I find myself wondering how many of our present day leaders, President Obama in particular, are aware of what happened in Palestine on 10 March 65 years ago.
On that day in 1948, two months before Israel's unilateral declaration of independence in defiance of the will of the organized international community as it then was at the UN, Zionism's in-Palestine political and military leaders met in Tel Aviv to formally adopt PLAN DALET, the blueprint with operational military orders for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
They did not and never would refer to the crime they authorised as ethnic cleansing. Their euphemism for it was "transfer".
As noted in an excellent anniversary briefing paper by IMEU (the American-founded Institute for Middle East Understanding), from the earliest days of modern political Zionism its advocates grappled with the problem of creating a Jewish majority state in a part of the world where Palestinian Arabs were the overwhelming majority of the population.
The earliest insider information we have on Zionism's thinking is from the diary of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism's colonial-like enterprise. He wrote:
"We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."
Those words were committed to paper by Herzl in 1895 but they were not published (in other words they were suppressed) until 1962.