Reddit reviews The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, 2nd Edition (Cambridge Middle East Studies 15)

The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951 by Ilan Pappe, and The War for Palestine by Avi Shlaim agree with Morris.

Trust me. From the hundreds of tomes and articles I've read on the subject, there is no such thing as an objective history of Israel. It's impossible. There's simply too much emotional and cultural baggage that people have to lug around.

You just have to critically sift through the arguments. Saying that one Israeli historian fundamentally disagrees with another historian is like pointing out that Israel's flag has a Star of David on it... Not a huge surprise.

This is a tricky thing in terms of online sources, since the form sort of lends itself to pointing towards contemporary issues, rather than strict historicism. I'll recommend a few books that I think directly address some of the issues you're interested in below. What I might actually suggest is digging around for primary sources on the internet for this issue. One kind of nice side effect of the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict is that pretty much all of the major primary documents have been reproduced online! And many of the non-English ones have been translated into English! I suggest taking some time to actually read the Balfour Declaration, the Sykes-Picot agreement, UN Res. 242, the Hamas Charter, the Israeli Constitution, the Oslo Accords, etc., etc..

Additionally, if you want even deeper primary source info, you can get that too. The US National Archives has made public and digital thousands of primary documents related to this subject on it's website. A simple search for Israel, as an example, returns over 1,700 documents that are in the Online Public Holdings. Similar searches at the British Public Records Office can be done as well.

Some recommended reading:
Israel Gershoni, Confronting Fascism in Egypt

Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, The War for Palestine, 1948

Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity

> I'm not sure where you're getting this ethnic cleansing idea

Well, here's one example of where I got it from, and there are numerous other sources: https://www.amazon.com/War-Palestine-Rewriting-History-Cambridge/dp/0521699347

I can recommend this book. It is very good: https://www.amazon.com/War-Palestine-Rewriting-History-Cambridge/dp/0521699347

Avi Shlaim's book, https://www.amazon.com/War-Palestine-Rewriting-History-Cambridge/dp/0521699347/

His essay http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0005/The%20Debate%20About%201948.html