| | Orion--
The question you're asking would really require a book for an answer. But here is the shortest answer I can manage:
Strictly speaking, there were few literal expulsions of Arabs by Jews. But there were some, confined to a specific period and circumstance: The documented explusions of Arabs took place between December 1947 and the summer of 1948, during war time. There were two different wars here. Between December 1947 and May 1948 you have an Arab-Jewish-British civil war taking place under British authority. From May 1948 on, the British leave, and Israel declares independence and you have a war between the State of Israel and the Arab states. I'll call these War 1 and War 2.
War 1 was a free-for-all between Arab and Zionist forces, which in my view was simultaneously initiated by both sides. Both sides engaged in expulsions while the British looked on more or less helplessly. These explusions were sporadic, not systematic, because the fighting was sporadic rather than systematic.
War 2 took place after the British left, and involved an invasion by the Arab states of the new Israeli state. At this point, the Israelis systematically began to expel Arabs from Israel and the Arab states began to expel Jews as well. The expelled Jews were integrated into Israel, but the expelled Arabs were sent to refugee camps (and many remain there).
The best book I've read on this issue is Benny Morris's Origins of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. Morris is an Israeli historian. His politics are eccentric, but he is a good historian.
Arabs were also made refugees during the 1967 war, which was initiated in my view by the Soviet Union, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria (in that order of culpability).
So there were expulsions on both sides, and you can draw your own moral conclusions about their status. I don't see how the Palestinians can invoke the preceding history to show that Israel is exclusively to blame for their plight. So envy and malice are part of the explanation for Arab animosity for Israel. But the history does not make the Zionists/Israelis blameless either. There is room for some legitimate Arab grievances. (Nowadays, I would say that the grievances pertain to Israel's settlements policy, which do involve literal expropriation of land. So while explusion may not be an issue, usurpation is.)
If you go farther back in history (like 1890-1947), you encounter a different issue. The Zionists settled Palestine by buying tracts of land. The rural land in Palestine was held by absentee landowners whose title to the land was set by the Ottoman land codes that were in place before the Zionists arrived. These codes were fairly unjust to rural Palestinian peasants, and Zionist land sales exacerbated the difficulties by rendering many of the peasants homeless. (Of course, the Zionists also created economic opportunities for some Arabs, so this is not a one-way issue.) The difficulty here is that from the Zionist perspective, they were simply buying land by the existing land codes (what else were they supposed to do?), whereas from the Palestinian perspective, the land codes were themselves unjust, imposed by an outside power (the Ottoman Turks), and the sheer size of the Zionist purchases caused hardship. Whether you want to call this an "expulsion" depends on how you understand a complex situation.
There is also the issue that Zionist agriculture was generally more efficient than Arab agriculture, and externally subsidized as well, so that played a role as well. So envy (and ignorance) did play a role here.
Ask a simple question, & you get a book in response.
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