Hughes is great. But, I don't know why he and others let
@PeterBeinart get away with his revisionist history of 1948 - centered around the lie that Israel ethnically cleansed Palestinians to make way for the Jewish state, or some such wording.
On May 15, 1948, Israel declared independence - consistent with a UN resolution creating a Jewish and Palestinian state, which the Arabs/Palestinian leadership rejected, but which the Jews accepted. On the day of its birth, five Arab armies invaded the nascent Jewish state in order to annihilate it. They failed in their ethnic cleansing campaign, but resulted in the displacement of 700,000 or so Palestinians. In other words, the displacement was the result of the Arab desire - a mere three years after the Holocaust - to rid the region of a tiny Jewish state with a population of 600,00 people.
But, as
@ShMMor wrote, "Western activists for Palestinians are dedicated to two nearly theological precepts: that Israel is evil, and that no Palestinian action is ever connected to any Palestinian outcome".