The Arabs attacked Israel in many wars and lost, so the consequences are their fault.

The narrative that "Arabs attacked first" is Zionist propaganda that collapses against the historical record. Israel has used this claim to justify its establishment as a settler-colonial state in 1948, yet the Nakba was already underway before any Arab army entered Palestine in May 1948. By then, over 300,000 Palestinians had already been forcibly displaced, and Zionist militias had already committed major massacres, including the infamous Deir Yassin massacre. These atrocities were part of a coordinated military strategy known as Plan Dalet, aimed at ethnically cleansing Palestinians and establishing a Jewish state.

Israel's pattern of regional colonial expansion and military aggression tells a different story. In 1956, the combined forces of Israel, France, and Britain launched a military attack against Egypt, also known as the Tripartite Aggression. In 1967, Israel launched a surprise attack on Egypt, and went on to occupy the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights, and Egyptian Sinai. Israel invaded Lebanon and launched major aggressions in 1978, 1982, and 2006, carrying out mass destruction of civilian infrastructure, siege, forced displacement, occupation, and massacres, including Sabra and Shatila, when more than 3,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were slaughtered in three days.

In 2025 alone, Israel was committing genocide in Palestine, while simultaneously attacking Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Syria, and Qatar. Israel's war on Lebanon in particular, although not the first, was unprecedented in its scale and destruction. Between October 2023 and May 2026, the assault killed over 5,000 people, displaced more than 1.2 million, flattened entire villages, destroyed homes, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure, while Israel continues to occupy Lebanese territory. This is not a state "responding" to Arab attacks. It is a regional colonial power expanding its domination across the region.

Even if Arab states had attacked first, international law still regulates the conduct of war and prohibits attacks on civilians, destruction of civilian infrastructure, collective punishment, and forced displacement. Across successive military offensives, Israel has repeatedly been accused by UN bodies, international courts, and major human rights organizations of violating these principles. Whether a state started or lost a war does not justify these crimes, nor does it erase the accountability of perpetrators or the rights of victims.

The war narrative obscures the true nature of Israel as a settler-colonial project built on the ethnic cleansing and dispossession of the Palestinian people, alongside the expansion of its colonial domination across the region, as evident in successive regional aggressions against at least 12 countries since its establishment in 1948, and expansionist ideologies such as "Greater Israel."

This narrative seeks to shift responsibility for Zionist colonial violence onto Palestinians and Arabs themselves, while portraying colonial conquest as self-defense and normalizing Israel's ethnic cleansing, occupation, and broader colonial expansion across Palestine and the region.