I have ready numerous diaries and posts where Israel is villified because of the displacement on the Palestinians arabs in 1948 during the first Israel/Palestinian War. The details usually rely on references and quotes from two books.
Benny Morris--The Making of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49 (1989)
Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007).
While I don't expect many of the anti-Israel posters and diarists here to change their minds about the history of the area, it struck me that it may be worthwhile letting open-minded readers of DKos know that much of the history and interpretation of same has been challenged.
One of those presenting a different scholarship and view is Efraim Karsh who is head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and the author most recently of Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale).
His article of refutation can be seen as follows: 1948, Israel, and the Palestinians--The True Story
Since the article is published in a so-called neocon source (Commentary Magazine) I assume many won't bother to look at it. But for those who are intellectually curious, it's worth reading.
This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent creation of the longstanding Palestinian "refugee problem" forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars pressed by Israel’s alleged victims and their Western supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed. As early as the mid-1950’s, the eminent American historian J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation, and his findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most influential of Israel’s revisionist "new historians," and one who went out of his way to establish the case for Israel’s "original sin," grudgingly stipulated that there was no "design" to displace the Palestinian Arabs.
The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and Israel’s early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of writers and ignored or distorted by the "new historians," paint a much more definitive picture of the historical record. They reveal that the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What follows is based on fresh research into these documents, which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported.
I am not any kind of scholar of the history of Israel/Palestine, as I suspect is the case for most of you out there. All I am doing is pointing out that the received history of Israel/Palestine upon which so much Israel bashing here has been based is challenged by a reputable source.