KINIGUIDE | What they didn't tell you about the Middle East war
Steven GanPublished: Oct 8, 2025 8:00 AM | Updated: Oct 8, 2025 7:02 PM
KINIGUIDE | At the heart of the Israel–Palestine conflict is something simple - land, rights, and justice.
The Israel-Palestine conflict did not begin on Oct 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel.
What sparked the dispute?
Let’s be clear from the outset: the struggle for Palestine has always been about land and self‑determination, not primarily about religion. Its roots lie in two major betrayals of the Palestinian people by Western powers.
During World War I, the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany...
Malaysiakini dissects long-standing conflict.
Let’s fact MK with AI. 1)“UN partition gave the Zionists nearly two-thirds of the land.” — Mostly false (overstated). UNGA Resolution 181 (29 Nov 1947) allocated ~56.5% of Mandatory Palestine to the proposed Jewish state, ~42.9% to the Arab state, with ~0.6% (Jerusalem–Bethlehem) as a corpus separatum. 2)“Israel suddenly attacked Iran.” — Missing context. The 2024–2025 timeline shows mutual escalations: suspected Israeli strike on Iran’s consular facility in Damascus (Apr 1, 2024) → Iran’s 13 Apr 2024 mass drone/missile attack on Israel → Israeli retaliatory strike inside Iran (Apr 19, 2024) → major Israeli airstrikes across Iran on Jun 13, 2025 (killing senior IRGC figures and scientists) → Iranian missile barrages in response. It also fail to mention Iran is the finder and weapon supplier to Hamas, Houtis, Hezbolah is launching a perpetual war against Israel. “Israel has ~90 nuclear warheads and isn’t an NPT signatory.” Israel does not go around calling for the destruction of any country, communities or race. If a rogue country start supplying WMD to terrorist, how many would suffer? The article fails to address a major countervailing historical fact: the mass exodus of Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries after 1948, which intensified through the 1950s–1970s. Between 1948 and the early 1970s, an estimated 850,000–1,000,000 Jews were forced to flee or were expelled from Arab and Muslim-majority nations such as Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Morocco. Most became refugees resettled in Israel, France, or the United States. This displacement—sometimes called the “Jewish Nakba”—was driven by violent pogroms (e.g., the Farhud in Baghdad, 1941), state confiscations of property, loss of citizenship, and rising anti-Jewish hostility following Israel’s establishment. By the late 1960s, virtually all Jewish communities of the Middle East had vanished, marking one of the largest refugee movements in the region’s modern history. Yet this exodus is rarely factored into narratives portraying Jews solely as European settlers; many Israelis today descend from those expelled families.