(Oct. 11, 2026 / JNS)

Much of the criticism of Zionism rests on the perception of what happened in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. The charge is ethnic cleansing, which allegedly undermined Palestinian national aspirations and proved the settler-colonialist nature of Zionism.

The reality was strikingly different.

During the war, there was no broad ethnic cleansing of an indigenous population. Much of the Arab population of the area that became Israel were recent migrants who came first in the 19th century from Egypt and other parts of the Ottoman Empire. Then, the 1858 Tanzimat Reforms opened up land for purchase in Palestine. There was further migration from Judea and Samaria during the British Mandate period (1920-1948) for economic reasons. These recent migrants married women from their home villages and went back at harvest time. During the early stages of the 1948 war, many simply returned to their villages to await the end of the conflict.

A second group that voluntarily left almost immediately were the wealthy and professional classes, believing an Arab victory would allow them to return quickly from Lebanon and Jordan. Their absence is why, after Israel’s victory, Arab citizens were devoid of any political, economic or social organizations. They had no newspapers, political parties or civic structure.

A third group was Arab residents of the largest urban centers, particularly Haifa and Jaffa. Zionist forces easily defeated the Arab forces in these cities, at least partially due to the latter’s disunity. Arab Muslims and Christians were at odds, as were the longstanding Arab residents with the new Muslim working class.

After victory in Haifa, the Zionists made every effort to convince the Arab population to remain. However, the Arab Higher Committee in Cairo demanded that all Arabs leave those cities. The British accommodated this by providing boats to Gaza and Lebanon. It seems that Arab leaders would not allow any Arabs to live under Zionist rule.

There were some examples of ethnic cleansing. For example, after killing 250, mostly civilians, during the sweltering summer heat, 45,000 Arab residents of Ramle and Lydda were forcibly marched to Ramallah, with dozens dying en route. There were “bodies of men, women and children scattered along the way,” a Haganah soldier lamented. “Old people sat beside their carts begging for a drop of water—but there was none.”

Such expulsions, however, only became widespread during the final autumn offensives. Villages were cleared, sometimes violently, and their remaining residents forced to leave. During this period, probably 150,000 Palestinians became refugees, less than half the total.

As the war concluded, a leading Arab intellectual characterized the defeat as a nakba (“disaster” or “catastrophe”). The catastrophe in question, however, had nothing to do with the refugees. It was simply that there was now a Jewish state in a Muslim-majority region.

This was the word’s sole meaning until the 1992 Oslo Accords forced Yasser Arafat to seize on the refugees as a means of undermining a two-state solution. He used their squalid conditions in refugee camps as a justification for making a complete “right of return” to what is now Israel a nonnegotiable demand. Today, countries like Lebanon continue to treat a million descendants of refugees as second-class noncitizens—real apartheid—to keep this aspiration of undermining the Jewish state alive.

Many of the mufti’s opponents sought an accommodation with Zionism.

There is also the myth of a Palestinian national movement. It is most clearly articulated in the documentary 1936, which claimed that the three-year Arab revolt that began that year crystallized the Palestinians’ national aspirations.

The documentary completely misrepresents the facts. For example, it leaves out the revolt’s leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, for two reasons: After his exile in 1937, the mufti went to Iraq to foment antisemitic pogroms, as he had in Palestine in 1921 and 1929. After being forced to flee Iraq, he went to Germany and became a trusted collaborator of the Nazi regime, broadcasting its propaganda to the Arab world and enlisting Bosnian Muslims to fight for the Third Reich.

The documentary also spends little time on the British Peel Commission and its recommendation of a two-state partition, with the Zionist state allotted only 12% of the British Mandate. For the mufti, however, any Jewish state was too much, and he brutalized Arabs willing to speak to the commission. When the mufti learned that a notable planned to testify, he wrote, “Those who go to meet the partition commission should take their shrouds with them.” Indeed, mufti supporters killed as many as a thousand Arabs to quell opposition to his political positions. Most importantly, the 1936 revolt had little to do with national aspirations, as the rejection of the Peel Commission’s recommendations attests. Instead, it had to do with eliminating further Jewish immigration and the possibility of a Jewish state.

The mufti’s brutal treatment of those who disagreed with him prompted many leading Arabs in Mandatory Palestine to reject his leadership. Despite this resistance, however, he was appointed leader of the Palestinian delegation to the Arab League, reflecting the prestige he had obtained for his refurbishing of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Many of the mufti’s opponents sought an accommodation with Zionism, so there was no unified Arab support for the 1948 war effort. They were further alienated when the Arab League selected a Syrian national to lead the newly constituted Arab Liberation Army (ALA) to fight against the Zionists before foreign Arab armies invaded.

As a result, few local Arabs were willing to fight. According to the anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappé, 90% of the 3,000-strong ALA was comprised of foreign volunteers. Indeed, due to the unwillingness of many Arab villages to support its efforts, the ALA had inadequate supply lines, making extended military campaigns impossible. The mufti formed his own Holy War Army, but it attracted fewer than 1,000 volunteers. While other locals would join village self-defense forces, few were willing to fight the regular Zionist army.

The arrival of foreign Arab armies could not overcome this lack of local support. Because Christians had friendly relations with their Jewish neighbors, Lebanon refused to send troops. The Iraqi contingent was small and, after an initial defeat, sat out the war in Judea and Samaria. Syria sent only a few thousand troops along with a Druze contingent that defected, with some joining Israeli Druze in the Zionist forces.

The 5,000-strong British-sponsored Jordanian Arab Legion was well trained. However, Jordan’s King Abdullah was a fierce critic of the mufti and uninterested in aiding his war effort. Instead, the king used his troops in areas assigned to the Palestinians by the U.N. partition plan, which he hoped to annex. As a result, it was the Egyptian army, remnants of the ALA and the Syrian army that were the only real opposition the Zionists faced. Due to the almost total lack of local Arab involvement, foreign troops were outnumbered by Zionist forces who were better organized and better armed. Thus, it is not surprising that Israel won a decisive victory.

All these facts undermine the central claims made by supporters of the Palestinians and the moral high ground they claim.