John (#21), your numbers are simply wrong. The number of those truly “expelled” was only in the thousands, mostly from strategically vulnerable areas (around the supply route to Jerusalem, for example). The vast majority fled because their leaders fled, because Arab leaders were encouraging it, or because there was a war on. (Even Benny Morris acknowledges this.) The numbers registered as “refugees” was roughly 650,000, but that number was based on residence of as little as TWO YEARS! Why so brief? Because in the 1920s and 1930s, as Jewish immigration was limited, there was large scale Arab immigration from what today are Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia into “Jewish” Palestine for work.
It’s also unfortunate that you buy the myth that Jews were “treated better than in Christian Europe”. In fact, the Jewish experience varied in time and place. The Damascus Blood Libel and the forced conversion of Persian Jews in the 19th century that had them fleeing eastward (into Afghanistan), the mellahs (ghettos) of Morocco, etc. My own grandfather perished in the “death march” of Jews out of Syria in the closing days of WW I. And we shouldn’t forget the Arab pogroms in Palestine of 1920, 1929 and 1936, or the Nazi-inspired “Farhad” pogrom that took place in Iraq in 1941, or the Arab collaboration with the Nazis in North Africa.
