Efraim Karsh: Justice for Palestine - '...Indeed, even during the 1948 war, far more Palestinians were driven from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab armed forces than by Jewish/Israeli forces. Nowhere at the time was the collapse and dispersion of Palestinian society described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews. To the contrary, as a senior British official discovered to his surprise during a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, "while [the refugees] express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. 'We know who our enemies are,' they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes.... I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over."...' [Great resource article on just why the Palestinians don't matter to other Arabs.]