Source
For many years, the term Nakba, the "humanitarian disaster", has been a sufficient term to describe all the events of 1948 in Palestine and the impact of these events on our daily lives.
I think it is time to use another term, "ethnic cleansing" in Palestine.
The term Nakba does not include any direct reference to who is behind the disaster.
In other words, anything can cause destruction in Palestine and it could be the Palestinians themselves. But this will not be the case when the term ethnic cleansing is used,
This term includes an accusation and a direct reference to its perpetrators, not only in the past but also in the present.
It is time to use the term "ethnic cleansing" clearly and without hesitation, as the best term able to describe the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948.
Ethnic cleansing is a crime and those who committed it are a bunch of criminals.
In 1948, the leadership of the Zionist movement became a government of Israel and committed crimes against the Palestinian people.
Israel's goal in 1948 was clear, as was clear and direct in the Dalet plan,
Which was adopted by the High Command of the Haganah (The secret Jewish organization in pre-state Israel) in March 1948.
The goal was to seize as much of Palestine as possible and to remove most Palestinian villages and Arab neighborhoods from the future of the Jewish state.
The implementation was more systematic and comprehensive than the plan had anticipated. In just seven months, 531 villages had been destroyed and 11 civilian communities had been evacuated.
Mass expulsion has been accompanied by massacres, rapes and imprisonment of men in labor camps for periods of more than a year, International law classifies such a policy as a crime against humanity.
The US State Department believes that the correction of these crimes is only by bringing back all the people - who have been displaced or driven out because of ethnic cleansing - to their homes.
Source
Quoted from articles Dr.. Ilan Pappe is a lecturer at the Center for Middle East Studies at Haifa University and Chairman of the Emile Touma Institute for Israeli and Palestinian Studies in Haifa