on the advice of, under pressure from or on the instructions of Arab leaders, as happened in Haifa in April 1948. During the war, the Israeli government formulated a policy intended to prevent the return of the refugees (who had just tried to destroy the Jewish community); and this policy was indeed carried out on the ground. But there was no policy of “expulsion of the Arabs,” and so some 160,000 Arabs remained, about one-fifth of the country’s total population.

There were officers who expelled Arabs (Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin) and there were some who did not (Benjamin Dunkelman, Moshe Carmel). But the majority fled or were made to flee. Not exactly “ethnic cleansing.”

During the war both sides massacred civilians and prisoners of war. The first massacre of thewar took place in December 1947, when Arabs murdered 39 Jews at the Haifa oil refineries. But during the war, the Jewish side murdered more Arabs than the number of Jews murdered by the Arab side. (That is if only because the Jews took over hundreds of Arab villages, while the Arabs took over fewer than a dozen Jewish communities – and the Palestinians did not occupy even one Jewish community. It was where armed Palestinians fought alongside Jordanian forces in the conquest of a Jewish settlement – Kfar Etzion, on May 13, 1948 – that the largest massacre of Jews took place during the war.)

The story of Arab aggression against the Jewish community – in rounds of violence in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-39 and in 1947-48, is