Everyone Is Lying to You About the Palestinians
You have been lied to. Systematically, deliberately, and for decades, about one of the most discussed people in the world. People you think you understand and know. A narrative so embedded in Western culture that questioning it feels like heresy. To explain how the deception began and has lasted for so many years, I want to tell you a very famous children's tale - The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Two con artists arrive in a kingdom. They call themselves tailors, the finest in the world, and they make the emperor an offer he cannot refuse: a suit of fabric so extraordinary, so impossibly beautiful, that it carries a unique property. It is invisible completely, perfectly invisible — to anyone who is stupid or unfit for their position.
The emperor orders the suit; he pays generously. The tailors set up their looms, work with great industry and visible effort, and produce absolutely nothing. The looms are empty. There is no fabric. There is no thread. There is only the performance of weaving and the gold disappearing into their pockets.
The crowd had been waiting for weeks for what was supposed to be the moment, the grand reveal of the most extraordinary suit of clothes ever made, worth a small fortune, commissioned from the finest tailors in the world. The emperor stood before the mirror and marveled. His advisors gasped and declared it exceptional, unprecedented, a masterpiece. The crowd lining the streets erupted; no one dared to be the one person in the square who couldn’t see what everyone else claimed to see. To say nothing was to be smart. To say nothing was to be safe. To say nothing was to belong.
Then a child screamed what every single person already knew:
The emperor has no clothes.
The Western world has been staring at empty looms for years. Journalists. Professors. Presidents. All of them nodding at the fabric, describing the weave, punishing anyone who points at the empty loom and asks a simple question:
Is any of this actually true?
The Emperor’s New Clothes is not really about a con; it’s about virtue. The ministers, the courtiers, the crowd, they weren’t stupid. They were afraid. Afraid of being the one person in the room who couldn’t see what everyone else claimed to see. In the modern West, we have a name for this: political conformity.” The herd moves together, without examining the evidence, and if you don’t see the fabric, you are the problem. You are ignorant and stupid.
This is how dangerous ideas begin, and this is exactly how the Palestinianization of the West began, the process by which Palestinians became the ideal victim, the perfect martyr, the sacred cause that must be worshipped, amplified, and saved at any cost.
Palestineism as a symbol
Let’s examine Palestinianism as a symbol through one of the oldest lenses we have. “Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are.” In this work, we’re not going to examine the Palestinians through their conflict with Israel. That story has been told, retold, and weaponized beyond recognition. Instead, we’re going to look at them through a different mirror — the allies who chose them, the regimes that embraced them, the movements that marched beside them.
The First Ally: Great Britain 1920–1948
When the British Mandate was established in 1920, the Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean were not yet calling themselves Palestinians. Many of them had arrived in recent decades, drawn by the economic opportunities that Jewish immigration had created, draining swamps, building cities, founding hospitals, newspapers, orchestras, and universities.
The British offered these Arabs something remarkable: a political framework, protected rights, and a path toward self-determination. It was an opportunity to build.
So they built. But what they built was not cities or universities. They built an ethos, and the foundation of that ethos was violence against Jews. Not against the British, because this was never really about colonialism, and they knew it. The British were useful — they blocked Jewish immigration, favored Arab political demands, and helped manufacture an Arab identity where there had been only loose tribal affiliations before.
Under British protection — and often with British indifference — they massacred Jewish families in their homes, slaughtered worshippers inside synagogues, raped women, mutilated bodies, smashed the skulls of children. In Hebron. In Jerusalem. In Safed. In Jaffa. Year after year, before there was a state to resist, before there was an occupation to oppose, before there was a single Israeli soldier on a single street.
The cause came later — dressing up something much older in the language of liberation. The goal was never a state; it was to eliminate Jews as part of a jihadist vision of Islamic conquest. That ethos was there from the beginning. It has never changed.
The Second Ally: Nazi Germany 1936–1945
The British appointed a leader for the Arab population of Mandatory Palestine. They gave him the title Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, making him the highest religious and political authority in the region. His name was Haj Amin al-Husseini, and his official role was to serve as a bridge between the Arab population and the British administration, to maintain order, and to manage the religious affairs of the Muslim community.
Instead, he built a nationalist movement with a single obsession: driving the Jews out. He spent two decades inciting riots, organizing massacres, and eliminating any Arab voice willing to compromise or coexist. When World War II broke out, he made his choice openly. He fled to Nazi Germany, requested a meeting with Adolf Hitler, and on November 28, 1941, sat across from the Führer in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
Why Hitler? Because al-Husseini had concluded that the Nazis were the only power willing to commit, in writing, to the complete elimination of Jewish presence in the Middle East. He came with a clear request: a formal Axis declaration recognizing Arab independence and pledging to destroy the Jewish homeland. He opened the meeting by conveying, in his own words, the admiration of the entire Arab world for the Führer.
Hitler confirmed what al-Husseini already believed. Germany’s war against the Jews of Europe and Germany’s opposition to a Jewish presence in Palestine were one and the same war. It was a perfect match. Al-Husseini spent the war years in Berlin broadcasting pro-Nazi propaganda in Arabic across the Middle East. The Nazis, for their part, granted him honorary Aryan status. The man who organized the Hebron massacre, who built his movement on mosque-fueled incitement and manufactured rage, had found his ideological home
The Third Ally: The Soviet Union
When the Nazi project collapsed in 1945, Al-Husseini fled to Cairo. The Soviet Union was seeking leverage in the Middle East. Israel had aligned with the West. The Arab world was volatile, resource-rich, and humiliated after three military defeats. It was perfect raw material for superpower-seeking proxies.
The Soviets understood something the Arabs hadn’t fully grasped yet: in the post-war world, naked ethnic violence was bad optics. The language of the second half of the 20th century was not race and religion. It was liberation. Colonialism. Oppression. Self-determination. If you wanted the world’s sympathy, you didn’t talk about driving Jews into the sea. You talked about land, Refugees, occupation, and Indigenous rights.
The KGB went to work; Soviet intelligence operatives helped engineer the transformation of a local Arab rejection movement into a global anti-colonial cause. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the West, documented in detail how the KGB crafted the Palestinian narrative as a Cold War weapon. The goal was not Palestinian statehood; it was to destabilize the West’s most reliable ally in the Middle East and tie America down in an endless, unwinnable conflict.
Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian man, was a product of this machinery. He was recruited, trained, funded, and groomed by Soviet-aligned intelligence services; he was taught to speak the language of liberation while running an organization whose founding charter called for the destruction of Israel by armed struggle.
The PLO was established in 1964 — three years before the Six-Day War, three years before a single Israeli soldier stood in the West Bank or Gaza. There was no occupation to resist; there were only Jews to eliminate.
The rebranding was a masterpiece. By the 1970s, the Palestinian cause had become the flagship of the global left. What had begun as a religious-nationalist movement rooted in massacre and Nazi collaboration had been relaunched as a Third World liberation struggle, complete with revolutionary aesthetics, academic champions, and a seat at the United Nations.
The emperor had new clothes - and the Western left applauded the weave.
The Fourth Ally: Jordan 1948–1971
After the Arab world lost the 1948 war against Israel following their rejection of the partition plan, hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled Israel. Jordan didn’t just absorb them; it annexed the West Bank entirely and granted Palestinians full citizenship. Overnight, Jordan had become the PLO’s most important host: vast refugee camps, a sympathetic population, and a long border with Israel, perfect for launching attacks. King Hussein tolerated them. For a while.
Through the late 1960s, the PLO turned Jordan into a state within a state; they ran their own checkpoints. They openly trained fighters and answered to no one. Arafat’s men strutted through Amman with weapons, ignored Jordanian law, and made it clear they considered themselves beyond the king’s authority. When Jordanian soldiers tried to assert control, the PLO shot back.
In September 1970, Palestinians hijacked four international passenger jets and forced three to land in the Jordanian desert. They blew up the planes in front of international cameras and held the passengers hostage for weeks. It was a spectacle meant to humiliate the West — staged on Jordanian soil without Hussein’s permission and in full view of the world.
Hussein had seen enough and unleashed his army. In ten days of brutal urban fighting, the Jordanian military killed thousands of Palestinians and drove the rest north. By 1971, the PLO and Palestinian citizens had been entirely expelled from Jordan to Lebanon.
The Fifth Ally: Lebanon 1971–1982
Lebanon took in what Jordan had expelled. The PLO arrived with weapons, money, fighters, and no intention of being anyone’s guest. They moved into the Palestinian refugee camps in the south, declared them autonomous zones, and began doing exactly what they had done in Jordan — building a state within a state, this time with even less resistance.
Lebanon was the perfect host for the wrong reasons. The country was already fracturing along sectarian lines — Christians, Sunnis, Shia, and Druze — and the central government was too weak to say no. The 1969 Cairo Agreement had already granted the PLO the legal right to operate independently on Lebanese soil and to conduct armed struggle against Israel. A sovereign country had signed away its sovereignty.
The PLO didn’t just use Lebanon as a base; they took it over. They controlled the refugee camps with an iron fist, taxed the population, ran courts, operated prisons, and published their own newspapers. They hijacked Lebanese media, bribed journalists, and threatened those who refused to cooperate. In southern Lebanon, where Lebanese civilians began calling it Fatahland, they built a military infrastructure that rivaled the Lebanese army. Rocket attacks into northern Israel became routine. Israeli reprisals followed, and Lebanese civilians paid the price for both.
By 1975, Lebanon collapsed into civil war. The PLO didn’t cause it alone, but they poured gasoline on every fire. They allied with Muslim and leftist factions against the Christian militias, turning a political crisis into a full-scale war. In 1976, Syria invaded not to help the Palestinians, but to cut them down to size.
By 1982, Israel had had enough. The Israeli army invaded Lebanon, reached Beirut, and surrounded the city. After weeks of siege, the PLO evacuated — 8,000 fighters dispersed across the Arab world, and Arafat himself sailed out of Beirut harbor on a Greek ferry, waving to cameras. A second Arab country had thrown them out. They landed in Tunis. Three thousand miles from Palestine.
The Sixth Ally: Kuwait 1990
While Arafat sat in Tunis, licking his wounds, the Palestinian cause was being funded by the Persian Gulf. Kuwait had built itself into a modern state on Palestinian labor and sent money to the PLO. Kuwait was the organization’s most reliable cash machine until Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990.
The Arab world held its breath, waiting to see who would stand where. Every calculation was political, every statement measured. Arafat embraced the Iraqi dictator publicly, praised the invasion, and positioned the PLO as Baghdad’s ally. He called it Arab solidarity. The rest of the world called it what it was: a man betting on the wrong horse with someone else’s money. Kuwait never forgot.
When the Gulf War ended and Iraqi forces retreated, Kuwait expelled nearly every Palestinian in the country. Three hundred thousand Palestinian families who had lived there for decades were thrown out within months. The Gulf states cut off all funding to the PLO overnight, and Saudi Arabia followed. The financial infrastructure that had kept Arafat’s organization alive for twenty years evaporated in a single political miscalculation.
The Seventh Ally: Iran and Qatar — The Gun and the Checkbook
By the early 1990s, Arafat was looking to set the streets on fire again, but the Palestinian movement was losing its edge, and Arafat knew it. The Islamic Republic of Iran had a vision, an Islamic caliphate spanning the Middle East, and they needed a local proxy to wage the war it couldn’t wage openly.
The two found each other, and everything reignited. The Islamic Republic had no interest in Palestinian statehood. A Palestinian state would mean a peace deal, and a peace deal would mean the end of the war — and the war was exactly what Tehran wanted. A proxy army on Israel’s southern border, firing rockets indefinitely, bleeding the Jewish state slowly, while Iran sat a thousand miles away and watched. Hamas was the perfect instrument. Throughout the 1990s, Iran flooded Hamas with money, weapons, and military training.
What had been a local Muslim Brotherhood offshoot became a regional war machine, and Iran became the indispensable patron behind it. But weapons need cover. Permanent war needs a story.
Qatar understood this better than anyone. The ruling family in Doha had pledged loyalty to the Muslim Brotherhood decades earlier, which meant they shared the same ultimate goal as Iran: the destruction of Israel and the expansion of Islamic power across the region. They simply preferred a different battlefield. Not rockets and tunnels, but television screens and university campuses. Where Iran supplied the gun, Qatar would supply the narrative that made the gun look righteous.
So the partnership was born. Qatar poured billions into Hamas, hosted its leadership in five-star comfort in Doha, and built Al Jazeera into the world’s most watched Arabic-language news network — deploying it as a round-the-clock propaganda machine. Every Israeli military operation became a war crime. Every Hamas atrocity became resistance. Every dead civilian became a martyr, carefully photographed, carefully broadcast, carefully curated for Western audiences who had no framework to question what they were seeing.
Iran provided the gun. Qatar provided the story that made the gun look righteous. Together, they did what the Soviets had started: they took a movement that the entire Arab world had used, betrayed, expelled, and abandoned, and turned it into the world’s most successful propaganda operation. Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait threw them out. Syria tried to destroy them. Egypt made peace with its enemy.
The Final Ally: The Western World
Every ally before this one had an excuse. The Soviets wanted a proxy. The Arab states wanted a weapon. Iran wanted a war. Qatar wanted influence. They used the Palestinians deliberately, cynically, with full knowledge of what they were doing.
The West had no such excuse. The West simply stopped asking questions. When the Palestinian cause arrived in Western universities, newsrooms, and parliaments, it came dressed in the language the left had spent decades building: colonialism, indigenous rights, occupation, resistance. It fit so perfectly that almost no one stopped to check whether the clothes were real. The ministers nodded. The professors described the weave, and the crowd cheered.
But one country decided to run an experiment instead. In 1992, Denmark accepted 321 Palestinian refugees, not as a political gesture, but through a special act of parliament. The Danish government then did something unusual: it tracked them. For nearly three decades, it followed what happened to these people in a free, prosperous, peaceful country with no occupation, no checkpoints, no Israeli soldiers, no siege. A country that gave them housing, welfare, education, and opportunity. By 2019, the results were in:
Sixty-four percent had acquired criminal records. Thirty-four percent of their children had acquired criminal records — and many of those children hadn’t even reached adulthood yet.
The vast majority were living on government welfare.
No occupation to blame, no apartheid to point to, no settlements, no blockade, no collective punishment. Just the same culture, the same values, the same ethos, transplanted to Scandinavia and left to grow on its own. The West looked at these numbers and looked away.
Because looking would mean asking the question no one wanted to ask: what if the problem was never the “occupation”? What if it was never the borders, the “settlements”s, the “colonialism”? What if the violence, the rejection, the inability to build — what if all of it traveled with them, across the Mediterranean, into the cold northern light of Denmark, and reproduced itself faithfully in the second generation?
What if the emperor had no clothes — and had never had them?
Every year, the World Happiness Report publishes its rankings. Every year, people are surprised by the same number. In 2025, Israel ranked the eighth-happiest country on earth. During a war, rockets, shelters, hostages, fallen soldiers, existential threat on every border, and Israel sits quietly between Sweden and Luxembourg, surrounded by Nordic countries famous for their peace, their welfare states, and their untroubled skies. This is not a coincidence; it is a civilizational fingerprint.
The ethos of Israeli civilization, built on creation, meaning, family, growth, spiritual depth, and an almost unreasonable insistence on life, produces happiness that bombs cannot touch. Now look at the other side.
The Palestinian national movement has never built a hospital that wasn’t a weapons depot. Never built a school that wasn’t a recruitment center. Its founding charter calls for destruction. Its television teaches children to die. Its highest cultural aspiration, repeated in every mosque and every protest from London to Los Angeles, is “from the river to the sea.” The Western world translated that phrase as a call for Palestinian statehood. In Arabic, it means something else entirely: min al-nahr ila al-bahr — arabiyya hurra. From the river to the sea — Arab and free. No Jews. No Israel. No coexistence. The translation was not a mistake. It was a deliberate gift to a Western audience that needed the lie to stay comfortable.
This is the choice that has always been on the table — not between Israel and Palestine, not between occupier and occupied, not between strong and weak. Between an ethos of life and an ethos of death. Between a civilization that teaches its children to create, and a movement that teaches its children to die.
You were told to pick a side.
You were never told what the sides actually were.
Now you know.
Articles that tell complex truths don’t go viral. That’s by design. Let’s make a collective effort. If this piece moved something in you, share it because the only way the biggest lie in modern history gets exposed is if enough people decide the truth is worth the discomfort of saying it out loud.
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Much Love
Yama Bar
The author has delivered a powerful rendering of the last century's history in a manner that utterly dismantles the current narrative. In a compelling way, the author brings to life the deep truth about the Palestine Question and shines a light on the innumerable instances in which the Arabs chose badly. We are where we are in the region not because of colonialism but because of a centuries long desire to destroy the Jewish people. It's well past time for the world to wake up to this.
First really well written and informative!
After reading your article, I did a bit of research on the “occupation” word. I hadn’t realized that the occupation narrative — the story that Palestinian suffering begins and ends with Israeli control of the West Bank — was not born in the Middle East. It was manufactured in Moscow.
After World War II, the Soviet Union needed to destabilize America’s most reliable democratic ally in the region. So the KGB did not fight Israel with weapons. It fought with words. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the West, documented how Soviet operatives transformed a local Arab rejection movement into a global anti-colonial cause — dressing raw violence in language the Western left could not resist. Liberation. Colonialism. Occupation. Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian, was a product of this machinery.
The word “occupation” is the most successful piece of that propaganda. It collapses under one honest question: occupied since when, and by whom? Jordan held the West Bank from 1948 to 1967, expelling every Jew. No protests. No UN resolutions. No marches in London. “Occupation” entered the vocabulary only when Israel controlled the land. That is not a legal argument. It is a Soviet-designed political weapon.
Then Denmark ran the experiment. In 1992, it accepted Palestinian refugees and tracked them for thirty years. No occupation. No checkpoints. Full opportunity in one of the world’s most peaceful countries. The results directly contradicted the narrative. The problem had traveled across the Mediterranean and reproduced itself in Scandinavia.
Jordan expelled them. Lebanon expelled them. Kuwait expelled 300,000 overnight.
The occupation was never the explanation. It was always the excuse.