among the Arabs believed that the Zionists should go back to wherever they came from.)
What happened in 1948 was an "ethnic" war, as described
above.
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 100 million. The Jewish community lost 1 percent 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 unified 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 Arab states, which had hardly emerged from the colonial era.
37. According to the United Nations plan, the Jewish state was supposed to receive 55 percent of Palestine, in which the Arabs would constitute almost half of the population. During the war, the Jewish state expanded its territory and ended up with
78 percent of the area of Palestine, which was left almost empty of Arabs. The Arab populations of Nazareth and some villages in the Galilee area remained almost by chance; the villages in the Triangle were given to Israel as part of a deal by King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan, and their Arab inhabitants could not, therefore, be driven out.
38. In the war, some 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted. Some of them found themselves in the battle zone and fled, as civilians do in every war. Some were driven away by acts of terror, such as the Deir-Yassin massacre.2 Others were systematically expelled in the course of the ethnic cleansing.
39. No less important than the expulsion itself is the fact that the refugees were not allowed to return to their homes when the fighting was over, as is usual after a conventional war. Quite the contrary, the new State of Israel saw the removal of the Arabs very much as a blessing and proceeded to completely erase some 450 Arab villages. New Jewish villages were built on the ruins, often