The 1947-49 Zionist assault on Palestine’s Indigenous population, culminating in country-wide ethnic cleansing operations that brought about the removal of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homeland, has been portrayed as a historical fabrication by all Israeli governments to date. Although the perpetration of the Nakba, regarded by some scholars as Palestine’s first genocide, has been definitively established by overwhelming and irrefutable evidence, Nakba denialism has been continuously supported by prominent Israeli academics and public intellectuals. How can this state of affairs be explained? Guided by Patrick Wolfe’s logic of elimination theory and Stanley Cohen’s states of denial theory, this paper examines Israel’s internal discourse of denial through analysis of Israeli Supreme Court cases from the 1950s concerning expulsions of Palestinians from Israeli-occupied territories that were allocated for a Palestinian state in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, a subject that has been examined only by a handful of studies. It argues that the Court employed three distinct strategies to legitimate the continuation of these ethnic cleansing operations following the establishment of the state: legalism (i.e., the formulation of expulsion-enabling legal arguments), denialism (of pertinent facts that cannot be convincingly depicted as legal state conduct), and pseudo-moralism (that is, depicting the Palestinians as treacherous, dangerous, and thus deserving expulsion). Nevertheless, the paper shows that in several cases the Court did recognize that the Israeli military carried out illegal deportations of Palestinians (e.g., from Majd al-Krum, Mazra‘a, and Fureidis). That recognition, the paper shows, has not prevented contemporary commentators from denying that these illegal expulsions took place, even when faced with first-hand testimonies by Palestinians who survived these ethnic cleansing operations and ultimately became Israeli citizens. The paper concludes by showing that the same legitimation strategies have been used to enable the 2023-24 Gaza Genocide, thereby illuminating the workings of Israel’s settler-colonial structure and the ways in which prevalent narratives of mass violence are being configured and disseminated to justify the perpetuation of violence through the constant manipulation of history, law, and morality.