Figure 12 – A Wikipedia disambiguation notice

The page split was initiated by a user named Iskandar323, who was later topic-banned from editing conflict-related content due to his blatant bias.^[1] Notably, on the same day and the next,  three additional editors known for their consistently anti-Israel editing activity also became involved; this is consistent with the repeated suggestions that a coordinated effort has been made to reshape the framing of conflict-related articles in a way that further amplifies a onesided perspective.^[2] 

 Figure 13 – A log of recent edits to the article on the conflict in Palestine in 1948

Upon reviewing the content of both versions, it is important to note that each can be considered highly biased against Israel, as they employ various framing strategies that emphasize Palestinian displacement while downplaying the broader historical and political context. 

The article’s title in both versions can arguably be regarded as biased, especially when compared to editions of Wikipedia in other languages, which refer to the war either as the “Israeli War of Independence” or the “1948 Arab–Israeli War.” However, the October 2022 version of the article mitigated this by offering essential balance in its opening sentence, stating that the war is “known in Israel as the War of Independence … and in Arabic as a central component of the Nakba.” This crucial contextual information, which typically belongs at the beginning of an article to orient readers, has been relocated in the 2025 version to a separate section on terminology, thereby depriving readers who focus on the introductory paragraph of necessary background and perspective. In addition, while there is no separate article on the Israeli War of Independence from the Israeli viewpoint, a new article was published on the Nakba in 2023, further duplicating content already published in articles on the war and the 1948 Palestinian exodus,, thus serving as yet another way to use Wikipedia as a propaganda tool.

In continuing to compare both versions, the biased emphasis on Palestinian perspectives and the lack of broader historical and political context—including the rejection of the UN Partition Plan, the coordinated invasion by surrounding Arab states, and the existential threat faced by the Jewish population— becomes strikingly apparent. 

Neither version’s introductory paragraph includes a single mention of the crucial fact that the first phase of the war began when the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine launched attacks against the Jewish community in an effort to prevent the implementation of the UN Partition Plan.

Instead, in the first two paragraphs of both versions, the war is portrayed as if it emerged out of nowhere, a deus ex machina, without reference to the escalating violence between Arab militias and the Jewish community or the broader geopolitical dynamics that led to the invasion by neighboring Arab states. The 2022 version omits any mention of who initiated the violence, while the 2025 version frames it subversively, stating that “in anticipation of an invasion by Arab armies, they enacted Plan Dalet, an operation aimed at securing territory for the establishment of a Jewish state.” This framing distorts the sequencing of events and ignores the fact that at the war’s outset, armed militants targeted mixed cities and Jewish transport routes in an effort to spread terror and weaken the Jewish community. Plan Dalet was formulated in direct response to these attacks to secure key regions that had been cut off, with some settlements entirely isolated. The missing, or rather deliberately concealed information transmits a false impression that accountability for the fate of the Palestinians lies solely with Israel, erasing historical complexity and reinforcing a one-sided narrative.

While both versions display a pronounced bias against Israel, the differences between them reveal a growing pattern of editorial intervention, with the 2025 version reflecting an even more distorted and one-sided narrative.

In the 2022 version, the Jewish fighting forces are accurately referred to as residents of the

Yishuv,  Jews who were living in Mandatory Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, some of whom had roots in the land going back generations. In contrast to that, the 2025 version replaces this terminology with the more politicized “Zionist forces,” which appears twice in the opening paragraphs, the first time, in an extremely shallow depiction of the events: “During the war, the British withdrew from Palestine, Zionist forces conquered territory and established the State of Israel.” This editorial change is not merely semantic but rather aligns with narratives that delegitimize the Jewish historical connection to the land by framing Jewish presence as that of colonial actors. In so doing,, the article seems to echo the rhetorical patterns of new antisemitism, which cloaks traditional antisemitic tropes in the language of anti-Zionism.

While both articles withhold crucial information, focusing primarily on the heavy price paid by the Palestinians without offering readers sufficient context about the broader causes and developments of the war, the 2025 version also omits a notable detail that appears at the end of the second paragraph in the 2022 version: “

The territory that was under British administration before the war was divided between the State of Israel, which captured about 78% of it, the Kingdom of Jordan (then known as Transjordan), which captured and later annexed the area that became the West Bank, and Egypt, which captured the Gaza Strip, a coastal territory on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, in which the Arab League established the All-Palestine Government.Whereasthat “All-Palestine” government was short-lived and largely symbolic, its mention in the 2022 article points to attempts at Palestinian political organization in the immediate aftermath of the war. 

Its absence in the updated version may reflect a broader editorial trend that centers on Palestinian dispossession while downplaying internal Arab political dynamics and agency.

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[1] However, as in similar cases, his 48,213 edits, many of which seem extremely biased, remained intact. 

[2] See, for example, the ADL report and the writings of journalists such as Aaron Bandler and Ashley Rindsberg.