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Over a period of two years, from 1947-1949, the Zionists demolished
419 Arab villages and depopulated the Palestinian Arabs in those
towns. When the state of Israel was established in 1948 it became
apparant that this Zionist policy was a systematic state-sponsored
program to replace Palestinians and their land with Jews and Jewish
villages.
The
following are some quotes by a Palestinian author, Walid
Khalidi and Israeli war hero, Moshe Dayan.
"By the end of the
1948 war, hundreds of entire villages had not only been depopulated
but obliterated, their houses blown up or bulldozed. While many of
the sites are difficult to access, to this day the observant
traveller of Israeli roads and highways can see traces of their
presence that would escape the notice of the casual passer-by: a
fenced-in area, often surmounting a gentle hill, of olive and other
fruit trees left untended, of cactus hedges and domesticated plants
run wild. Now and then a few crumbled houses are left standing, a
neglected mosque or church, collapsing walls along the ghost of a
village lane, but in the vast majority of cases, all that remains is
a scattering of stones and rubble across a forgotten landscape."
Walid Khalidi, Palestinian author, All That Remains.
 "Jewish
villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even
know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you
because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not
exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the
place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid
in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu'a in the place of Tal
al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that
did not have a former Arab Population."
Moshe Dayan,
Israeli war hero, Address to the Technion, Haifa
(as quoted in Ha'aretz, April 4, 1969)
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