Israel has a long history of false flag attacks: why should this conflict be any different?
During the ceasefire in Trump's mind that nobody agreed to this morning, it looks like Israel may have carried out a false flag attack to keep the US in it's undeclared war with Iran. Ah, but that's a conspiracy theory isn't it? No one carried out false flags do they?
Well...
It's often said the the first casualty of any war is the truth. There’s a name barely spoken now, but etched into the annals of modern deception: the Lavon Affair. In 1954, a secret Israeli terror cell was activated in Egypt. Their mission? Bomb civilian targets and frame them on Egyptian groups, undermining British trust in Egypt just as it sought to withdraw from the Suez Canal zone. Israeli intelligence called it 'Operation Susannah' The idea was simple: use terror to shape the political narrative, then deny everything. It went monumentally wrong: several agents were caught, two were executed, and Israel spent years denying involvement before finally admitting the truth in 2005. So why open with this? Because whenever someone suggests Israel might be engaged in disinformation, covert provocation, or staged events in today’s conflict, whether in Gaza, the West Bank, or beyond, they’re dismissed as conspiracists, antisemites, or worse. But history doesn’t lie. The Israeli state, on the other hand does. Repeatedly.
1. False Flags 101: The Lavon Affair
The Lavon Affair was no rogue op. It was state-sanctioned, planned by Israel’s military intelligence, and approved, at least tacitly, by Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon. Their Egyptian operatives targeted US and UK-linked buildings, including libraries and cinemas. The aim was to convince the British government that Egypt was unstable, dangerous, and not ready for independence. They were caught in the act. Several agents were arrested, and under interrogation, they confessed. Two of the team, Moshe Marzouk and Shmuel Azar were hanged. The rest received lengthy prison sentences. Israel denied involvement for decades, calling the operatives 'Zionist martyrs'. But in 2005, decades after the fact, the Israeli government formally recognised the surviving agents as veterans and admitted the operation had occurred. A quiet press release, a few medals, no public reckoning.
2. Lavon’s fallout: the scandal that nearly tore Israel apart
What made the Lavon Affair more than just a botched op was its domestic political detonation. When the Egyptian authorities captured and prosecuted the operatives, Israel’s government went into crisis mode. Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon denied authorising the plot. The Director of Military Intelligence, Binyamin Gibli, insisted Lavon had approved it. The government’s response? Obfuscation. The result was years of internal inquiry, censorship, and finger-pointing. Lavon resigned under pressure, but later documents including the Agranat Commission’s findings and testimonies from the Shin Bet suggested he may have been telling the truth.
In 1960, after the affair simmered in the background, Ben-Gurion demanded a new investigation. This triggered what Israeli political historian Yossi Melman called a 'moral rot' at the heart of Israel’s early statecraft: one that used secrecy and scapegoating to protect its image, not its integrity. Even Moshe Sharett, Israel’s second Prime Minister, kept a diary in which he condemned the military’s penchant for preemptive violence and misinformation. On the Lavon Affair, he wrote:
“We have reached a point where we almost act as aggressors. We need some terror, assassination or sabotage for military prestige.”
This wasn’t a rogue cell. It was policy. And together with plausible deniability, targeted assassination and extra judicial covert operations it still is.
Lavon and Dyane - 1954.
3. Covert ops, global games, and the Mossad modus operandi
Since Lavon, Israeli covert strategy has followed a pattern:
- Find a threat:real or perceived.
- Strike preemptively or provocatively.
- Spin the consequences into an image of defensive necessity.
Take Operation Plumbat (1968), for example. Mossad, using a dummy shipping company in West Germany, smuggled 200 tonnes of yellowcake uranium: essential for nuclear weapons out of Belgium and into Israel via the Mediterranean. The entire operation was masked using forged papers and false cargo declarations. All to bolster Israel’s then-denied nuclear weapons programme. Then there’s Operation Wrath of God: Israel’s global assassination campaign in response to the Munich massacre. It spanned decades, targeting not just suspects but their supposed facilitators. While some hits struck PLO-linked figures, others (like the 1973 killing of Moroccan waiter Ahmed Bouchiki in Lillehammer, Norway) were clear errors. Yet Israeli officials never faced accountability. The broader picture? Israeli intelligence operates with virtual impunity and zero transparency, shielded by claims of national security and the silence of its Western backers.
4. Recent parallels: Gaza, Hasbara, and narrative control
Fast forward to 2023–25. The Israeli military claims to be targeting Hamas leadership and arms depots. But the death toll in Gaza particularly following the October 2023 Hamas attack has exploded past 55,000, with over 70% being women and children according to Euro-Med Monitor and UN sources. Israeli officials routinely frame strikes on residential buildings, schools, or refugee camps as 'precision' attacks or 'tragic accidents' but never part of systemic aggression. When Al-Ahli Arab Hospital was hit in October 2023, the immediate Israeli military claim was that it was a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket. Western media echoed it. Only days later, independent analysts from Forensic Architecture and Bellingcat questioned the trajectory evidence and challenged IDF narratives. But by then, the moment had passed and the official story had set in.
Israel also engages in what its own spin-doctors call 'Hasbara' a term that means 'explanation' but functions as a state-sponsored global PR campaign. Through paid influencers, fake social accounts, and media briefings, it works to frame every Israeli action as justified defence and every Palestinian casualty as 'human shield collateral' It’s narrative warfare, and it’s not subtle. And it's bullshit.
5. The danger of dismissing all doubt as conspiracy
Now here’s where critics of Israel must tread carefully but firmly. False-flag thinking is not inherently antisemitic. To question state narratives is a civic duty. But to insist every act of violence is a Zionist trick? That’s conspiracy, and it ends up being both morally grotesque and politically useless. The Lavon Affair gives us permission to doubt not to deny. It reminds us that intelligence agencies lie, governments stage things, and victims are often blamed while aggressors write the headlines. But we must distinguish between evidence-based scepticism and antisemitic fantasising. Lavon isn’t proof that every Israeli bombing is a hoax. It is, however, a reminder that history is littered with precedents for deceit. We can hold two thoughts at once:
- That Hamas committed atrocities.
- And that Israel’s response is not only disproportionate but built on layers of spin and strategic disinformation, sometimes deadly, sometimes fabricated, always self-serving.
It's also worth noting at this point that the use of false flag attack is not exclusive to Israel. The Gulf of Tonkin is a prime example of the US doing this. This took place in August 1964 was a fabricated naval skirmish used by the United States to justify escalation in Vietnam. While one North Vietnamese attack on the USS Maddox may have occurred, the second reported attack almost certainly didn’t yet it was used by President Lyndon B. Johnson to push through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, effectively giving him a blank cheque for war. Declassified NSA documents later confirmed that intelligence was deliberately skewed to fit a pre-planned narrative. It was a textbook false flag war by deception.
The UK also has a track record of false flag tactics, especially in colonial and counterinsurgency contexts and in Northern Ireland. Not on the scale of Lavon or Tonkin perhaps, but enough to show that the British state, too, will lie and kill in secret to protect its power and narrative.
Israel, it has to be said, however, has dialled this up to 11
6. Conclusion: We shouldn’t swallow it, then or now
The Lavon Affair should have been a watershed moment for the Western powers. Instead, it’s been buried. The Israeli state, one that murdered UN peacekeepers in Lebanon, bombed journalists in Gaza, and has admitted to lying about civilian casualty numbers when it suits them has never paid a price for its deception. So why would it stop? And as long as British politicians from both Labour and the Tories continue to parrot IDF talking points, accept donations, take freebies to the Knesset, and suppress pro-Palestinian speech, we are complicit. So yes: when we see a bombing, a hospital flattened, a convoy shredded, an attack of US assets that is denied and the official response is 'It was a Hamas mistake' or 'Iran did it' we’re right to raise an eyebrow. Not because we’re conspiracy theorists. But because history has shown, repeatedly, that the Israeli state has lied before, and will lie again. And this time, it’s not just about preserving its image. It’s about obliterating a people and widening a regional conflict into something that may become uncontrollable.
References
- Melman, Yossi & Raviv, Dan. Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel's Intelligence Community (1990).
- Cohen, Avner. Israel and the Bomb (1998).
- BBC News Archive (2004). The Lavon Affair. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-27009796
- Sharett Diaries – Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle (1983).
- The Guardian (2013). "How Israel used a secret shipping network to acquire uranium." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/15/israel-secret-uranium-smuggling-operation
- UN Independent International Commission on the OPT (2024).
- Forensic Architecture + Bellingcat (2023). Al-Ahli Hospital analysis. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/al-ahli-hospital-blast
- Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (2024). https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/5889
- Reuters (2022). “UN says Israel likely shot journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.” https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-says-israeli-forces-likely-shot-journalist-abu-akleh-2022-06-24/
- France 24 (1987). “Was Mossad involved in the Hindawi affair?”
- Electronic Intifada / Middle East Eye / Mondoweiss – ongoing investigative reporting.
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