Theodore Herzl and his mother among representatives
of the Sixth Zionist Congress, Basel 1903.

The early Zionists admitted the reality that Palestinian Arabs inhabited Palestine. Consequently, they started planning how to deal with them, so as to reduce their threat to the project of settling European Jews in their land.

Since the Zionists had no use for the natives, and in fact wanted their lands for the "conquest of labor", natives had to be removed.

To justify this purge, the standard dehumanization tools of European colonialism came in handy.

In 1925, in a letter to Senator O.O. Grusenberg, Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist school of Zionism, wrote that the establishment of a Jewish majority in Palestine would "have to be achieved against the will of the Arab majority." That would not have constituted a moral burden for Jabotinsky, since he had "utter contempt for the Arabs," considering them "decidedly inferior to Europeans and unworthy of a place in the Holy Land."

David Ben-Gurion also made it clear that unless they are "convinced" to leave, "we will expel the Arabs and take their places."

Naturally, the Palestinians were not convinced to that they should leave; hence Ben-Gurion's Plan Dalet, and many other like it, had to be implemented, resulting in thirty-four documented massacres, 531 depopulated Arab villages and towns, and a flood of more than 750, 000 refugees.

A former director of the Israeli army archives said, "In almost every Arab village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes."

Israeli new historian Ilan Pappe wrote on Israel's responsibility for creating the Palestinian refugee problem, "The Jewish military advantage was translated into an act of mass expulsion of more than half of the Palestinian population. The Israeli forces, apart from rare exceptions, expelled the Palestinians from every village and town they occupied. In some cases, this expulsion was accompanied by massacres of civilians… Expulsion was also accompanied by rape, looting, and confiscation of Palestinian land and property."

 

By the end of 1948, the majority of the Palestinian people had become refugees.
Palestine had become Israel, the Jewish state.