How the game treats history

Content note

Statecraft: Israel puts real people, real places and real wars on screen. Its first scope, the MVP, tells the story of the Liberation War, the austerity period and immigration from 1948 to 1951.

Events that touch the Holocaust, terror, massacres or war casualties carry a sensitive tag, and each needs a recorded sensitivity review before any build leaves the maintainer’s machine. The Holocaust is an event the player reacts to, never one the player plays. It is shown without swastikas.

The perspective is Israeli

The player leads the Yishuv and the State of Israel. Narration and terminology use Israeli framing, and each fact takes one value from Israeli official or mainstream sources. Contested ranges and opposing-narrative panels are not shown. Arab and Palestinian actors are computer-run actors with their own goals.

This is a design decision by the maintainer, and it is not up for vote. Issues and pull requests that ask to change the perspective are closed with a link to the content policy. A fork can make a different choice under its own name.

Displacement: the Deport outcome

After capturing an enemy city or village, the player picks one of three outcomes: raid and withdraw, occupy, or deport. Deport removes the settlement’s residents.

Deport stays in the game as a historical possibility, but it never pays. It gives no reward. It carries its real costs: it creates refugees, brings large Social cohesion and International Support penalties, and has permanent consequences. It is shown soberly, through sourced event cards. This is the owner’s ruling of 12 October 2026.

Which residents are affected, where they go and what becomes of the settlement are still open design questions.

Violence against civilians

No mechanic or text may reward or celebrate violence against civilians, from any side. Choices tagged holocaust, terror, massacre or war-casualties cannot grant treasury or score rewards for the atrocity side of a choice, and automated tests enforce this.

Immigration and refugees

One of the game’s three objectives is to absorb immigrants by giving them housing and employment. Refugees are a population unit in the game. The rules for their arrival, their resettlement and their move into civilian life are still open.

Facts and sources

• Every fact is sourced. Every date, number, name and office in the game’s content carries a source, the date that source was checked, and a review status.
• No words are attributed to a real person unless they are sourced verbatim.
• People appear in their public roles and documented acts. Competence and loyalty values are game balance, not judgements of the person.
• Game balance values and hypothetical alternatives must be marked as design assumptions.
• Writing drafted with AI is a draft. A person checks every factual claim in it against its sources before it is marked fact-checked.
• Historian review is planned for M4 and is not yet a gate.

Disputing a fact

Facts are open to correction. The framing is not. Open an issue with the Historical accuracy form, name the file and the field, say what is wrong, and give at least one source the reader can check. A link to a social-media post is not a source. When the sources disagree, the game keeps one value, chosen by the rule on perspective above, and the issue records why.

The full texts

This page restates two documents in the repository: the historical content policy and the game design document, with the owner’s rulings.