This paper examines Israeli government policy towards the Nakba narrative over two distinct periods of Israeli history: the tenure of David Ben-Gurion as prime minister, from 1955 to 1963, and that of Benjamin Netanyahu starting in 2009. At the center of this riveting story is one document made up of several dozen pages aimed at crafting a pro-Israeli narrative of the Palestinian exodus during the 1948 War. It was Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion who first realized that the narrative of Palestinians being forcibly expelled by Jewish forces in 1948 was gaining traction around the world. To counter it, Ben-Gurion endeavored to construct an Israeli narrative of the Palestinian Nakba which centered on the premise that Palestinians left on their own accord during the war. If Israel did not bear any of the responsibility for their departure, the logic went, it could legitimately continue to block their return. To give an academic veneer to this story, Ben-Gurion contracted several prominent Israeli Middle Eastern scholars and instructed them to locate evidence that supported his premise. The scholars were given unparalleled access to the archives of the Israeli Intelligence community, as well as funds to conduct interviews with Palestinian leaders and refugees around the world. Indeed, the scholars were able to “prove” Ben-Gurion’s supposition and their study was meant to be leaked to the international press to ward off any pressure to return the refugees. Using correspondence pertaining to the writing of the study, as well as early drafts and oral interviews with the scholars who were involved in the project, I argue that the scholars went to great lengths to produce an academic study; however, they also willfully ignored evidence that did not support Ben-Gurion’s thesis (some of which was used decades later by the so-called “new historians”). In the second period surveyed in this paper, I examine the extensive bureaucratic and legal attempts to block access to the full text of Ben-Gurion’s commissioned study, efforts which culminated in an Israeli cabinet decision in February 2017 to block the specific file from being declassified indefinitely. All in all, I argue, Israel remains as invested in the narrative that Palestinians “chose” to leave as it was in the 1960s. Moreover, this analysis demonstrates that the state is willing to go to great lengths to prevent scholars from unearthing the “backstory” of how that narrative was originally crafted.