable giving.” The Nakba wasn’t a rebranding of the Holy Land; it was mass expulsion backed by organized violence. Growing up, I was told demonic Palestinians had been instructed to depart temporarily while Arab armies drove all the Jews into the sea, and that radio broadcasts urged the Jew-hating Arabs to step out for a brief spell while their leaders did the job. I’ve checked and checked and never seen credible substantiation for that claim. It’s a made-up story used by racists to reposition victims of ethnic cleansing as hateful house‑sitters. Denying Palestinian refugees the right of return is cruel, immoral, and un-Jewish.

#11 – “By rejecting the UN Partition Plan, Palestinians sealed their fate.”

This is the original “they had their chance” story, told as if Palestinians recklessly threw away a good deal and have been paying the price ever since. The 1947 UN Partition Plan was drafted by a committee of 11 countries with no Arab representation and proposed turning roughly 55% of historic Palestine into a “Jewish state” at a time when Jews were about a third of the population and owned less than 7% of the land. Palestinians – whose families had lived on and worked that land for centuries – were told a foreign‑backed “Jewish state” for European settlers and other diaspora Jews would be dropped onto what had largely been Arab land and that a nonbinding recommendation should override their right to self‑determination. They weren’t naive; Palestinians were aware, from recent history in places like Algeria, South Africa, and across the Americas, what settler colonialism does to indigenous peoples: dispossession, racial hierarchy, and cultural erasure. Had the tables been turned and Zionists been told to accept a similar arrangement on most of their land, there’s no doubt in my mind they would have rejected it too. Calling Palestinians’ refusal of this awful deal “sealing their fate” is just another way of saying colonized people must accept their own dispossession or forfeit their rights forever.

#10 – “Palestinians have repeatedly been offered a state of their own but rejected it every time.”

This is the sales pitch from hell: carve up their land, strip the “state” of borders, army, water, and real sovereignty, then act shocked they didn’t sign on the dotted line. What was sold as a “generous offer” was a Bantustan. Saying “they rejected peace” just means they refused to legalize their own cage. Palestinians have never once been offered full, genuine sovereignty over their own territory, and Palestinian refugees have never been offered the essential right of return that international law guarantees them. Refusing a fake “state” that ratifies your dispossession isn’t rejecting peace; it’s refusing to rubber‑stamp your own permanent subjugation.

#9 – “Israel stopped occupying Gaza in 2005.”

Zionists apparently think you can control airspace, sea, borders, and basic infrastructure and still swear you’re not an occupier. Gaza is a case study in “remote‑control occupation”: no settlers inside the fence, but total control over who and what goes in or out, punctuated by regular bombing campaigns. If that’s not occupation, the word has no meaning. Under international law, a territory remains occupied when a foreign power maintains effective control over its land, sea, and air, and every serious legal body that has examined Gaza has continued to classify it as Occupied Territory. The fact that Zionists don’t want to hear that doesn’t magically change the reality for the people trapped there.

#8 – “The problem began on October 7th.”

This is the lie that tries to hit the “Reset” button on history. It pretends everything before October 7, 2023 – the Nakba, occupation, apartheid, siege, decades of massacres and expulsions – was just background noise, and “the conflict” magically started on that awful day. Erase nearly eight decades of Israeli violence and dispossession, and you can rebrand genocide as “self‑defense.” On October 6th, Gaza was already widely known as “the world’s largest open‑air prison,” the UN had categorized it as “unlivable,” and award‑winning Israeli journalist Gideon Levy was calling it a “concentration camp.” An 18-year-old Gazan would be unable to recall a time when he wasn’t forcibly confined inside that fence under subhuman conditions for the “crime” of existing while Palestinian. Pretending that hellscape was peaceful normalcy the day before is gaslighting on a genocidal scale.

#7 – “Israel is the only democracy in the Mideast.”

Democracy for whom? A regime that openly privileges one ethno‑religious group in law, controls millions of disenfranchised subjects under military rule, and passes a Nation‑State Law declaring self‑determination “unique” to Jews isn’t a shining beacon of anything except apartheid. Zionists love to claim that Israel’s Palestinian/Arab citizens enjoy equal rights, but organizations like Adalah have documented more than 60 Israeli laws that directly or indirectly discriminate against them in land, citizenship, political participation, resources, and basic civil rights (see the Adalah Discriminatory Laws Database for details). Calling that a “democracy” is less a compliment to Israel than an insult to the entire concept of democracy. I find it offensive to slap the word “democracy” on an apartheid state that denies at least half the people under its control the right to vote for the officials who decide whether they live, die, or can see a doctor.

#6 – “Zionism is simply about Jewish self‑determination.”

On its face, this sounds reasonable. Like everyone else, Jews deserve safety, freedom, and dignity. But in practice, Zionism has never been simply about Jewish safety, freedom, and dignity; it’s been a political project to secure a Jewish‑majority state in a land that was already overwhelmingly Palestinian. “Jewish self‑determination,” in Zionist usage, is a euphemism for a state that claims the right to oppress Palestinians to guarantee permanent Jewish dominance. The conversation is never about self‑determination for everyone between the river and the sea; it’s about one group’s supposed “right” to self‑determination being used as a trump (no pun intended) card to deny that same right to the people already living there, and to present any demand for Palestinian equality as an attack on Jewish existence itself. When Zionists warn that equal rights for Palestinians will “destroy” Israel, they’re confessing that their version of Israel as an ethnostate with exclusive rights for the “Chosen” only exists if Palestinians are kept unequal.

#5 – “Anti‑Zionism is antisemitism, and criticizing Israel is a form of Jew hatred.”

This is the gag order dressed up as protection. It insists that a 19th-20th-century political ideology and current apartheid state are somehow fused to the core of Jewish identity, so any serious criticism of Zionism or Israel automatically becomes hatred of Jews. In practice, it’s been used to silence Palestinians, punish Jewish dissenters, and shut down nonviolent movements like BDS. Worst of all, by insisting Israel speaks and kills “for the Jews,” it actually increases the risk to ordinary Jews around the world, then points to the backlash it helped create as proof that Jews “need” Zionism. The idea that “good” Jews support oppression is itself antisemitic, and with growing numbers of Jews openly identifying as anti‑Zionist, the claim that anti‑Zionism or sharp criticism of Israel equals Jew hatred looks more absurd – and more desperate – by the day.

#4 – “Palestinians are naturally violent creatures who either engage in terrorism or support it.”

This is the flip side of the supremacy coin: if Jews are cast as the eternally rational, civilized victims, Palestinians must be framed as barbaric, irrational creatures who either pick up the gun or cheer for whoever does. Never mind that Palestinians have an immense, documented history of nonviolent resistance – boycotts, strikes, marches, popular committees – in the face of overwhelming force. If you brand an entire people as congenital terrorists, then every checkpoint, every bombing, every child killed in their bed becomes “preventive security.” Growing up, I was led to believe that “Arabs” hated Jews for being Jews, and that if they ever had the chance, they’d kill us all. That’s the same script every settler‑colonial project has used, from calling indigenous peoples “savages” to describing enslaved Africans as inherently dangerous. Unlike the IOF and illegal Israeli settlers who engage in constant violence, including terrorism, an overwhelming majority of Palestinians have responded nonviolently to more than 77 years of Israeli state violence.

#3 – “Palestinians deserve all the punishment they’ve received from the ‘Jewish State.’”

This is Zionism’s purest form of victim‑blaming: decades of humiliation, dispossession, siege, bombing, imprisonment, and starvation are reframed as a kind of cosmic customer‑service issue that Palestinians brought on themselves by not being sufficiently quiet, grateful, or dead. Every atrocity becomes a “consequence” of their alleged barbarism rather than a choice made by an extremely powerful state that decided to rule another people by force. It’s the logic of the abuser: whatever I do to you is your fault for making me do it. And, like all victim‑blaming, it exists to soothe the conscience of the oppressor and to tell the rest of the world that justice would be dangerous, while ongoing cruelty is just “the natural order of things.”

#2 – “The IDF is the world’s most moral army.”

Nothing screams “most moral” like bombing hospitals, schools, and mosques; starving a captive population; and obliterating entire neighborhoods, all caught on video and live-streamed across the planet. This slogan exists for precisely one reason: to pre‑launder any atrocity. If you accept the premise that the IOF is uniquely moral, then, whatever it does – mass killing included – must somehow be okay. That’s not ethics; that’s a movement resembling a cult. Since October 7, 2023, more journalists have been killed in Israel’s war on the children, women, and men of Gaza than in any other conflict or country in the world in a comparable period, making it the deadliest conflict for journalists ever recorded. A “most moral army” doesn’t keep killing the people whose job is to show the world what it’s doing.

#1 – “Israel hasn’t committed genocide.”

When you systematically kill, maim, starve, and uproot a trapped population while political and military leaders talk openly about erasing them, that’s not a tragic accident of war; it’s a project of destruction. Denying genocide in the middle of live‑streamed mass killing isn’t a neutral position; it’s complicity. One of the more popular Zionist deflections is, “Hamas hides in civilian areas,” as if that somehow makes every home, hospital, school, mosque, and apartment block in Gaza fair game. Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth – there’s no such thing as a “non‑civilian area” – and international law doesn’t say, “If fighters are nearby, you’re free to erase entire neighborhoods and starve everyone left alive.” Even in urban warfare, an army must distinguish between combatants and civilians, use proportionate force, and avoid collective punishment. And if placing military infrastructure near civilians automatically made those civilians expendable, Israelis might want to explain why the IOF’s own headquarters, the Kirya compound – Israel’s “Pentagon” – sits in the heart of central Tel Aviv, surrounded by offices, malls, apartment towers, and dense civilian life. Bombing refugee camps, targeting journalists and medics, and cutting off food, water, and medicine to two million people isn’t self‑defense; it’s the deliberate destruction of a people’s ability to live. Major human rights organizations – including Amnesty International, a UN Commission of Inquiry, and B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group – have concluded that Israel is committing genocide or acts that meet the legal definition of genocide in Gaza, and the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister for using starvation as a weapon against civilians. To deny all this is happening is to deny the reality Palestinians are enduring every single day.

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