During the 1948 Palestine War in which the State of Israel was established, around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs or 85% of the total population of the territory Israel captured fled or were expelled from their homes by Israeli forces. The causes for this mass displacement is a matter of great controversy among historians, journalists, and commentators. Outline of the historical debate Initial positions and criticisms In the first decades after the exodus two diametrically opposed schools of analysis emerged; Israel claimed that the Palestinians left because they were ordered to by their own leaders, who deliberately incited them into panic, to clear the field for the war, while the Arabs claimed that they were expelled at gunpoint by Zionist forces who deliberately incited them into panic. Arab view The Arab view is that the Palestinians were expelled by Zionist forces and that the exodus of 1948 was the fulfillment of a long-held Zionist dream to ethnically cleanse Palestine so that the land could the transformed into a Jewish-majority state. Nur Masalha and Walid Khalidi notes that ideas of transferring the Palestinian Arab population to other Arab countries were prevalent among Zionists in the years prior to the exodus. In 1961, Khalidi argued that Plan Dalet, the Zionists' military plan executed in April and May 1948, aimed at expelling the Palestinians. Israeli view Rabbi Chaim Simons demonstrated in 1988 that Zionist leaders in Mandatory Palestine viewed "transfer" (a euphemism for ethnic cleansing) of Arabs from the land as being crucial. He concluded that it was, in fact, a policy and that the Zionist leadership has no viable alternative. Glazer in 1980 summarized the view of Zionist historians, notably Joseph Schechtman, Hans Kohn, Jon Kimche, and Marie Syrkin, as being: At that time, Zionist historians generally attributed the Arab leaders' alleged calls for a mass evacuation to the period before the proclamation of Israeli statehood. They generally believed that, after that period, expulsion became standard policy and was carried out systematically. As described below, the narratives presented have been influenced by the release of previously unseen documents in the 1980s. In a review in 2000, Philip Mendes pointed to the prevailing Jewish view being that "... it was an absolute fact that the Palestinian Arabs departed in 1948 at the behest of their own leaders, and that Israel desperately attempted to persuade them to stay." Mendes then examines the work of new historian