Raashid, in 1947 the United Nations proposed a partition plan dividing the territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish leadership accepted it. The Arab leadership rejected it and five Arab armies invaded with the stated aim of destroying the new state before it could take root. The displacement of Palestinian Arabs in 1948 occurred in the context of that war, a war the Arab states started. Some Palestinians fled the fighting. Some were expelled. The historical record on specific incidents is contested and complex. What is not contested is who rejected the partition plan and who launched the invasion.
The Jewish population of the Middle East and North Africa tells the other half of the story that is consistently omitted. In 1948 approximately 850,000 Jews lived across Arab countries, communities that in many cases predated the Arab conquest of those territories by over a thousand years. Following Israel's founding they were systematically expelled, their property confiscated, their communities destroyed. Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia. 850,000 people with nowhere to go but Israel. That population transfer, which nobody calls ethnic cleansing, is the mirror image of 1948 that the ethnic cleansing argument never acknowledges.
Two populations were displaced in 1948. One has been the subject of continuous international attention for seventy five years. The other has been written out of the story entirely. That asymmetry is a deliberate choice about whose suffering counts.