I think that you may be sorry you asked for a rebuttal, because here is mine.

The mass exodus of the Palestinians; they ran from the huge army of Zionist. They had to escape the hordes of Jews who were invading Palestine. So many (numbering 716,000 to include elderly, children, women and men) Jews that they overpowered and chased out the poor tent dwelling Palestinians. That is what muslims would like for everyone to think. They want everyone’s pity.

True, if words have meaning then it was a catastrophe for those living in Palestine. Between 600,000 and 700,000 (depending on who you ask) left their homes (tents). At war’s end, the refugees dispersed to Jordanian occupied West Bank, the Egyptian occupied Gaza Strip, and neighboring Arab countries. And when the war for Independence of Israel ended, they were not allowed back into Israel.

But, how did all of this begin? When did it start? Did it start in 1948? And what are the consequences of that exodus, not just for Palestine but for the security and peace of the region?

The entire mess did not begin in 1948 or even in 1901 when boxes were set up in all Jewish establishments to collect money to buy land in what was British owned and occupied lands taken from the Ottoman Empire. This story starts in 1799, outside the walls of Acre in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, when an army under Napoleon Bonaparte besieged the city. It was all part of a campaign to defeat the Ottomans and establish a French presence in the region.

In search of allies, Napoleon issued a letter offering Palestine as a homeland to the Jews under French protection. He called on the Jews to ‘rise up’ against what he called their oppressors.

Napoleon’s appeal was widely publicized. But he was ultimately defeated. In Acre today, the only memory of him is a statue atop a hill overlooking the city.

Yet Napoleon’s project for a Jewish homeland in the region under a colonial protectorate did not die, 40 years later, the plan was revived but by the British.

On 19 April 1936, the Palestinians launched a national strike to protest against mass Jewish immigration and what they saw as Britain’s alliance with the Zionist movement.

The British responded with force. During the six months of the strike, over 190 Palestinians were killed and more than 800 wounded.

Wary of popular revolt, Arab leaders advised the Palestinians to end the strike.

Palestinian leaders bowed to pressure from the Arab heads of state and agreed to meet the British Royal Commission of Inquiry headed by Lord Peel.

In its report of July 1937, the Peel Commission recommended the partition of Palestine. Its report drew the frontiers of a Jewish state in one-third of Palestine, and an Arab state in the remaining two-thirds, to be merged with Transjordan.

A corridor of land from Jerusalem to Jaffa would remain under British mandate. The Commission also recommended transferring where necessary Palestinians from the lands allocated to the new Jewish state.

The Commission’s proposals were widely published and provoked heated debate.

As the Palestinian revolt continued, Britain’s response hardened. Between 1936 and 1937, the British killed over 1,000 Palestinians; 37 British military police and 69 Jews also died.

But, what of the war? The first of what would be many large scale assaults began on 9 January 1948, approximately 1,000 Arabs attacked Jewish communities in northern Palestine, and by February the British said so many Arabs had infiltrated they lacked the forces to run them back. In fact, the British turned over bases and arms to Arab irregulars and the Arab Legion.

In the first phase of the war, lasting from November 29, 1947 until April 1, 1948, the Palestinian Arabs took the offensive, with help from volunteers from neighboring countries.

I. F. Stone, an author says it best in his book This Is Israel, distributed by Boni and Gaer, visited the war and wrote about the area. His book opens with a foreword by Bartley Crum, the prominent American lawyer, businessman, and publisher of PM, the most widely read progressive newspaper of the 1940s. Crum evokes “the miracles (that the Israelis) have performed in peace and war. . . . They have built beautiful modern cities, such as Tel Aviv and Haifa on the edge of the wilderness. . . . They have set up a government which is a model of democracy.” His friend and star correspondent, Izzy Stone, has “set down what he knows and what he has seen, simply, truthfully and eloquently.” We Americans, Crum concludes, “can, through this book, warm ourselves in the glory of a free people who made a two thousand year dream come true in their own free land.”

Accompanied by famed war photographer Robert Capa’s who produced the iconic images of male and female Israeli soldiers. He writes of newborn Israel as a “tiny bridgehead” of 650,000 up against 30 million Arabs and 300 million Muslims and argues that Israel’s “precarious borders,” created by the United Nations’ November 1947 partition resolution, are almost indefensible. “Arab leaders made no secret of their intentions,” Stone writes, and then quotes the head of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Azzam: “This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.”

As I mentioned earlier, Palestine was indeed backed by the armies of the Arab world, but they also had several others who you will not hear any Palestinian talk about when they discuss the “force exodus” from their homeland. Encouraging and leading the uprising against Israel were several Nazi collaborators prominent among the Arab military units that poured into Palestine after passage of the UN’s resolution. In addition to the grand mufti, they included the head of the Arab Liberation Army, Fawzi el-Kaukji, who took part in the fascist revolt against the British in Iraq in 1940 and then escaped to Berlin, where he recruited Balkan Muslims for the Wehrmacht. Another Palestinian military commander, Sheik Hassan Bey Salameh, was a former staff officer under Rommel. Salameh had last appeared in Palestine in 1944 when he was dropped as a Reichswehr major for sabotage duties. German Nazis, Polish reactionaries, Yugoslav Chetniks, and Bosnian Moslems flocked into Palestine for the war against the Jews.

So Palestine had some military trained helpers in addition to a massive Army, all with one thought in mind, to kill any Jew they found. But, the story does not end there. The Jews fought back and the exodus of Arabs began. First to run away were the wealthiest of the families while the Arab guerrillas were moving in, the Arab population was moving out. Of course this could have been due to the grand mufi giving explicit orders to the Palestinians to abandon Haifaa, which was the largest Arab community of any city assigned to Israel under the UN’s partition plan.

One could say how horrible for those leaving, but really how horrible for the Jews that had no place to run. No escape into surrounding nations. No help from America, no help from Russia, and a pretty puny army of Brits. And one has to hand praise to the British for standing and dying alongside of this new nation.

On April 26, 1948, Transjordan's King Abdullah said: “All our efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Palestine problem have failed. The only way left for us is war. I will have the pleasure and honor to save Palestine.” And I am sure he was confident in making this grand statement, after all the Arab forces outnumbered the Jews 50 to 1. Should have been a brief and inexpensive campaign, both monetarily and in loss due to death. So he unleashed his army, on 4 May 1948 the Arab Legion attacked Kfar Etzion. But was met with resistance that drove them back. The Legion returned a week later, refreshed and replenished with supplies and ammunition. And two days of fighting commenced. The Jews, equipped with hand guns, some rifles, and a few explosives, were overwhelmed. Many of the Jews who surrendered were murdered after their surrender. This was before the invasion of the regular Arab armies that would follow.

The UN recognized that the Araabs were the aggressors. But, were not able to go to Palestine to implement a resolution. On 16 February 1948 the Commission reported to the Security Council: “Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein.” And of no surprise, the Arabs were blunt, Jamal Husseini told the Security Council on April 16, 1948: “The representative of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight.” Furthermore, the British commander of Jordan's Arab Legion, John Bagot Glubb admitted: “Early in January, the first detachments of the Arab Liberation Army began to infiltrate into Palestine from Syria. Some came through Jordan and even through Amman . . . They were in reality to strike the first blow in the ruin of the Arabs of Palestine.”

Despite the disadvantages in numbers, organization and weapons, the Jews began to take the initiative in the weeks from 1 April until the declaration of independence on 14 May. The Haganah captured several major towns including Tiberias and Haifa, and temporarily opened the road to Jerusalem.

The partition resolution was never suspended or rescinded. Thus, Israel, the Jewish State in Palestine, was born on 14 May, as the British finally left the country. Five Arab armies (Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon and Iraq) immediately invaded Israel. Their intentions were declared by Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League: "It will be a war of annihilation. It will be a momentous massacre in history that will be talked about like the massacres of the Mongols or the Crusades."

Israel-haters are fond of citing—and more often, misciting—historians in support of their arguments. Let me offer some corrections. . . . In defiance of the will of the international community, as embodied in the UN General Assembly Resolution of November 29th, 1947, the Arabs launched hostilities against the Jewish community in Palestine in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost; and one of the results was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes. . . . On the local level, in dozens of localities around Palestine, Arab leaders advised or ordered the evacuation of women and children or whole communities. . . .

Most of Palestine’s 700,000 “refugees” fled their homes because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders). But it is also true that there were several dozen sites, including Lydda and Ramla, from which Arab communities were expelled by Jewish troops.

The displacement of the 700,000 Arabs who became “refugees”—and I put the term in inverted commas, as two-thirds of them were displaced from one part of Palestine to another and not from their country (which is the usual definition of a refugee)—was not a “racist crime” . . . but the result of a national conflict and a war, with religious overtones, from the muslim perspective, launched by the Arabs themselves.

Another path breaking work of historical scholarship, if facts mattered at all in this debate, would put the final nail in the coffin of the Nakba myth. The book is Palestine Betrayed, by Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East program at King’s College London. Karsh has delved deeper into the British and Israeli archives—and some Arab ones—than any previous historian of the period. He deftly uses this new material to seal the case that the Nakba was brought on by the Palestinians’ own leaders.

For example, using detailed notes kept by key players in Haifa, Karsh provides a poignant description of an April 1948 meeting attended by Haifa’s Arab officials, officers of the nascent Israeli military, Mayor Shabtai Levy, and Major General Hugh Stockwell, the British military commander of Haifa. Levy, in tears, begged the Arab notables, some of whom were his personal friends, to tell their people to stay in their homes and promised that no harm would befall them. The Zionists desperately wanted the Arabs of Haifa to stay put in order to show that their new state would treat its minorities well. However, exactly as Stone reported in This Is Israel, the Arab leaders told Levy that they had been ordered out and even threatened by the Arab Higher Committee, chaired by the grand mufti from his exile in Cairo. Karsh quotes the hardly pro-Zionist Stockwell as telling the Arab leaders, “You have made a foolish decision.”

In describing the battle for Jaffa, the Arab city adjoining Tel Aviv, Karsh uses British military archives to show that the Israelis again promised the Arabs that they could stay if they laid down their arms. But the mufti’s orders again forbade it. In retrospect, it is clear that the mufti wanted the Arabs of Haifa and Jaffa to leave because he feared not that they would be in danger but that their remaining would provide greater legitimacy to the fledgling Jewish state.

Unfortunately, no amount of documentation and evidence about what really happened in 1948 will puncture the Nakba narrative. The tale of dispossession has been institutionalized now, an essential part of the Palestinians’ armament for what they see as the long struggle ahead. It has become the moral basis for their insistence on the refugees’ right to return to Israel, which in turn leads them to reject one reasonable two-state peace plan after another. In the meantime, the more radical Palestinians continue to insist that the only balm for the Nakba is the complete undoing of the historical crime of Zionism—either eliminating Israel or submerging it into a secular democratic state called Palestine. (The proposal is hard to take seriously from adherents of a religion and a culture that abjure secularism and allow little democracy.)

Nor will the facts about 1948 impress the European and American leftists who are part of the international Nakba coalition. The Nakba narrative of Zionism as a movement of white colonial oppressors victimizing innocent Palestinians is strengthened by radical modes of thought now dominant in the Western academy. Postmodernists and postcolonialists have adapted Henry Ford’s adage that “history is bunk” to their own political purposes. According to the radical professors, there is no factual or empirical history that we can trust—only competing “narratives.” For example, there is the dominant establishment narrative of American history, and then there is the counter-narrative, written by professors like the late Howard Zinn, which speaks for neglected and forgotten Americans. Just so, the Palestinian counter-narrative of the Nakba can now replace the old, discredited Zionist narrative, regardless of actual historical facts. And thanks to what the French writer Pascal Bruckner has called the Western intelligentsia’s new “tyranny of guilt”—a self-effacement that forbids critical inquiry into the historical narratives of those national movements granted the sanctified status of “oppressed”—the Nakba narrative cannot even be challenged.

This makes for a significant subculture in the West devoted to the delegitimization of Israel and the Zionist idea. To leftists, for whom Israel is now permanently on trial, Stone’s 1948 love song to Zionism has conveniently been disappeared, just as Trotsky was once disappeared by the Soviet Union and its Western supporters (of whom, let us not forget, Stone was one). Thus Tony Judt can write in The New York Review of Books—the same prestigious journal in which Stone began publishing his reconsiderations of Zionism—that Israel is, after all, just an “anachronism” and a historical blunder.

If you went to David Keith's site he states:

"If you think that aircraft contrails “look different” or are “behaving strangely” consider that regular aircraft condensation trails (contrails) are sometimes long-lasting and the way they look can change suddenly along a flight path as aircraft fly through regions with different temperature and humidity. This is well understood and has been demonstrated by ground observation and by scientific research performed by thousands of people over many decades. Of course it's possible that something else is going on, but to prove it one would need more than simple photographs of something that looks entirely consistent with normal contrails."