How like the initial war of Independence where so many Arabs left their lands in anticipation of the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from their midst!

There seems to be an implication there that ethnic cleansing of Arabs was not carried out in Israel at that time. But it was, and highly successfully.

The flight of Arabs was encouraged by instances such as Deir Yassin where a massacre of civilian Arabs was carried out by Israeli forces, though even without that flights of refugees in times of upheaval are commonplace, and such refugees have a legal right to return home.

One way and another ethnic cleansing was duly achieved, with the removal of most of the inconvenient Arabs; and the situation was preseved, and is still preserved today, by means of a sustained refusal to allow refugees to return to their homes.

The result has been a state where Arabs are in a small minority, commonly described as "a democracy", though the fact that half the population had been eliminated from the electoral rolls throws some question on whether that is an accurate decription of the situation, anymore than it would have been in apartheid South Africa, if it had been possible to transfer the large majority of Africans to the Bantustan "homelands".