" Ben Gurion and Zionist leaders talked about expelling Arabs for a long time. But talk and implementation are two different things." The facts on the ground, however, are that Israel's leaders planned and implemented this outcome. This plan entailed a series of massacres to create fear amongst the surviving Palestinians causing them to flee. If they did not flee willingly, they were forced to do so. Yitzhak Rabin wrote in his memoirs, about the civilian population of the cities of Lydda and Ramleh, which were occupied on July 10, 1948 : " While the fighting was still in progress we had to grapple with a troublesome problem..., the fate of the civilian population of Lod and Ramleh, numbering some 50,000..... We walked outside, Ben Gurion accompanying us. [Yigal] Allon repeated his question ;' What is is to be done with the population?' B.G.[Ben Gurion] waved his hand in a gesture which said, ' Drive them out!'" {N.Y.Times. Oct. 23, 1979.}. Rabin and his officers proceeded to drive these 50-60,000 civilians away from their homes in terror, with low-flying airplanes hovering over their heads, shooting the occasional person and forcing them to run. The sight of terror-stricken men, women and children fleeing in the midday sun of the hot July summer, having run approximately 25 kilometres through the village of Beit Nuba, where I saw them with my own eyes, was a sight not to be forgotten.

Yigal Allon had a more subtle technique. He stated: " I gathered all of the Jewish mukhtars, who have contact with Arabs in different villages and asked them to whisper in the ears of some Arabs that a great Jewish reinforcement has arrived in Galilee and that it is going to burn all of the villages of the Huleh. They should suggest to these Arabs, as their friends, to escape while there is still time.... The tactic reached its goal completely. The police station at Halsa fell into our hands without a shot. The wide areas were cleaned." {Ha Sepher Ha Palmach, Vol. 2, page 268}.

Nathan Chofshi, a prominent Jewish thinker, who immigrated to Palestine from Russia in 1908, wrote, in rebuttal of statements by an American Zionist rabbi : " If Rabbi Kaplan really wanted to to know what happened. We old settlers in Palestine, who witnessed the flight, could tell him how and in what manner we, Jews, forced the Arabs to leave their cities and villages... We came and turned the native Arabs into tragic refugees. And we still dare to slander and malign them and besmirch their name. Instead of being ashamed of what we did and of trying to undo some of the evil we committed, by helping these unfortunate refugees, we justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them." { Jewish Newsletter, Feb. 9, 1959}.