As though eager to outdo the state’s founding myth: “A national homeland for the Jewish people in a land without a people,” Israelis have been producing lie after lie. But the fabric is collapsing beneath the weight of facts.

A recent Israeli security assessment has acknowledged that an Israeli combat helicopter shelled attendees at the Nova music festival next to the Re’im kibbutz. On 18 November, Haaretz reported that Hamas did not have advance knowledge of the festival and that the fighters decided to target it spontaneously. When the Israeli command learned of the attack, they dispatched a combat helicopter from the Ramat David Airbase. When it arrived at the scene it “fired at terrorists there and apparently also hit some festival participants,” the newspaper reports, citing a police source.

The report points out that the dates of the festival were changed at the last minute. The event was originally scheduled for Thursday and Friday, while the extra day – Saturday 7 October – was only added a few days earlier. Citing a senior security official, Haaretz explains, “Hamas found out about the party through drones or parachutes and directed the terrorists to the location using their comms system.”

Israeli police estimate that 4,400 people attended the festival on the day of the Hamas attack. Of these, 360 were killed – a significant increase from the previous estimate of 260. Seventeen police officers of various ranks were among the dead. That additional 100 dead, who were as likely to have been killed by Israeli army fire as they were by Hamas operatives, calls the whole narrative into question.

The Israeli government’s accretion of post- October 7 lies opened with the tale of the “forty decapitated babies.” Even as the White House refuted its veracity, President Joe Biden reiterated it. In a statement after meeting leaders of the US Jewish community, he said that “the terrorists beheaded children” and that he had seen pictures of them. A White House official had to walk back Biden’s remarks, saying that neither the president or his aides had seen the pictures or received confirmed reports.

Subsequent reports in the Western press debunked the story. A CNN report dated 12 October was unable to confirm the allegations of decapitated children. A CNN team “pored through hundreds of hours of media posted online” in an attempt to corroborate atrocities by Hamas, but it “has not seen anything that would appear to confirm the claims of decapitated children.” In addition, a CNN team visited Kfar Azar, where Israeli officials said the barbarous act took place, but “saw no evidence of beheaded youths. Israeli officials have not released any photographs of the incident either.

CNN challenged another Israeli fabrication. On 2 November, it cited evidence that the missile that struck the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza had been fired from inside Israel, as opposed to from within Gaza. That flies in the face of the claim made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and parroted by his guest at the time, Biden, that members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza were responsible for the deadly attack against the hospital.

“By geolocating the camera positions and establishing the field of view as seen in the videos, CNN was able to determine the rocket was likely fired near the Israeli town of Nahal Oz,” the news site relates. It found that this projectile had exploded before reaching the hospital. Yet, none of the videos reviewed by the news channel captured rockets fired from within Gaza that could have struck the hospital.

One of Israel’s most recent lies holds that a Hamas HQ was located beneath the Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in the besieged enclave that has been governed by Hamas since 2007. The BBC has aired a report exposing huge gaps in this Israeli narrative. First, it showed footage of an Israeli army video in which an Israeli military spokesman is explaining what their forces ostensibly found in the basements of the hospital. It is worth noting here that the occupation forces had rebuilt the hospital complex with its basements in the 1970s, and that the Israeli army had used that hospital as its own headquarters in Gaza at some point in the 1980s. The spokesman stated that the time the video was shot was 9:00, but the BBC report zoomed into the Israeli officer’s wristwatch, which showed a different time. The video also showed a magazine for an old Kalashnikov lying on a table. However, another video filmed shortly afterwards showed two old Kalashnikovs standing side-by-side.

In the two weeks since the Israeli army took control of the Shifa Hospital, they have not come up with any convincing evidence that Hamas had been conducting operations from the basements, let alone using it as a command-and-control centre. Nor could they produce evidence that any of the hostages had been held beneath the hospital. Even the body of a woman who had been held captive was found “somewhere near” the hospital, according to the Israeli army statement, which did not specify the location.

Zionist settlers began to arrive in Palestine over a century ago to the march of the slogan that Palestine was “a land without people” promised to “people without a land.” That myth ran up against Palestinian peasants who soon began to resist the growing foreign colonies that were sprouting around the Lake of Tiberius (Sea of Galilee), Upper Galilee and the coastal plane, which is to say the most fertile areas of Palestine. Zionists from Russia, Poland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe also encountered resistance. When faced with the general Palestinian farmers’ refusal to sell their land, they were forced to purchase fallow land from the Ottoman Tapu (deed of ownership) registrar and then reclaim it for agriculture.

The next myth went by the name of “Solomon’s Temple” whose presumed location inspired the establishment of the Palestinian Antiquities Fund in the late 19th century. Millions of dollars have since been spent on archaeological digs in the occupied West Bank and occupied Jerusalem to unearth the antiquities of Judea and Samaria in the late Bronze Age. Apart from producing a web of tunnels beneath most of the Old City of East Jerusalem, the excavations yielded little to substantiate the myth. In fact, the archaeological record has led some Western experts to believe that the kingdom of King David and his son Solomon had never existed in Palestine to begin with.

No mythmaking in this region would be complete without an “oasis of civilisation in the desert of the Middle East” metaphor. That mirage quickly evaporated by dint of the savagery of the Zionist gangs during the Palestinian uprisings in the 1920s and 1930s and the 1948 which brought us the massacres of Deir Yassin, Kafr Qassem and others.

Still, the Israeli lies machine would not rest. It next produced the yarn that the Palestinians in 1948 voluntarily up and left their homes to join their relatives in the Arab countries. The international community refused to buy that one. The UN General Assembly has passed several resolutions, most insisting on the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

The well-known line that Israel is the only democracy in the region has thrived for decades. But it received a debilitating blow with the UN General Assembly resolution that equated Zionism with racism, acknowledging that democracy as practised by that state is an extension of colonialist ideology.

As for the “promised land” trope, it gave rise to colonies/settlements bristling with arms, rapacious theft of land, and smug indifference to the vast majority of world opinion which sees those settlements as a violation of international law.

The figments of the Israeli fiction about its war in Gaza are crumbling and so too is the credibility of Western powers that oppose a ceasefire on the grounds that it would reward Hamas. Could it be that they think the murder of 9,000 women and children out of a total of 13,000 civilians killed by the Israeli army in Gaza is not a sufficient reward for Netanyahu and his government?

* A version of this article appears in print in the 23 November, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly