Erasing Palestinian History: The Propaganda of PragerU’s Israel Series

“Politically, the land of Israel swapped hands for thousands of years, but it was never anything other than a sovereign Jewish state.” This statement from PragerU’s series of five-minute videos on Israel epitomizes the blatant distortions and historical erasure that characterize the entire series. PragerU promotes a colonialist narrative that reinforces Zionist claims while attacking Palestinian identity, history, and rights. The connection between their attacks on anti-racist education and their erasure of Palestinian history is part of a strategy to shape public understanding in a way that aligns with PragerU’s right-wing ideological agenda.

The series portrays the 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982 wars as heroic efforts to liberate Israel while largely ignoring or minimizing the impact on Palestinians. For example, the video on the 1948 war glosses over Israel’s violent colonization of Palestine, mentioning only one of the many massacres, Deir Yassin. The narrator refers to the event as “what the Arabs claim was a massacre,” casting doubt on the well-documented fact that Zionist militias killed more than 100 Palestinian men, women, and children in the village of Deir Yassin.

The PragerU video “Does Israel Occupy the West Bank?” justifies Israel’s control over the West Bank by claiming that Israel “liberated” the area during the 1967 Six-Day War: “When Israel liberated these territories in 1967 during the Six-Day War, it was retaking its own land. You can’t ‘occupy’ land that belongs to you.” This claim distorts international law and ignores the consensus of the global community, including the United Nations, which recognizes Israel’s presence in the West Bank as an occupation under the Fourth Geneva Convention. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion declaring Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as illegal under international law, confirming that Israel’s actions are in breach of international standards.

Some of the most egregious distortions appear in the final two videos: “Zionism: Why All the Controversy?” and “Israel: Who Are the Indigenous People?” In “Zionism: Why All the Controversy?” the video claims, “Anti-Zionism is just one form of antisemitism,” conflating opposition to Zionist ideology and settler colonialism with hatred of Jewish people.

Anti-Zionism is not automatically antisemitism. Anti-Zionism challenges the ideology of imposing a Jewish nation-state on land that Palestinians had lived on for generations and critiques Israel’s violation of human rights and international law. Antisemitism, however, is hatred targeting Jewish people solely because of their identity. By equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, the video not only misrepresents the nature of anti-Zionism but also trivializes the threat of antisemitism by using it as a political weapon. It also denies the growing movement of anti-Zionist Jews in groups like Jewish Voice for Peace.

“Israel: Who Are the Indigenous People?” takes the distortion further: “If you support Indigenous people’s rights, you should also be a Zionist, and understand that the Jews are the Indigenous people of the Land of Israel, who never really left.” This statement erases Palestinian indigeneity, ignoring the centuries-long presence of Palestinians and their deep historical roots in the region. The United Nations defines Indigenous peoples as those with “historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies,” who maintain distinct cultural identities and ancestral territories. By this definition, Palestinians, with their continuous habitation and cultural connection to the land, are clearly indigenous to the region. By contrast, the Zionist movement dates from the late 19th century, and even by World War I, the population of Palestine was only about 6 percent Jews. The state of Israel is the product of relatively recent waves of migration — and wars to remove Palestinians from the area. PragerU’s video co-opts the language of Indigenous rights to legitimize the dispossession and marginalization of Palestinians, turning the concept of indigeneity into a tool for further erasure.

PragerU’s curriculum is not an educational resource. It reads like a press release for Israel.