I didn’t read your article, I know the up shot. Did you address that the war was initiated to preempt Johnson from meeting with Nasser’s #2? The other telling fact in this war was the Israeli shooting of the life rafts of the Liberty–there is no excuse for that even if they thought that dirty Egyptians were in those dingies.

As for the claim that Arabs left “under the orders of their leaders”, this is old Zionist propaganda, for which there is no evidence. The video you provide only discusses the false claim that rapes had occurred. It was the massacre itself, by Zionist terrorists, that frightened many Arabs into fleeing their homes. Many others were forced from their homes.

“Focusing primarily on Plan D (Dalet , in Hebrew), conceived on March 10, 1948, Pappe demonstrates how ethnic cleansing was not a circumstance of war, but rather a deliberate goal of combat for early Israeli military units organized by David Ben-Gurion, whom Pappe labels the “architect of ethnic cleansing.” The forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians between 1948 and 1949, Pappe argues, was part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state. Framing his argument with accepted international and U.N. definitions of ethnic cleansing, Pappe follows with an excruciatingly detailed account of Israeli military involvement in the demolition and depopulation of hundreds of villages, and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arab inhabitants.”

http://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851684670

The author is Israeli, BTW.

Your claim that the West Bank and East Jerusalem was “ethnically cleansed” by Jordan is nonsense. Funny you should deny the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Arabs from what became Israel while also making this claim. I can’t help but wonder if you have a prejudice…

Israel did not withdraw from the Sinai for peace. Israel withdrew from the Sinai to remove Egypt from the equation, so it could more freely continue to occupy and illegally colonize the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

In 48, Israel also showed that she wasn’t totally au fait with ethnic cleansing, as one fifth(?) of the arab population remained along with druze, bedouin, circassians, armenians and others. How many of the 700,000 arabs who left did so due to Israeli action and how many left of their own accord or under the orders of their leaders or as a result of miscalculated arab propaganda http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Ata-hY9WQ is open to debate.

Jordan on the other hand did an excellent job of ethnically cleansing Judea, Samaria and east Jerusalem of Jews.

The fact that Israel could give back a piece of territory the size of Sinai with its potential mineral resources for a promise of peace (that might well die with Mubarak) also suggests to me that real estate isn’t Israel’s #1 priority.

I don’t understand your question. I think the question is more appropriately: In what way does Israeli policy since it’s inception not fit with desire for the land?

I mean, how much proof does a person really need? You’ve got the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Arabs in ’48, the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory since ’67, the illegal colonization of the illegally occupied Palestinian territory, and so on.

It’s like asking for proof that water is wet.