even "the War of Liberation" by the Jews, and "al Nakba," the catastrophe, by the Arabs.
30. As the conflict intensified in the region, and with the resounding impact of the Holocaust, the United Nations decided to divide the country into two states, Jewish and Arab. Jerusalem and its environs were to remain a separate entity, under international jurisdiction. The Jews were allotted 55 percent of the land, including the unpopulated Negev desert.
31. Most of the Zionist Movement accepted the partition resolution, convinced that the crucial issue was to establish a firm foundation for Jewish sovereignty. In closed meetings, David Ben-Gurion never concealed his intention to expand, at the first opportunity, the territory given to the Jews. That is why Israel's Declaration of Independence did not define the state's borders and Israel has not defined its borders to this day.
32. The Arab world did not accept the partition plan and regarded it as a vile attempt by the United Nations, which at the time was essentially a club of Western and Communist nations, to divide a country that did not belong to it. Handing over more than half of the country to the Jewish minority, which comprised a mere third of the population, made it all the more unforgivable in their eyes.
33. The war initiated by the Arabs after the partition plan was, inevitably, an "ethnic" war: a war in 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 homogeneous 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 1930s. Effectively this meant the expulsion of the Arab population from the country. On the other side, many