the wrong side. After all, hundreds of thousands of people did loose their homeland. Hundreds of ancient villages, mosques, churches and cemeteries were destroyed and old Arab Palestine pretty much ceased to exist. That is still a catastrophe for a whole lot of people. And of the 150,000 or so Palestinians who were allowed and willing to stay within the new Israeli state, they all remained under military occupation until 1966 - and 40% of them were internally displaced refugees and unable to return to their home towns, neighborhoods and villages.
Neither the Palestinians or any other people on earth would have accepted a partition plan that brought the usurpation of more than 50% of their homeland to new immigrants when they were almost 70% of the population most of whom had lived in Palestine for generations . It was no secret that the Arabs would resist. Because anyone else in their situation would have viewed the partition as a grave injustice. As Zeev Jabotinsky said way back in 1922, "no indigenous people in history has every willingly accepted the usurpation of their homeland without a fight to the end. And the Arabs will be the same." It should also be noted that the first major waves of expulsions occurred prior to the intervention of any outside Arab armies and the Israeli declaration of independence.
As far as whether or not the Nakba was by accident or design or a combination - I will quote former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami from his book,
Scars of War Wounds of Peace: The Arab Israeli Tragedy. Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Scars-War-Wounds-Peace-Israeli-Arab/dp/0195181581/sr=1-1/qid=1166681762/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8701952-4352901?ie=UTF8&s=books
from page 42:
"The reality on the ground was at times far simpler and more cruel than what Ben-Gurion was ready to acknowledge. It was that of an Arab community in a state of terror facing a ruthless Israeli army whose path to victory was paved not only by its exploits against the regular Arab armies, but also by the intimidation, at at times atrocities and massacres it perpetrated against the civilian Arab community. A panic-stricken Arab community was uprooted under the impact of massacres that would be carved into the Arabs' monument of grief and hatred."
and from page 43:
" Benny Morris found no evidence to show 'that either the leaders of the Arab states or the Mufti ordered or directly encouraged the mass exodus'. Indeed Morris found evidence to the effect that the local Arab leadership and militia commanders discouraged flight, and the Arab radio stations issued calls to the Palestinians to stay put, and even to return to their homes if they had already left. True, there were more than a few cases where local Arab commanders ordered the evacuation of villages. But these seemed to gave been tactical decisions taken under very specific military conditions..."
From page 44:
"The first major wave of Arab exodus in April-May 1948, essentially in the wake of the Dir Yassin massacre that was perpetrated by Lehi and Irgun with the Haganah's connivance and the unfolding of Plan D, might perhaps have taken the leadership of the Yishuv by surprise. But they undoubtedly saw an opportunity to be exploited, a phenomenon to rejoice at -- Manachem Begin wrote in his memoirs, The Revolt, that 'out of evil, however, good came-and be encouraged. 'Doesn't he have anything more important to do?' was Ben-Gurion's reaction when told, during his visit to Haifa on 1 May 1948 that a local Jewish leader was trying to convince Arabs not to leave. 'Drive them out!' was Ben-Gurion's instruction to Yigal Allon, as recorded by Yitzak Rabin in a censored passage of his memoirs published in a censored passage of his memoirs published in 1979, with regard to the Arabs of Lydda after the city had been taken over on 11 July 1948....Plan D, however, was a major cause for the exodus, for it was strategically driven by the notion of creating Jewish contiguity even beyond the partition lines and, therefore by the desire to have a Jewish state with the smallest number of Arabs.
from page 44:
"The debate about whether or not the mass exodus of Palestinians was the result of a Zionist design or the inevitable concomitant of war could not ignore the ideological constructs that motivated the Zionist enterprise. The philosophy of transfer was not a marginal, esoteric article....These ideological constructs provided a legitimate environment for commanders in the field to encourage the eviction of the local population even when no precise order to that effect was issued by the political leaders. As early as February 1948, that is before the mass exodus had started but after he witnessed how Arabs had fled West Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion could not hide his excitement."
"Ben-Gurion's reaction when told, during his visit to Haifa on 1 May 1948 that a local Jewish leader was trying to convince Arabs not to leave. 'Drive them out!' was Ben-Gurion's instruction to Yigal Allon, as recorded by Yitzak Rabin in a censored passage of his memoirs published in a censored passage of his memoirs published in 1979, with regard to the Arabs of Lydda after the city had been taken over on 11 July 1948....Plan D, however, was a major cause for the exodus, for it was strategically driven by the notion of creating Jewish contiguity even beyond the partition lines and, therefore by the desire to have a Jewish state with the smallest number of Arabs.
this article by world renowned Israeli hisorian Avi Shlaim of Oxford regarding transfer:
London Review of Books, 9 June 1994.
link to full article:
While the ethics of transfer had never troubled Ben-Gurion unduly, the growing strength of the Yishuv eventually convinced him of its practical feasibility. On 12 July 1937, for instance, Ben-Gurion confided to his diary:
The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had ... a Galilee free from Arab population .... We must uproot from our hearts the assumption that the thing is not possible. It can be done.
The more Ben-Gurion thought about it, the more convinced he became that "the thing" could not only be done but had to be done. On 5 October 1937, he wrote to his son with startling candour:
We must expel Arabs and take their places ... and, if we have to use force - not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places - then we have force at our disposal.
The letter reveals not only the extent to which partition became associated in Ben Gurion's mind with the expulsion of Arabs from the Jewish state but also the nature and extent of his territorial expansionism. The letter implied that the area allocated for the Jewish state by the Peel Commission will later be expanded to include the Negev and Transjordan. Like Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder and leader of Revisionist Zionism, Ben-Gurion was a territorial maximalist. Unlike Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion believed that the territorial aims of Zionism could best be advanced by means of a gradualist strategy.
When the UN voted in favour of the partition of Palestine on 29 November 1947, the struggle for Palestine entered its decisive phase. Ben-Gurion and his colleagues in the Jewish Agency accepted the partition plan despite deep misgivings about the prospect of a substantial Arab minority, a fifth column as they saw it, in their midst. the Palestinians rejected the partition plan with some vehemence as illegal, immoral and impractical. By resorting to force to frustrate the UN plan, they presented Ben-Gurion with an opportunity, which he was not slow to exploit, for extending the borders of the proposed Jewish state and for reducing the number of Arabs inside it. By 7 November 1949, when the guns finally fell silent, 730,000 persons, or 80 per cent of the Arab population of Palestine, had become refugees. "
link to full article:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0005/It%20Can%20Be%20Done.html
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