The Beguiling Tom Segev

Tom Segev of Haaretz quotes Professor Renana Meridor, Eliyahu Meridor's widow and mother of Salai, Dan and Avital (there's another sister):-

Renana Meridor from Jerusalem writes in response to the affair of the Nakba being mentioned in textbooks, which was surveyed here last week: "Both Arab schoolchildren and Jewish schoolchildren in Israel are apparently not allowed to know that at the end of the hostilities of 1948, the part of Mandatory Palestine which remained in the hands of the Arabs was 'cleansed of Jews,' as all its Jewish residents were either killed or expelled from it."

but adds:

What both Jewish and Arab children ought to know is the following:

It is true that no Jews remained in some of the territories of Mandatory Palestine, which remained in Arab hands at the end of the hostilities of 1948. Most of the Jews who fled and were expelled lived in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, in the settlements of Gush Etzion, in Atarot and in Neveh Yaakov - a total of no more than 2,500 people, less than half of 1 percent of the Jews who then resided in the country. The Arab refugees numbered 650,000, and fewer than 150,000 Arabs remained in the territory of Israel after the war.

Besides leaving out a few places, notably the Labour movement's kibbuzt, Bet Ha'aravah, Segev fails to note that many more places were set aside by the UN to be included in the borders of the "Arab state" and they would have suffered the same fate of ethnic cleansing not to mention what I have repeatedly poasted here, that this policy of ethnic cleansing by Arabs directed at Jews started at Tel Hai in 1920 already.