ABSTRACT
The collapse and dispersion of Palestine's Arab society during the 1948 war is one of the most charged issues in the politics and historiography of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Benny Morris portrayed the Palestinians as the hapless victims of unprovoked Jewish aggression. Morris also twists the historical record to indict Arthur Ruppin, who headed the Zionist Organization's Palestine office. Perhaps no figure is a greater victim of Morris's distortions than David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding father and the man who announced the Jewish state's independence. Morris's misrepresentation is all the more significant since just months after Ben-Gurion's testimony before the UN Special Commission on Palestine, the Palestinian Arabs launched a war to abort the UN's partition resolution of November 29, 1947. In the end, whatever was said at the Jewish Agency Executive meeting is immaterial simply because the Zionist movement rejected the British Labor Party's transfer recommendation.
