You really need to read a history book man, beacuse this toejam is embarrassing.
Who started that first war now again?
You mean when the Arab armies united to destroy the state of Israel just as it was born?
If you read the history, you will see the Israeli forces were on the offensive months before the Arabs.
I would say to him that the Palestinians are refugees because they moved out of the area to allow Syria, Jordan and Egypt to come in and kill all the Jews. When the invading forces were thrown back the Palestinians suddenly found themselves with no home and surrounded by a very (understandably) unfriendly bunch of people who were supposed to be dead when they returned.
Ah, the old myth that the Arabs were told to leave to make way for the Arab armies to come and conquer Israel.
Seems a strange way to make war, doesn't it?
Encourage the civilian population to leave, the people who can aid your armies with food, shelter, local guides, intel on enemy troop movements etc.
It's basically been admitted as a myth by the Israeli government. Read the memoirs of the leaders of the time, and it's obvious just how false it is.
Look at Deir Yassin, where the Stern gang and Haganah and Irgun combined to massacre a hundred or so Arab civilians. Haganah, the main Jewish military force, spread the story that they had counted the bodies of 254 Arab civilians, according to Mordechai Raanan to cause panic amongst the Arabs.
The Arabs accused Haganah of making the figures up to spread terror.
"...at the company and platoon levels, officers and men cannot but have been struck by the thought that the steady Arab exodus was 'good for the Jews' and must be encouraged to assure the security of 'Jewish' Haifa. A trace of such thinking in Carmeli Brigade headquarters can be discerned in the diari entries of Yosef Weitz* for 22-24 April, which the JNF executive spent in Haifa; "I think this state of mind should be exploited and press the other inhabitants not to surrender. We must extablish our State". On 24 April, Weitz went to see Carmel's adjutant, who informed Weitz that the nearby Arab villages were being evacuated and that Acre had been 'shaken'. "I was happy to hear from him that this line was being adopted by the Haganah command, to frighten the Arabs so long as flight-inducing fear was upon them"...Weitz, it appears found a responsive echo in Carmeli Brigade headquarters. It made simple military as well as political sense..."
"...the truth was different: The commander of the Carmeli Brigade, Moshe Carmel feared that many of the Arabs would remain in the city. Hence, he ordered that three inch mortars be used to shell the Arab crowds on the market square. The crowd broke into the port, pushing aside the policemen who guarded the gate, stormed the boats and fled the city. The whole day mortars continued to shell the city even though the Arabs did not fight..."
"...It was understood by all concerned that, militarily, in the struggle to survive, the less Arabs remaining behind and along the front lines, the better, and, politically, the less Arabs remaining in the Jewish State, the better. At each level of command and execution, Haganah officers in those April-May days when the fate of the State hung in balance, simply "understood" what the military and political exigencies of survival required...."
"...In accordance with Plan D, the Haganah and dissident Zionist groups launched a series of military offensives, the fully anticipated result of which was the Arabs' flight from Palestine. The attacks themselves were the most important single factor in the exodus of April-June from both the cities and from the villages...This demonstrated clearly by the fact that each exodus occurred during and in the immediate wake of each military assault. No town was abandoned by the bulk of its population before Jewish attack..."
"...The widely publicized slaughter at Deir Yassin, the massacres in Khirbet Nasr ad Din near Tiberias and Ein az Zeitun near Safad, the indiscriminate and protracted mortarings at Haifa and Acre, the use of loudspeakers broadcasting 'black propaganda' messages in Arabic, crop burnings and so on, spurred into exile those Palestinians not sufficiently impressed by the lightning assaults of the Zionist forces. Especially outside the major urban centers, it was standard Haganah and IDF policy to round up and expel the remaining villagers (usually old people, widows, cripples) from sites already evacuated by most of their inhabitants...."
"...Throughout March and April 1948, the broadcasts of AHC and neighboring Arab countries were consistently urging the Palestinians to remain in place..."
"...as early as December 1947 these broadcasts were instructing Palestinians to 'stay put and fight'. Furthermore, by and large the local leaderships and militia commanders whether in obedience to the AHC or indpendently, discouraged flight, even to the extent of issuing formal threats and imposing penalties, but it all proved to no avail..."
All from Benny Morris' Birth of a Nation, via the onwar.com forum.
Benny Morris is an Israeli historian, who used Israeli sources in writing his books.
