ZIONISM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF ITS VICTIMS 101 struggle, or even the policies produced in Israel ever since. The fact that matters for the Palestinian— and for the Zionist— is that a territory once full of Arabs emerged from a war (a) essentially emptied of its original residents and (b) made impossible for Palestinians to return to. Both the ideological and organizational preparations for the Zionist effort to win Palestine, as well as the military strategy adopted, envisioned taking over territory, and filling it with new inhabitants. Thus the Dalet Plan, as it has been described by the Zionist historians Jon and David Kimche, was “ to capture strategic heights dominating the most likely lines of advance of the invading A ra b armies, and to fill in the vacuum left by the departing British forces in such a way as to create a contiguous Jewish-held area extending from the north to the south.” " In places like Galilee, the coastal area from Jaffa to A c r e, parts of Jerusalem, the towns of Lydda and Ramla, to say nothing of the A ra b parts of Haifa, the Zionists were not only taking over British positions; they were also filling in space lived in by A ra b residents who were, in Weitz' word, being “ transferred," Against the frequently mentioned propositions— that Pales­ tinians left because they were ordered to by their leaders, that the invading A ra b armies were an unwarranted response to Israel's declaration of independence in May 1948— I must say categorically that no one has produced any evidence o f such orders sufficient to produce so vast and final an exodus.44 In other words, if we wish to understand why 780,000 Palestinians left in 1948, we must shift our sights to take in more than the immediate events of 1948; rather, we must see the exodus as being produced by a relative lack of Palestinian political, organizational response to Zionist effectiveness and, along with that, a psychological mood of failure and terror. Certainly atrocities, such as the Deir Yassin massacre o f 350 Arab civilians by Menachem Begin and his Irgun terrorists in April 1948, had their effect. But for all its horror, even Deir Yassin was one o f many such massacres which began in the immediate post-World War I period and which produced conscious Zionist equivalents of American Indian-killcrs.'15 What proba­ bly counted more has been the machinery for keeping the