Truth has become a scarce resource in an age glutted with information. We have more data than at any time in human history, yet less shared reality. Every controversy – from Israel–Palestine to vaccines, climate breakdown and geopolitics – is saturated with people who are utterly convinced they are speaking “the truth”, while recycling claims that are at best partial, at worst entirely imagined.
I am less interested in scoring points about who is right in any particular quarrel than I am in asking why we drift so easily away from what can be known, and why we cling so fiercely to what cannot be verified. We are a meaning‑seeking species: we would rather hold a false certainty than live with an honest ambiguity. This genuinely puzzles me.
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict provides a convenient case study because it’s so thick with archives, testimonies, competing historiographies and moral outrage. But the same habits of mind appear in very different settings – in boardrooms, religious sects, activist spaces, and security councils. What I want to examine is the psychological economy that makes distortion so attractive, and integrity so rare.
What Can Be Known – and What We Do With It
Let’s start, very briefly, with the historical terrain. The 1948 war has now been examined from multiple angles by Israeli, Arab, Palestinian and international scholars. On certain points, the archival record is robust enough to support wide agreement.
Around three‑quarters of a million Palestinians were displaced or expelled in 1947–49; that order of magnitude is accepted by UN agencies and historians across the spectrum. Substantial numbers – in the region of a few hundred thousand – had already left their homes before the formal entry of Arab armies in May 1948. Jewish paramilitary organisations carried out operations that led to the depopulation of Arab villages; some involved direct expulsions, some flight in fear, some local orders by Arab commanders, and some the collapse of social infrastructure. A Haganah document known as Plan Dalet exists; its language includes the capture of villages and, under certain conditions, destruction of property and removal of inhabitants. There were massacres, the most well‑known being Deir Yassin. There were large‑scale expulsions such as those from Lydda and Ramla.
None of that is speculative. These are not “narratives” in the sense beloved of spin doctors. They are claims cross‑checked in multiple archives, in enemy documentation, and in thousands of personal testimonies.
Yet, from this relatively solid base, the interpretive branches diverge sharply. One group of historians sees in these facts the execution of a premeditated project of ethnic cleansing, a consistent design to remove as many Arabs as possible from the territory of the future Jewish state. Another group accepts most of the same evidence but reads it as a series of harsh measures taken in the fog of a war that the Jewish community believed to be existential – a war they neither entirely initiated nor entirely controlled. Still others cling to older apologias: that Palestinians left “voluntarily”, or under pan‑Arab orders, and that Israeli forces merely filled a vacuum.
Here we move from relatively settled fact into zones of interpretation, omission and selection. It is in these zones that psychology goes to work.
The Seduction of Partial Truths
Very few people set out consciously to lie about history. It’s far more common to engage in a kind of gentle embezzlement of reality: to borrow heavily from those facts that support “our” story, and quietly ignore those that do not. From a distance it looks like deceit. From the inside it feels like loyalty.
In any conflict that touches deep identity – national, religious, civilisational – facts are rarely allowed to stand unadorned. They are sorted into three piles: those that glorify “us”; those that damn “them”; and those that must be minimised, relativised, or buried. The technical term for this is cherry‑picking. Psychologically, it functions more like self‑protection.
Take the question of who “started” the 1948 war. Credible historians agree that armed clashes began almost immediately after the UN partition vote in November 1947, with attacks by both Arab and Jewish irregulars escalating into what could be described as a civil war. Yet national myths still crave a single, clean starting gun. For many Israelis, that moment is fixed at the crossing of Arab armies on 15th May 1948 – a simple tale of a tiny state attacked by five invading neighbours. For many Palestinians, the war began with the first paramilitary operations to clear villages, which they locate months earlier.
Both camps rely on real events, but rearranged to anchor their chosen morality play. The same pattern appears in other theatres: NATO’s eastward expansion and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; the early spread of SARS‑CoV‑2 and the political rows over origins and lockdowns; the industrialisation of the Amazon and the claims around indigenous land rights. In each case, the story is cleaned up for partisan consumption. Ambiguity is the first casualty.
Why does this happen so predictably?
One explanation, widely supported in the psychological literature, is that humans carry a strong bias towards seeing “our” group as essentially decent and “their” group as essentially suspect. Information that upholds this schema is effortlessly absorbed; information that threatens it is experienced almost as an attack on the self. Neurological studies of motivated reasoning suggest that when we encounter unwelcome facts, the parts of the brain associated with emotion and self‑identity flare into activity, while the deliberative circuits go conveniently quiet.
This means that fact‑checking, by itself, is often futile. When someone is attached to a story that gives their group moral clarity, asking them to accept archival material that muddies the water is akin to asking them to betray their family. No wonder they dig in.
Virtue, Victimhood and the Hunger for Moral Simplicity
We like to imagine that people distort the truth mainly out of naked self‑interest – to win elections, for example, to avoid blame, or to hold onto power. There is obviously plenty of that. But there’s another impulse at work that is, in its own way, more dangerous because it feels righteous from the inside: the desire to inhabit the role of virtuous victim or noble redeemer.
In the industrial epoch, political projects have increasingly wrapped themselves in redemptive myths. The nation that rose from the ashes after humiliation. The party that alone speaks for the oppressed. The movement that is on “the right side of history”. These stories are intoxicating because they flatter us with significance. We’re no longer just people muddling through; we are bearers of destiny.
In the Israel–Palestine context, both peoples carry deep narratives of historic trauma: the Shoah on one side, dispossession and repeated displacement on the other. Each narrative has roots in real suffering. But the moment trauma is converted into a permanent moral franchise – a kind of inexhaustible credit with which anything can be justified – truth begins to warp. Atrocities committed by “us” must be minimised or rationalised lest they contaminate the purity of our cause. Atrocities committed by “them” are highlighted and, if necessary, embellished.
This is not unique to the Middle East. A similar moral economy operates when imperial powers re‑package colonial extraction as a “civilising mission”; when revolutionary movements suppress awkward evidence of their own purges; when corporations greenwash their operations while lobbying to stall real change. Facts that threaten the myth are either diverted into footnotes or dismissed as enemy propaganda.
From a psychological slant, one might ask: do people cling to distorted narratives simply to feel virtuous? Or is that too shallow a reading? The evidence from trauma studies suggests that communities which have experienced systemic violence, dispossession, or humiliation often develop collective narratives that serve as psychic armour. These stories stabilise identity and bind the group together. To question them – even gently – can be experienced as a fresh wound. In that sense, myth becomes a coping mechanism. Integrity feels like treason.
Industrial Economism and the Manufacture of Reality
Modern societies don’t simply drift into these patterns; they are trained into them. For at least two centuries, a particular worldview – the industrial, growth‑obsessed, competition‑fixated ideology that masquerades as common sense – has been teaching us which truths are profitable and which must be ignored. In that worldview, the only facts that matter are those that can be monetised, weaponised, or used to maintain control. Everything else – the unmeasured, the inconvenient, the poignant, the slow-burning – is pushed to the margins. Climate breakdown was treated in this way for decades. So were indigenous claims to land and knowledge. So were the early warnings about financial fragility before each global crisis.
The same machinery of denial operates around war and peace. Casualties that can be spun as proof of the enemy’s barbarity are front‑page news. Casualties that point to our own complicity are statistical noise. In the case of Palestine, the erasure of hundreds of depopulated villages from maps, the renaming of landscapes, and the suppression or “reclassification” of military archives all serve the same function: to make certain facts inaccessible or forgettable. Other governments and movements have done similar work in their own theatres – burning land records, rewriting schoolbooks, burying evidence of massacres in classified vaults.
What looks like “memory” at the level of a nation is, very often, an editorial exercise by those who benefit from a particular version of the past. The industrial mindset turns history into a managed brand.
Yet even that is only part of the story. The deeper issue is that millions of ordinary people, not just elites, choose to inhabit these managed realities. They choose – often unconsciously – to repeat simplified talking points rather than wrestle with raw evidence. They forward unverified claims because these claims fit a picture of the world that feels coherent. They retreat into echo chambers where dissenting facts are either absent or mocked.
If we are to be honest, we must say: this is not an affliction of “other people”. It is a human tendency. The line between honest mistake, self‑serving blind spot, and deliberate fabrication runs through each one of us.
Why We Prefer Stories to Evidence
The human nervous system did not evolve to handle terabytes of data and global surveillance feeds. It evolved in small bands facing immediate threats: a rustle in the grass, a rival clan across the valley. In such an environment, quick pattern recognition and group cohesion were more important than detached analysis. Several strands of contemporary research converge on a simple observation: once an issue becomes bound up with identity and belonging, factual corrections rarely change minds. They sometimes make things worse by triggering what some psychologists describe as “defensive strengthening” of prior beliefs. Presented with information that contradicts our position, we double down.
That mechanism helps explain why fact‑checking alone has so little traction in highly charged disputes. People are not simply weighing evidence in an open ledger. They are protecting a story that tells them who they are, who their friends are, and who must be resisted. This raises an uncomfortable question: if truth is so difficult to defend in public life, is it because people are fundamentally indifferent to it? Or is it that other needs – for safety, belonging, recognition, and predictability – are simply stronger?
The answer, so far as I can tell from both empirical findings and decades spent working with leaders and activists, is that truth competes with these other needs and frequently loses. Where acknowledging an unwelcome fact would isolate us from our group, we’re remarkably adept at not seeing it. Where changing our mind would threaten our livelihood, we develop an almost mystical faith in the status quo.
In that sense, disinformation is not merely something done to us by malign actors. It’s co‑produced by our cravings and fears. Those who wish to manipulate us merely surf on the currents already present in our nervous systems.
From Opinion to Inquiry
If anything in this essay is to be of use, it must extend beyond diagnosis. But I’m wary of offering neat prescriptions. The psyche is not a machine that can be recalibrated by decree. Still, one can at least make distinctions. There are claims that can be substantiated across multiple independent sources: the number of villages erased, the existence of a military order, the timing of a particular diplomatic meeting. There are claims that rest on weaker footing: alleged quotations that turn up only in partisan publications; numbers that cannot be traced back to any archival or institutional record; stories that grow more dramatic with each retelling but leave no documentary trail.
And then there is a third layer: the conclusions we draw from those facts. Was there a centrally directed master plan to expel an entire population, or a cluster of local decisions and permissive attitudes that produced similar outcomes? Was a particular bombing a deliberate targeting of civilians, or an attack on a military position carried out with reckless indifference to civilian life? Did a political leader consciously decide to provoke war, or sleepwalk into it? On such questions, certainty should be in short supply. Where three independent, credible sources do not converge, honesty demands humility. It becomes more responsible to say, “this is what the available evidence suggests” than to proclaim “this is how it was”.
Yet public discourse, shaped as it is by industrial habits of competition and branding, rewards confidence over care. The pundit who admits uncertainty is quickly elbowed off the stage by the ideologue who speaks in blazing absolutes. The algorithm boosts the furious, not the reflective. And so we spiral further into narrative warfare, each side convinced that the other is living in a “post‑truth” world while we remain steadfast guardians of reality.
The great irony, of course, is that both sides are often correct when they point to the other’s distortions. What is rarely acknowledged is how closely those distortions resemble our own.
Living Without the Comfort of a Single Story
So where does this leave us? If we wish to write or speak about contested events – like the founding of Israel, the Nakba, or any of the more recent catastrophes unfolding in real time – we face a series of choices. We can use facts as ammunition, carefully selecting only those that harden our preferred tale. That’s the common practice in politics, marketing, and much of journalism. We can retreat into a posture of fatalistic relativism: everyone has their story, nothing can be known, so why bother? That, too, is tempting – especially for those fatigued by endless conflicts over “who started it”. Or we can take a more demanding path: one that accepts the existence of verifiable facts, acknowledges the limits and gaps in our knowledge, and stays alert to the ways in which our own loyalties seduce us into half‑truths.
Such a path doesn’t simply require better information. It requires a different inner stance. It may demand, for example, that we learn to endure the discomfort of discovering that people we admire have done terrible things, and that those we demonise have at times acted with courage or restraint. It may call on us to inhabit, at least temporarily, the way an event appears from more than one vantage point – not to dissolve distinctions between aggressor and victim, but to understand how each side narrates its own choices.
The psychological literature on intergroup conflict suggests that contact – when it is genuine, voluntary, and not structured by domination – can loosen rigid narratives. When Israelis and Palestinians, or Hindus and Muslims, or indigenous communities and settler populations, talk to each other outside official scripts, they encounter the inconvenient fact that the other side is not a caricature but a complex assemblage of fears, hopes, and memories. That realisation does not magically resolve disputes, but it can weaken the hold of the more cartoonish propaganda.
Whether such encounters can scale in a world dominated by industrial economism, algorithmic echo chambers, and a media economy addicted to outrage is an open question. Perhaps the more realistic ambition is smaller and more personal: to cultivate in ourselves a vigilance against the seductions of certainty, and a commitment to distinguish between what we know, what we infer, and what we merely wish were true.
In the end, truth isn’t a possession we can hoard. It’s a relationship – fragile, revisable, and constantly tested by events. To live honestly in such a relationship is to accept that we will often be wrong, that our heroes will disappoint us, that our enemies will surprise us, and that history, when examined without anaesthetic, refuses to flatter anyone. If there is any virtue worth claiming in times such as these, it may be this: not the proud conviction that we already hold the truth, but the quieter courage to stand where evidence is allowed to challenge our comforts, and where empathy is permitted to temper our certainties. That position is far less theatrical than the posturing of the zealot. It is also, admittedly, lonelier. But it might be one of the few places left from which genuinely new futures can still be imagined.