Thank you again for taking the time to respond thoughtfully. I will try to answer your critiques as best I can. First, I hope you take time to learn about Reacting to the Past as a genre of games, so you can better understand what the framework I am working in is. (I show my students this video to introduce the topic
and this is the website of the Consortium in charge of Reacting: https://reactingconsortium.org/Let me try to make you understand my perspective as a historian and game creator. I fully understand your distaste for the last three-quarters of a century of Israel's policies towards the Palestinian people, and I will not defend the policies of past and especially the present Israeli government. But I am here to recreate, as faithfully as possible, a teachable moment from the past. I am doing that despite the fact, that as you rightly point out that moment is exclusionary to most of the voices of the people of Mandatory Palestine in 1948. I limit the voices to those who were physically in the room, as a result the voices are all-male, and all-ethnically Jewish (9 of whom were born in Eastern Europe and the last from the Moroccan Jewish community).
You are also right to notice that I very carefully avoided using the ethnonym "Palestinian" to refer to the Arab population of Mandatory Palestine in 1948. I also carefully avoided using the term 'Israeli' too, because neither of these national identities existed in 1948, but are a result of the creation of Israel and the Naqba. As with the people portrayed in the game, I used the language of the time for the sake of historical accuracy, not to erase history, but to be true to it.
As for the one sided nature of the depictions of violence in the timeline, I can understand your criticism. I worried about this, and made sure to point out both the violence used in the resistance to the Mandate after 1945 by the Yishuv, and that violence was used by extremists on both sides in the opening phases of the 1947-48 War. By the rules of the format, I was actually well over the length the historical introduction was supposed to be. So just I could not justify an in depth mention of Deir Yassin or the King David Hotel bombing, which are not directly relevant to the game, and leave out material that was. Likewise, the narrative is limited by the start date of the game, aside from Deir Yassin, most of what historians describe as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine occurs after this moment in history, as does all of the acts of the government of Israel against the Palestinian people. It is not deliberate erasal or ignoring the suffering of one people, it is a authorial decision to create the most useful short introduction to the task at hand, which is a debate over the Israeli Declaration of Independence, and not a history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Reacting to the Past games like this are designed with time for students and instructors to discuss the game afterward. In this debrief, students discuss what they learned and how they felt about the game. I hope instructors will call attention to the lack of diversity in this room, and point out that it would be clearly unacceptable for a representative body to be composed like this today. Likewise, I hope they also bring up all the points you make so they can help serve as context around the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict.
While I don't think we will ever agree, I do want to thank you for your feedback and I will incorporate what you said as part of the instructions to instructors on how to talk to the game with their students, because you raise important points that ought to be discussed in the debrief instructions so others running the game point out to students the points you have made. Please do not feel you wasted your time in having this discussion with me, and please feel free to continue the discussion here if you want, or you can contact me privately, as I used my full name and affiliation in the game text, you should have no trouble finding my email. Thank you.