Interesting article. Few authors acknowledge the understandable anger of fellahin displaced by the sale of lands to Jewish settlers by far off effendis.

Kudos for setting an idea going forward, however difficult to implement.

Still, sources agree that Jews owned less than 6% of all the land in '47. Don't forget the White Paper of '39 restricted further land sales to Jewish buyers. Then the UN awards more than half of the land to Jews, although we constituted less than a third of the population. Right there it would be understandable if Palestinians thought their land stolen.

There's no evidence of any broadcast instructing Arab residents to flee. I think that in the wake of Deir Yassin (which probably wasn't an intentional massacre, but resulted in many civilian deaths), the Arab League spread word trying to consolidate support, but wound up terrifying villagers who fled at the approach of Hagana/IDF forces.

There's no doubt in the historic record that Ben-Gurion sought the IDF to take as much land as possible & make return of the residents impossible. He declined several proposed UN truces for that reason.

Finally, I'd point out that I opened the article saying that "Whenever I read about....etc." Not necessarily my opinion here.

Thanks for taking the time to read & comment.