Two facts the story always omits: why the wars actually started, and how many times peace was offered and refused. Both are on the record. Neither is a secret.
The popular version of this conflict begins in 1967, with “the occupation,” as if history started there. It did not. Two things happened around that date that the slogan version leaves out entirely.
First, who started the 1967 war and why. Second, the long list of times a Palestinian state was put on the table and turned down. Here is each, with the dates and the documents.
It is described as the start of “the occupation,” rarely as a war, and almost never with its cause. Here is the month that led to the first shot, in order.
You will sometimes see a line from an Israeli general or minister years later, conceding that Nasser “did not actually intend to attack.” It is quoted to suggest the threat was invented. It proves nothing of the sort. Closing an international waterway to a country's shipping is, under international law, an act of war in itself, intention or not. Add the expulsion of the UN force, 100,000 troops in Sinai, a war pact with Jordan and the open promise to destroy Israel, and no nation on earth waits to be hit first.
Here is the question the “1967 occupation” story cannot answer. From 1949 to 1967, the West Bank was held and annexed by Jordan, and Gaza was ruled by Egypt. For nineteen years, two Arab states controlled exactly the land a Palestinian state would sit on.
In all that time, neither created a Palestinian state, offered one, or was asked to. There were no settlements, no Israeli checkpoints, no “occupation” in the sense meant today. If that land was the whole grievance, those nineteen years are unexplained.
And the timing gives it away: the PLO was founded in 1964, three years before Israel held an inch of the West Bank or Gaza. What it set out in 1964 to “liberate” was Israel itself.
A favourite inversion says that even when Palestinians accepted a state, it was never enough for Israel. The record runs the other way. Here is the offer, and the answer, each time.
This is not a claim that peace is impossible. It is a claim about who kept saying no. When an Arab leader chose peace, he got it: Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979 and received every inch of Sinai back; Jordan made peace in 1994. The door was never locked. It was walked away from, again and again.