beardedbruce, you should consider what happened to the Jews who were expelled from the Arab countries to be a direct result of the ethnic cleansing that was being done on the Palestinians (which, by the way, began several months BEFORE Israel's war of independence). By the time Israel declared its independence, several hundred thousand Palestinians had already been ethnically cleansed. They fled their homes because the Jewish paramilitaries were committing massacres and other atrocities on Palestinian villages, and they didn't want to be next. And all of that happened months before the war that you say was being waged against Israel (in reality, that war was Arabs defending the area that had been alloted to the Palestinians in the partition plan. Almost all of the fighting took place in areas where Israelis were attempting to take land that had not been given to them in the partition plan). They did not flee out of fear for what other Arabs might do to them. That's another vicious, racist lie.