The Zionist viewpoint has "its peculiar blindnesses, its ideological weaknesses to say the least, its outrageous falsifications ... " (p. 13) Said notes that Western scholarly writing about the Middle East "is adversely affected by the Zionist-Palestinian conflict."

Concluding his introduction, Said says (p. 19), The Palestinians have since 1974 premised their political work and organization on the notion of joint community for Arabs and Jews in Palestine. ...

Peters alleged that the Arabic-Speaking population of Mandatory Palestine on the eve of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War was predominantly not of an indigenous origin, but rather recent arrivals from neighboring lands coming mostly after the First Aliyah, and that Palestinian refugee problem is in reality a population exchange with the Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews of the Islamic world, both claims decried as Nakba Denial.

Hitchens refers to Benny Morris´s then newly published article "The Causes and Character of the Arab Exodus from Palestine: The Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Service Analysis of June 1948", which was first published in January 1986 in the Middle Eastern Studies in which Hitchens quotes Morris as saying that the IDF intelligence report 'thoroughly undermines the traditional official Israeli "explanation" of a mass flight ordered or "incited" by the Arab leadership for political-strategic purposes.'

(p. 75) According to Hitchens this confirmation "by an Israeli historian using the most scrupulous and authentic Zionist sources, at last allows us to write finis to a debate which has been going on for a quarter of a century ... between Erskine B. Childers and Jon Kimche."

In Israel in 1958, as a guest of the Foreign Office and therefore doubly hopeful of serious assistance, I asked to be shown the proofs, I was assured they existed, and was promised them.

Hitchens concludes the essay with the observation that even as he was writing the article, he noticed a full-page advertisement from Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which said: In 1948, on the day of the proclamation of the State of Israel, five Arab armies invaded the new country from all sides.

And he concludes with a prediction: Even though nobody has ever testified to having heard them, and even though no record of their transmission has ever been found, we shall hear of these orders and broadcasts again and again.In his essay "Truth Whereby Nations Live", Israeli journalist and translator Peretz Kidron tells of his collaboration with the Canadian Ben Dunkelman in 1974 ghostwriting the latter's autobiography Dual Allegiance.

The surrender was formalized in a written document that agreed that the inhabitants would cease hostilities in return for promises that no harm would come to the civilian population.

In the end, Dunkelman decided not to use this episode in his autobiography, but Kidron felt that this was important evidence that Israel had forcibly expelled the Palestinians, and he made a copy of it.

While doing so he had access to the part of Rabin's memoirs which related to the expulsion of Palestinians from Lydda and Ramle in the middle of July 1948 ("Operation Larlar").

While the Israeli military censor passed the manuscript, a special ministerial commission struck out several portions of the translation, including this section where Rabin had written:[2] What would they do with the 50,000 civilians in the two cities ... Not even Ben-Gurion could offer a solution, and during the discussion at operation headquarters, he remained silent, as was his habit in such situations.

Kidron's conclusion: In brief, the two descriptions, particularly when taken together, proved beyond any shadow of doubt that there were high-level directives for mass expulsions of the Arab population, and that the decision-makers, evidently aware of the discreditable and unlawful nature of such a policy, were careful to leave no incriminating evidence about their personal and political responsibility.Chomsky's essay, "Middle East Terrorism and the American Ideological System", denounced as "breathlessly deranged" by a Washington Post reviewer,[3] is an indictment of Israeli and American military operations during the 1980s in the Middle East and Central America, respectively.

He describes Shimon Peres and Ronald Reagan as "two of the world's leading terrorist commanders," noting that Peres had just "sent his bombers to attack Tunis, where they killed twenty Tunisians and fifty-five Palestinians", with the civilian victims "crushed ... to dust" (quoting a Ha'aretz report) in alleged retaliation for the killing of Israeli civilians, noting further that "There can be no serious doubt of [Reagan administration] complicity in the Tunis attack".

He presents documentation of what he calls "atrocities" committed by Israelis (for example Peres' "Iron Fist" operations in Southern Lebanon, which he quotes a Western diplomat as characterizing as reaching new depths of "calculated brutality and arbitrary murder", taken from a The Guardian report.