In 1948 the Jewish militia became the Israeli army but between the end of 1947 and the beginning of 1949 they destroyed close to 500 towns and villages and exiled close to 800,000 Palestinians who to this day are not permitted to return. So, it turns out that the creation of Israel had not, after all, been a haphazard fight in which the Arabs fled their homes due to the directives of their own leaders. It had been a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing by the Jewish militia involving massacres, terrorism, and the wholesale looting of an entire nation.
Miko Peled (Jewish peace activist) in a speech for Palestine Awareness Week at SDSU, 2011 According to UN Resolution 181 (United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine), there would have been 407,000 Arabs in the Jewish state, comprising 45% of the total population. After the Nakba, only 150,000 Arabs remained in the Jewish state.