Land Day Jewish Exodus The background of the former is completely skewed as you note The latter article is premised on a wholly ideological POV attempt to establish a symmetry between the expulsion of Palestinians and the far more and much later generally exodus of Jewish communities from the Arab world The Arabs did not encourage Palestinians to leave Zionists strongly encouraged the Jewish diaspora in the Arab world to make aliyah As it stands of all I P articles the Jewish exodus registers as the one which narrates almost exclusively an Israeli Zionist POV Quite remarkable This is how Shlomo Ben Ami puts it in his review of In October of that year on the eve of Operation Hiram which led to the expulsion of many of the Arabs of the northern Galilee region Ben Gurion declared The Arabs of the Land of Israel have only one function left to them to run away And they did panic stricken they fled in the face of massacres in Ein Zeitun and Eilabun just as they had done in the wake of an earlier massacre in Deir Yassin Operational orders such as the instruction from Moshe Carmel the Israeli commander of the northern front to attack in order to conquer to kill among the men to destroy and burn the villages were carved into the collective memory of the Palestinians spawning hatred and resentment for generations There are only two points on which Morris splendid analysis falters He is unconvincing in his attempt to pardon some of Israel s original sins by creating an awkward symmetry between the Palestinian refugee crisis and the forced emigration of 600 000 Jews from Arab countries and Iran which Morris quotes Israeli leaders as calling an unplanned exchange of population Regimes hostile to Israel were not alone in getting Jews to leave envoys from the Mossad Israel s intelligence agency and from the Jewish Agency were working underground in several Middle Eastern countries to encourage Jews to go to Israel More important for many Jews in the region the very possibility of immigrating to Israel was the culmination of millenarian dreams It represented the consummation of a quest to take part in Israel s resurgence as a nation No matter how painful the memory of their eviction or how humiliating their second class status in Israel these new Israelis never sought to return to their lands of origin By contrast the Palestinian refugees were forced into the wilderness of exile with no guarantee of a new national home and no prospect of returning to their native land The yearning for return thus became the Palestinians defining national ethos Morris characterization of the conflict of 1948 as an Islamic jihad against Jewish Western infidels in Palestine is also unpersuasive It is true that the figurehead of Palestinian nationalism at the time was the fanatically religious and viscerally anti Semitic mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al Husseini And Arab discourse during 1948 was occasionally peppered with the rhetoric of holy war the Syrian author Vadi a Talhuq s book A New Crusade in Palestine published on the eve of the Arab invasion compared the war to the liberation of Palestine from the crusaders Yet Israel in 1948 was no tool of the West On the contrary it could not have won the war without arms shipments from the Soviet bloc The socialist nature of Israeli society at the time prompted Egypt s prime minister Mahmud al Nuqrashi to define Israel as an agent of atheism and nihilist Communism And the Zionists Arab enemies were hardly under the control of Islamic movements They were all ruled by decadent conservative elites who paid nothing more than lip service to Islamic values and the religious hysteria on the Arab street Broadcasters and agitators rallied the masses under the banner of a holy war against the nascent Jewish state But the Muslim Brotherhood sent only one battalion to fight in Palestine It was ill trained conventional armies not Hezbollah style guerrilla units that led the Arab assault in 1948 After the defeat rather than pursuing jihad against Israel the conservative Arab regimes signed an armistice agreement granting legitimacy to Israel s 1948 borders And between 1949 and 1952 they all attempted to reach permanent peace agreements with the Jewish state Shlomo Ben Ami A War to Start All Wars Foreign Affairs September October 2008 Review of Benny Morris 1948 A History of the First Arab Israeli War Benny Morris Yale University Press 2008