which each side seeks to conquer as much land as possible and evict the population of the other side. Such a campaign (which later came to be known as "ethnic cleansing") always involves expulsions and atrocities.
34 The war of 1948 was a direct continuation of the Zionist-Arab conflict, and each side sought to fulfill its historical aims. The Jews wanted to establish a homogenous national State that would be as large as possible.The Arabs wanted to eradicate the Zionist Jewish entity that had been established in Palestine.
35 Both sides practiced ethnic cleansing as an integral part of the fighting. Almost no Arabs remained in the territories captured by the Jews and no Jews at all remained in territories captured by the Arabs. However, as the territories captured by the Jews were very large while the Arabs managed to conquer only small areas (such as the Etzion Bloc, the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem),the result was one-sided (The ideas of "population exchange" and "transfer" were raised in Zionist organizations as early as the I930's. Effectively this meant the expulsion of the Arab population from the country. On the other side, many among the Arabs believed that the Zionists should go back to wherever they came from).
36 The myth of "the few against the many" was created on the Jewish side to describe the stand of the Jewish community of 650,000 against the entire Arab world of over a hundred million. The Jewish community lost 1% of its people in the war. The Arab side saw an entirely different picture: A fragmented Arab population with no national leadership to speak of, with no unifled command over its meager forces, poorly equipped with mostly obsolete weapons, facing an extremely well organized Jewish community that was highly trained in the use of the weapons that were flowing to it (especially from the Soviet bloc.) The neighboring Arab countries betrayed the Palestinians and, when they finally did send their armies into Palestine, they mainly operated in competition with each other, with no coordination and no common plan. From the social and military points of view, the fighting capabilities of the Israeli side were far superior to those of the