In his letter, Mr. Hacker reproduces the baseless fables produced by Israeli propagandists that the Palestinian refugees left in 1948 on the orders broadcast by their leaders. This manufactored tale was demolished by Erskine Childers who examined the American and British monitored records of all Middle East broadcasts throughout 1948 and reported: " There was not a single order or appeal or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine,in 1948. There is repeated monitored record of Arab appeals even flat orders to civilians to stay put " {The Spectator, May 12,1961}.

The Palestinian refugees were evicted from their homeland through a systematic process of ethnic cleansing formulated by all Zionist leaders. Theodor Herzl wrote in his diaries in 1896: " We shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border....the removal must be carried out discretely and circumspectly." { from R. Patai, Ed. " The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl. Vol 1}. Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister confided to his son, Amos, in a letter in 1937 that when the Jewish state comes onto being: " We will expel the Arabs and take their places."

Mr. Hacker claims that there were " No major atrocities committed by the Israeli army." History researcher Ariyeh Yitzhaki states: " For many Israelis it was easy to cling to the false claim that the Arabs left the country because that was what their leaders ordered. That is a total lie. The fundamental cause for the flight of the Arabs was their fear of Israeli violence, and that fear had a basis in reality." History researcher Uri Milstein, celebrated in Israel as the dispeller of myths, confirms Yitzhaki's evaluation of the volume of the massacres : " If Yitzhaki claims that there were murders in almost every village, then I say that up to the inception of Israel, every event of fighting ended in a massacre of Arabs. There were massacres of Arabs in all of Israel's wars, but I have no doubt that the War of Independence was the dirtiest."

I think the required reading for Mr. Hacker and The Globe & Mail readers, is the factual history of that conflict and not the manufactured falsehoods that Israel's apologists engender.