The goal of ‘disappearing’ the indigenous Arab population points to a virtual truism buried beneath a mountain of apologetic Zionist literature: what spurred Palestinians’ opposition to Zionism was not anti-Semitism, in the sense of an irrational or abstract hatred of Jews, but rather the prospect—very real—of their own expulsion.

Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, London, 2003, pp. xii-xiii