Nicholas Goldberg: Seven decades later, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still being kept secret

I once snuck into the abandoned village of Deir Yassin, just a few miles outside Jerusalem. The village had been the site 50 years earlier of a notorious massacre during the founding of the state of Israel. More than 100 Palestinian Arabs were killed there, including women, children and elderly civilians.

By the time I made my visit, as a reporter in Israel in the late 1990s, the village no longer existed officially; it had been stricken from the maps. The remaining houses were off-limits to the public; they were mostly