Political and media commentary on the Hamas killings of October 2023 have been preoccupied with claims that these were not only the worst terrorists but that their actions were without precedent.

That claim is part of a massive deceit, promulgated for over 100 years.

Instead of the public being conned by that deceit, a more faithful record can be obtained from several sources, from B’Tselem the Israeli Human Rights agency, from the UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs and from Ilan Pappé’s ground-breaking works, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2005) and Lobbying for Zionism On Both Sides of the Atlantic (2024).

Instead of ill-informed governments’ and mainstream media’s lazy repetition of “Hamas, Hamas” to justify a genocide, an inquiry into the colonisation of Palestine reveals a different history and a very revised way of judging the policies of Israel and the decimation of Palestine. Let’s begin with the most obvious year of deceit.

A story of deceit 

In 1917, the British Government approved the Balfour Declaration which promised a homeland for the Jewish people, but not at the expense of the indigenous people of Palestine. Britain had no intention of fulfilling any obligation to the Palestinians and Zionists, representing Jewish interests, regarded indigenous inhabitants of Palestine as merely an obstacle to the creation of a Jewish state.

Advance 30 years to the UN’s proposed partition of Palestinian land and to the creation of Israel. The conventional picture of the 1948 Nakba, the tragedy from a Palestinian perspective, says that 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and more than 500 Palestinian villages and towns were destroyed.

Scratch beneath the surface of those figures and you witness a record of inhumanity so horrendous that it raises the questions “who are the terrorists?” Why do people forget?

Justification for slaughter, torture, rape and other cruelties usually depends on labelling victims as completely unworthy and even, in the case of Palestinians, as not existing. To justify their ethnic cleansing, Jewish terrorist gangs in 1948 stigmatised their prospective victims as Nazis, cockroaches and cancerous.

Once the labels stuck, men and boys could be separated from women and girls, many of the former marched to beaches or mosques to be executed and buried in mass graves. In cities like Jaffa, many of the latter were raped. Pappé documents instances where girls were taken for the sexual pleasures of gangs, then murdered when they had served their purpose, a feature of ethnic cleansing.

Slaughter in the village of Deir Yassin illustrates atrocities beyond imagination. In April 1948, the Stern and Irgun terrorist militia murdered up to 250 inhabitants, 107 of the victims tied to trees and burned to death. Two men, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, were the leaders of these terrorist gangs and subsequently became prime ministers of Israel. In Tantura village, 400 people surrendered, but able-bodied young men were then executed by Jewish soldiers and intelligence officers. Women and children were lined up, stripped and photographed. Pappé describes those taken prisoner as being treated with degrading brutality, placed in cages without food or water, their blankets taken away.

The cruelty repertoire of Jewish gangs included the insertion of typhoid and dysentery germs into wells and other water systems. 

As in their passive witness of the 2023-25 genocide in Gaza, Britain was present at the 1948 slaughters, but did nothing, other than facilitating a terrorist rampage. UN representatives were present, but powerless.

Redefining Hamas

Between 1948 and 2023, Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation persisted, notably in the intifada (uprisings) beginning jn 1987 and again in 2000. In that violence, approximately 3000 Palestinians were killed and 1000 Israelis.

In the early years of the 21st century, Hamas operated in Gaza as an NGO, providing welfare, health and educational services and was apparently perceived by Gazans as reliable and not corrupt. At a time when the US and its Western allies had re-discovered democracy as a panacea for the ills of the Middle East, Hamas became a political party ready to run in the 2006 election in Gaza, an exercise in democracy encouraged and funded by the US secretary of state Condoleeza Rice.

The West wanted and assumed that the secular party, Fatah, would win the election. Instead, the people of Gaza voted overwhelmingly for Hamas, but when this happened, Israel, the US and their Western allies revealed that they only believed in democracy if they obtained the result they wanted.

As soon as Hamas’ success was known, Israel imposed a siege on Gaza; there were 2.5 million people, half of whom were children.

It would be shallow to use body counts as the moral way to assess blame for Israeli/Palestine violence, but since the Western media repeat ad nauseam that Hamas is “a terrorist organisation” which murdered 1200 Israelis in October 2023 — albeit more than 50 were killed by friendly fire — it is reasonable to set the record straight by recalling Palestinian casualties and the world’s reaction to such loss of life.

Death and destruction across Palestine are referred to as wars between the Israeli Defence Force and resistance groups within Gaza, not always Hamas. Even the reference to war, which is taken for granted, is deceptive, given that this one-sided contest looks more like organised slaughter.

In the 2008 Israeli Operation Cast Lead, 1400 Palestinians were killed, including 300 children. But why does that matter, they were only Palestinians.

In the 2014 Israeli operation, Protective Edge, more than 2000 Palestinians were killed, including 500 children. So what? They were only Palestinians.

In 2018/19, during the March of Return organised by civilians in Gaza — not by Hamas — Israeli snipers killed more than 220 Gazans. Many of the casualties were nurses, clearly visible in their hospital uniforms. A total of 13,000 young Palestinians were shot in the legs. They suffered severe injuries in a land with limited medical facilities.

The death toll in the so-called Gaza war 2023-2025 should also affect the West’s certainty that one terrorist organisation in one horrendous attack in October 2023 is responsible for decades of slaughter. Such reasoning is inaccurate, one-sided and deceiving. Hamas health sources’ figures put the death toll of Gazan civilians, mostly women and children, at 66,000. Yet, studies in the UK medical journal the Lancet, by US journalist Ralph Nader and by Australian academics Gideon Polya and Richard Hil, estimate that fatalities should also take in death by deprivation, and in consequence they show well over 500,000 deaths.

You would have to ask, how do those figures square with moral outrage about October 2023 as though the massive death toll in Gaza never happened or could be easily justified?

Managing deceit

Answering that last question depends on knowing the ways in which people have been deceived for 100 years. The Jewish National Fund, responsible for building pine forests over the ruins of the hundreds of Palestine villages and agricultural lands destroyed in 1948, is a prime deceiver. Picnic grounds in those forests exist above the remains of Palestians homes which can be erased from memory. They did not exist or, if they did, they were of no consequence.

Campaigns to dramatise Israeli virtues and to lay blame for deaths in Gaza have been conducted by Israeli military representatives. They can lie on every television set because ill-informed, often cowardly journalists seldom ask, “are we expected to believe what you are saying?”

The capacity to tell lies with a holier-than-thou presentation has been focused on several issues: Israel is a democracy; the Israel Defence Force never attacks civilians; the IDF is the most moral army in the world; Hamas is responsible for everything; there is no famine in Gaza.

In Australia, deception persists when the Zionist lobby and the gullible who support them insist that antisemitism is the issue, not the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children. A NSW premier and cautious federal politicians have been unashamed supporters of Israel because they accept the Zionist lobby’s insistence that supply of weapons of mass destruction to Israel is a way to combat alleged antisemitism.

Woe betide anyone who questions such a narrative.

In the White House and before President Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lacquered the deception stories with his usual claim that, on behalf of the world, he was fighting for civilisation against barbarism.

Netanyahu and the religious zealots in his cabinet will never acknowledge that they have nothing to do with civility, that they represent barbarism. Unless politicians, the media, the corporate world and managers of universities take the trouble to revise their understanding of history, this massive deception will continue.

The architects of the Balfour Declaration kept their promises. Unimaginable cruelty never occurred in 1948 when Palestine was cleansed. Even though Israel was founded on the efforts of numerous terrorist gangs, the only terrorists to commit war crimes were a group called Hamas who only appeared in 2006 and broke out after 17 years of siege.

Go figure the deception.

A version of an address to the Australian Institute of International Affairs on 30 September.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.