the notion that this book has not been refuted is a joke even former foreign minister shlomo ben ami says in his book scars of war wounds of peace that there was an ethnic cleansing of the palestinians the reality on the ground 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 and at times atrocities and massacres it perpetrated against the civilian arab community a panic stricken arab community was uprooted under the impact of masacres that would be carved into the arabs' monument of grief and hatred benny morris 's thesis about the birth of the refugee problem being not by design but by the natural logic and evolution of the war is not always sustained by the very evidence he himself provides ben gurion also instructed that abandoned arab villages needed to be settled by jews even before the end of hostilities israel's formal rejection of the refugees' claim for return a position that remains intact to this day rather than the expulsion and dispossession is the real defining moment of the conflict israel as a society also suppressed the memory of its war against the local palestinians because it could not really come to terms ith the fact that its finest sabras the heroes of its war for independence and the role models of the new nation expelled arabs committed atrocities against them and dispossessed them quit lying about this book