for opposition are: On the 18 August 1948, at the United Nations Security Council, Israel declared that it is not reasonable to contemplate a return of the refugees as the Arab League and the Arab High Committee have announced their intentions to continue their war of aggression and resume hostilities, noting that the state of war has not been lifted and that no peace treaty has been signed. However, Israel accepted the next year the return of some of the refugees, notably through the annexation of the Gaza Strip or by absorbing 100.000 of them in exchange of a peace treaty. The Arab countries refused the proposal, demanding a complete return. The Palestinian refugee issue is handled by a separate authority from that handling other refugees, that is, by UNRWA and not the UNHCR. Most of the people recognizing themselves as Palestinian refugees would have otherwise been assimilated into their country of current residency, and would not maintain their refugee state if not for the separate entities. Concerning the origin of the Palestinian refugees, the Israeli government said that during the 1948 War the Arab Higher Committee and the Arab states encouraged Palestinians to flee in order to make it easier to rout the Jewish state or that they did so to escape the fights by fear. The Palestinian narrative is that refugees were largely expelled and dispossessed by Jewish militias and by the Israeli army. Historians still debate the causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus. Notably, historian Benny Morris states that most of Palestine's 700,000 refugees fled because of the "flail of war" and expected to return home shortly after a successful Arab invasion. He documents instances in which Arab leaders advised the evacuation of entire communities as happened in Haifa. In his scholarly work, however, he does conclude that there were expulsions which were carried out. Morris considers the displacement the result of a national conflict initiated by the Arabs themselves. In a 2004 interview with Haaretz, he described the exodus as largely resulting from an atmosphere of transfer that was promoted by Ben-Gurion and understood by the military leadership. He also claimed that there "are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing". He has been criticized by political scientist Norman Finkelstein for having seemingly changed his views for political, rather than historical, reasons. Since none of the 900,000 Jewish refugees who fled anti-Semitic violence in the Arab