Israel - created by terrorism

The partition plan was manifestly unjust to the Palestinians.

In public the Zionist leaders welcomed partition, while in private they were already planning a ruthless assault on the civilian Palestinian population.

David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister explained to the executive of the Jewish Agency, in November 1947, that a bleak future faced the Palestinians: “They can either be mass arrested or expelled - it is better to expel them.”

Throughout December 1947 and January 1948 Zionist militias carried out atrocities in Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods. One such assault took place in the village of Khisas in Galilee on December 18, 1947. Zionist troops blew up houses in the village in the dead of night, while their occupants were sleeping. Fifteen people were killed, including five children.

From early December, in the city of Haifa, Zionist forces began rolling barrels of explosives into Palestinian neighbourhoods. They also poured burning oil into the streets and machine-gunned residents who tried to put out the flames.

While the expulsions and massacres gathered pace, the Zionist leaders discussed and finally adopted what was known as Plan Dalet (after the Hebrew letter D). It gave clear orders to commanders of the Hagana - the Zionists’ main military force - on how to deal with the Palestinian population:

These operations can be carried out either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those population centres which are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines; encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.

On April 10, 1948, in Deir Yassin more than 90 villagers were massacred, one third of them babies.

There was a deadly purpose to such massacres - the perpetrators hoped to terrify their neighbours into flight, thus speeding up the process of expulsion.

The UN partition resolution prompted Arab governments to allow groups of volunteer fighters to enter Palestine in order to defend the Palestinian population. Between December 1947 and May 1948 these were small bands, isolated from each other and lacking either adequate arms or a unified command.

Moreover, as Israeli historian Avi Shlaim notes, the tactics of the two sides were very different.

The Zionists quickly secured the main Jewish settlements and then struck out into areas designated as part of the Palestinian state, deliberately driving out the Palestinian population.