The State of Israel: founded on lies

Recently, the veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery was called upon to take part in a ceremonial reading of the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Having read through the document he said: “I was not impressed. It is not written in the edifying style of an historical document, but as a document with a mission: to convince the nations of the world to recognize our state. The introduction is a reiteration of Zionist slogans. It purports to set out the historical facts, and very dubious facts they are…”

I decided to read the document through myself to catalog the ‘dubious facts’ (let’s be honest and call them’ lies’) and found a few more than Uri mentioned.


Lie 1. Palestine was not the birthplace of the Jewish people. The Hebrew tribe had its origin in Mesopotamia. Its religious identity was shaped in the Sinai desert. Its settlement in the area later called Palestine was enabled by a vicious war of conquest in which the existing Canaanite population was wiped out.


Lie 2. The Jewish people did not hope for restoration of political freedom in Palestine. Their theology regarded the return to Palestine as an end-times event which would be led by the Messiah. The idea of European Jews ‘returning’ to Palestine to establish a Jewish state (Zionism) arose only in the latter half of the 19th century, and was supported only by a minority of Jews.


Lie 3. Jews were not continuously striving to establish themselves in Palestine. Those who migrated to the middle east and other places before the first Zionist aliyah (1890s), for example the Spanish Jews (1492), did so to escape persecution, and not many settled in Palestine.

Lie 4. The “recent decades” refers to the British Mandate under which the British authorities had full powers of administration. It was they that “brought the blessings of progress to all the country’s inhabitants”, through developments in agriculture and infra-structure. Although Jewish capital and enterprise did contribute to these developments, the Jewish Agency had no interest in helping the Arab population. Zionists who bought agricultural land from Arab land owners replaced the Arab workers with Jews; those Zionists who established new industries employed only Jews.


Lie 5. The Basel Declaration of the First Congress said “Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.” No mention of a ‘right’ to do so: no mention of the concept of a Jewish ‘nation’.


Lie 6. The Balfour Declaration said that the British Government “looked with favor” on the idea of a Jewish national home in Palestine: there was no mention of any ‘right’ for the Jews to have such a home.

Lie 7. Nor is such a ‘right’ acknowledged in the Palestine Mandate. It uses the term ‘right’ in connection with Jews only once, referring to Jews outside Palestine. It uses the term ‘right’ four times  in connection with the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.


Lie 8.  The refugees from Europe were homeless, but the Jewish people as a whole were not homeless. Jews had been living for generations within many of the world’s nations, and regarded their country of residence as their homeland.


Half-truth. Not all of the refugees and survivors wanted a life of honest toil in Palestine. Many would have preferred to go to the United States, but were prevented from doing so by very severe restrictions in immigration which continued until 1948.


Lie 9. The United Nations was founded in 1945. Its Members were States, not peoples. In 1945 Palestine was a Mandated State, but unlike the Colony of India it was not a founding Member of the United Nations.


Lie 10. The Resolution did not call for a Jewish State in Palestine: it recommended a plan in which Palestine would be divided into three components: a Jewish state, an Arab state, and the Holy City of Jerusalem, with the three of them forming an Economic Union, controlled by an Economic Board whose decisions were binding on the three entities, and on which foreign members appointed by the UN had the casting vote.

Lie 11. The Resolution did not ‘require’ the inhabitants to take steps to implement it, it ‘called upon’ them to do so.

Lie 12. The Resolution did not recognize a ‘right’ for the Jewish people to establish a Jewish State in Palestine.


Lie 13. The Declaration was not made on the ‘strength’ of the UN Resolution. The Plan of Partition with Economic Union specified a process in which power was transferred gradually from the Mandatory to a Commission set up by the UN and then from the Commission to the two states. The states were not to be independent sovereign states in the usual sense, because they were under the control of the Economic Board. There was no place within this process for a unilateral declaration of independence by either of the states.  Israel’s Declaration preempted the process specified in the Plan and was made in defiance of Resolution 46 of the UN Security Council.



These final two paragraphs express many noble intentions. I leave it to readers to count how many of these have been fulfilled.

About David Gerald Fincham

Retired academic scientist.

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