Israel never engaged in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

Israel never engaged in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in matter of fact, their population increased X times since the creation of Israel Palestinians left on their own, no one forced them. They are Arabs, their lands were nothing to special to them, they just moved somewhere else.

Response 1
The standard Zionist story is that the Arab leaders told the Palestinians to leave, so 750,000 Palestians (80% of the Palestinians in Israel-proper) just walked out of their homes. It's a lie. After Israel opened up it archives in the 1980's it has been established as a fact that the Palestinians were expelled and/or were forced to flee from Palestine from 1947-49. Benny Morris goes through Palestine village by village using official documents from Israeli archives and transcripts of communications between Zionist leaders to prove how most Palestinians were forced out of Palestine by the Zionists. His "Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited" effectively debunks the Zionist myth. Some people say that Benny Morris "changed his mind" on what happened. Wrong. He never backed away from his evidence of what happened - the evidence is the same. After 2000, he just started justifying the ethnic cleansing, and saying that Israel should have finished the job. An excerpt from an interview with Morris on the topic is found at the bottom of the page.

Not only were there direct expulsions - Israel engaged in psychological warfare to terrify many Palestinians into fleeing as well - there were cases where the IDF went around with microphones telling the Palestinians that if they did not leave, there would "be a Deir Yassin in every village" (see Charles Smith's "Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict").

The ethnic cleansing idea actually has a long history in Zionism. The Zionists had been planning on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from the very beginning. Herzl talks about it in his "The Jewish State;" David Ben Gurion said "We must expel Arabs and take their places;" Joseph Weitz said " Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries - all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left."    This was put into action in Plan Dalet and in Operation Hiram (see Charles Smith's "Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict," Mehran Kamrava's "The Modern Middle East," and James Gelvin's "The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War")

Here is a link for more information on Israeli war crimes:

http://www.crimesofwar.org/a-z-guide/arab-israeli-war/.

Rosemarie Esber's "Under the Cover of War" also uses official documents shows that israel engaged in ethnic cleansing in 1948.

When did the ethnic cleansing start? Zionist sympathizers may say that it was justified because the Arab states "invaded." There's a problem with that assertion. The ethnic cleansing did NOT start after the Arab states intervened - the Jews started doing so right after the partition - by the time Israel declared independence and the Arab states intervened in May 1948, 350,000+ Palestinians had already been driven out of Palestine by the Jews (see James Gelvin's "The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War" and Charles Smith's "Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict"). AFTER 350,000 Palestinians had been driven out, the Arab states were forced to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians to stop the ethnic cleansing. Even if Arab states intervened to stop an ethnic cleansing, it does NOT justify the Israelis finishing off the ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is wrong to begin with. Lets not forget the fact that most of the Palestinian attacks on Jews were RESPONSES to Jewish attacks on Palestinians (see  http://www.crimesofwar.org/a-z-guide/arab-israeli-war/."

Now you may ask how there are still Arabs in Palestine if they were ethnically cleansed. The Palestinians in Israel today are the descendants of the Palestinians who either lived in areas the Zionists did not see as strategically significant (as their ethnic cleansing started with, and was focused on, strategic areas), or were from places along the borders where the Zionists did not get to by the time the war ended in 1949 as they started their ethnic cleansing in the land given to the Jews in the partition, and then moved outwards into the proposed Palestinian state. If you look at a map of the concentration of Arabs in Israel, you will see that most of them are concentrated either along the border with the West Bank, or in some parts of the Galilee region (which were either not strategically important or gotten to late in the war). They were placed under military rule as a captive population until 1966 (an easy google search will show how they were held captive in Israel)

Here is an excerpt from an interview of Morris about the ethnic cleansing of 1948:

According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?

"Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field – they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village – she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.

"The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.

"That can’t be chance. It’s a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres."

What you are telling me here, as though by the way, is that in Operation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order. Is that right?

"Yes. One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31, 1948, the commander of the Northern Front, Moshe Carmel, issued an order in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arab population. Carmel took this action immediately after a visit by Ben-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth. There is no doubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion. Just as the expulsion order for the city of Lod, which was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited the headquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]."

Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for a deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion?

"From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea. The officer corps understands what is required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created."

Ben-Gurion was a "transferist"?

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">"Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist."

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">I don’t hear you condemning him.

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">"Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here."

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">When ethnic cleansing is justified

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">Benny Morris, for decades you have been researching the dark side of Zionism. You are an expert on the atrocities of 1948. In the end, do you in effect justify all this? Are you an advocate of the transfer of 1948?

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">"There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands."

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">We are talking about the killing of thousands of people, the destruction of an entire society.

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">"A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it’s better to destroy."

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">There is something chilling about the quiet way in which you say that.

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">"If you expected me to burst into tears, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I will not do that."

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">So when the commanders of Operation Dani are standing there and observing the long and terrible column of the 50,000 people expelled from Lod walking eastward, you stand there with them? You justify them?

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">"I definitely understand them. I understand their motives. I don’t think they felt any pangs of conscience, and in their place I wouldn’t have felt pangs of conscience. Without that act, they would not have won the war and the state would not have come into being."

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">You do not condemn them morally?

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">"No."

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">They perpetrated ethnic cleansing.

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">"There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide – the annihilation of your people – I prefer ethnic cleansing."

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">And that was the situation in 1948?

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">"That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">The term `to cleanse’ is terrible.

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">"I know it doesn’t sound nice but that’s the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed."

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">What you are saying is hard to listen to and hard to digest. You sound hard-hearted.

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">"I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv [pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war.

<p style="margin-top:0px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Georgia;font-size:16px;line-height:21px;">

Response 2
The Arab villages lost since Israel's war of independence - interactive: http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2014/may/02/arab-villages-lost-israel-war-independence-interactive