Before the day State of Israel declared it’s existence, there were 300,000 Palestinian refugees in surrounding Arab countries. The notion that Palestinians fled their homes to create a free fire zone for Jordan, Syria, and Egypt is a lie.

Of the total refugees, at least 55% were explicitly forced out by Haganah/IDF operations. Note that this is of the total 700,000. If the Free Fire Flight myth is true, this would mean that Haganah’s share of the blame for the refugees fleeing before Israel declared its statehood was even larger. The notion that most Palestinians fled voluntarily for any reason is a lie.

Israeli military intelligence says that roughly 15% of the expulsion was the result of groups like Lehi and Irgun. The notion that they played a small part is a lie.

The prospect of “population transfer” based on the “instructive example” of Turkey and Greece was openly supported by Zionist leaders as early as 1937. The notion that the Nakba came about as a result of “the exigencies of the moment” is a lie.

The difference between Haganah and Irgun/Lehi is that where the latter groups of Jewish militants would exterminate civilian populations where they arrived, the former group of Jewish militants would give civilians a head start and THEN raze their villages to the ground. This, they called “Havlagah”: Restraint.

The 1947 partition plan would have created an Israel that was, at most, 55% Jewish in population, encompassing all but maybe 10,000 Jews in the region. The final armistice lines created a country with almost 50% more land than the proposed partition. The notion that Israel “begged the Palestinians to stay and build a country with them” is conceptually absurd.

In 1948, Israel passed the “Infiltration Law”, making it a criminal offense for Palestinian refugees to enter Israel in an attempt to peacefully reclaim their private property, on the grounds that they were “foreign infiltrators”. The notion that they could have returned to the homes after hostilities had ended is (obviously) a lie.

The fact that the Palestinians able to remain became citizens of Israel who eventually gained something close to equal rights as a 10% minority in an explicitly Jewish ethnostate after a few more years of martial law does not matter.

The fact is that the Nakba was a crime, perpetrated by Israel, against the Palestinians, in order to steal their property and forcibly expel them from their homeland.

This is “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area”. This is ethnic cleansing. This is barbarism. This is evil. This is Zionism. This is Israel.

This is al-Nakba: The Catastrophe.