The 1947 partition of Palestine left the Jewish state with a 40 percent Arab population. Miraculously, the Arabs took off. Their flight started almost a year before the conscious Jewish policy of expelling the fifth column. Unlike in the previous periods of civil unrest, Arabs fled the country rather than temporarily moving into the hills. They fled without a hope of return, for they took their animals and belongings, and wouldn’t have realistically expected their villages to remain intact. Israeli leaders draw attention to the isolated calls by Arab leaders for the villagers to flee, ostensibly to clear the area for Arab military operations. No Arab villager would buy such nonsense. All of them understood that the Syrians and Jordanians wanted their emptied land.

God performs miracles without violating the laws of nature (that’s why there are atheists), and so the Arab flight was prompted by decades of unrest, a crumbling patriarchal society, a closed economy, spiraling clashes with Jews, loss of traditional leadership, and fear. Most Palestinian leaders argued against fleeing the country, but the peasants were of a different opinion. Jews, for their part, slowly switched to Plan D, attacking first the Arab villages, most of which—willingly or not—housed militias, and eventually cleansing the land of Arabs to gain a contiguous Jewish state. Out of hopelessness and fear of retaliation, the majority of Arabs fled Israel in two waves: amid the clashes before the proclamation of Israeli independence, and after the Jews had won the war. Much smaller numbers of Arabs fled during the war itself.

The near-absence of Arab flight from Galilee demonstrates that Jews did not plan to evict them; Arabs fled only the zones of intense conflict, rather than the entire Jewish state. Arabs that remained in Galilee developed into a demographical time bomb, and created an Arab majority in many parts of the Jewish state. Despite the huge influx of Jews since 1948, the Arab population of Israel continued to rise, from 10-19 percent to 34 percent among the Israeli young today. In order to create a Jewish state, Jews had no choice but to make the Arabs go.

Jewish actions followed the cruel logic of war and state-building, nowhere more clear than in Dir Yassin. That village, like many others, had an implicit non-belligerency agreement with Jewish settlements, but eventually succumbed to Arab guerrillas and bandits. Many villagers from Dir Yassin joined the bandits, and raided Jewish caravans to Jerusalem and the settlements. Pervasive ownership of firearms, the Islamic sanction of robbery, unemployment, and the youth bulge assured the village’s militancy. In the attack on Dir Yassin, Haganah forces shelled the village while Irgun and Lehi fighters stormed it, naturally being unable to discriminate between the full-blown militants and armed teenagers. Some women were also caught in the fighting. Testifying to the fierceness of the battle rather than an atrocity, Irgun subsequently paraded the survivors from Dir Yassin through Jerusalem and sent them into the city’s Arab sector. Arab propaganda, however, made the operation into a massacre and frightened many Arabs into fleeing. In terms of killed-for-fled efficiency, Dir Yassin stands out as a brilliant example of good military practice. In PR terms, Dir Yassin became a disaster for Israel for a single reason: Jews admitted it as such. No Palestinian talks about the Egyptian forces of Ibrahim Pasha or the British razing the Arab towns, though the Egyptian atrocities and British cruelties far exceeded Dir Yassin, Kfar Qasem, and all other infamous points of Jewish-Arab clashes. People complain of the things it makes sense to complain of. The Egyptians and the British offered Palestinians no opportunity to vent their grievances, but Jews were receptive to the enemy’s cries—and got more cries in return.