I'm currently reading what might be the key work of history in... well... Israeli history. "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem: 1947-1949" by Benny Morris. There's hardly a single member of Israel's intelligentsia who doesn't have an opinion on this book. When released in the late 80s, it pissed off much of Israel by producing records that the Israeli Yishuv planned a Palestinian exile, and pissed off the worldwide left because Morris refused to interpret this evidence as meaning that Israel had a plan for anything like a full Palestinian exile, and sometimes was justified in its actions. I'm not going to wade into the debate about what points Morris neglected, because both sides think they have their points, and it's all very sensitive among the Israel/Palestine intelligentsia. Everybody has different complaints about this book - which should tell you it hit the right nerve.
Like most scholarly works it's not a particularly easy read (though easier than many...), and goes into agonizing detail about the statistics, records, and vagueries of every town's evacuation. It's hard to retain this amount of information and know what to do with it during a first read (and I doubt there will be too many more...)
But what's clear from is that the only way to interpret the Palestinian expulsion is to believe literally everything you've ever heard about it, from either side. There was an Israeli plan to evacuate the Palestinian population, and yet there wasn't. There was a Palestinian mass panic after certain villages were exiled from their land out of military necessity (and occasionally out of territorial ambitions), and yet many Palestinians stayed put and were not thereafter evacuated - thereby becoming the ancestors of today's Israeli Arabs - now 2 million strong. There was no premeditated Israeli (Yishuv) plan to rid Israel of the majority of its Palestinians - in fact the Israeli government sometimes ordered the Arab population to stay put - as did the Arab armies, but when it happened, Israeli leadership breathed a sigh of relief because it alleviated them of potentially enacting just such a plan, which was considered even by Ben-Gurion. There was no assurance from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and similarly eminent Arab leaders that Palestinians would be able to return to their homes, but Palestinians took it on faith that Palestinian leadership and the Arab nations would return them after the Israelis were defeated. Early in his career, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem intended to guide his citizens live peacefully with Palestine's Jews so long as further Jewish immigration was halted, but once he realized that Zionists intended to bring massive numbers of Jews into Palestine to stop the potential in Europe for a holocaust, he advocated for the exact same genocidal policies as Hitler. The Palestinian side has much justice in thinking they have right to their land, but Palestinians had a plan to deal with Israelis that was much, much worse.
The important thing about vague historical events is that no matter how much you learn about them, so long as the legitimate evidence stays contradictory, your opinions about them stay vague.
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