No, I'm not. Really frustrating to have to explain this repeatedly.
While ethnic cleansing undoubtedly occurred, it wasn't the original intent "at the core" of the Zionist project. Rather, the intent at the core of the project was - precisely as always stated - desire for Jewish self-determination, and (once again) they initially set out to attain that through peaceful and legal means and were happy to accept an internationally supported solution that did not involve ethnic cleansing.
I'm really not sure how to make this clearer: there was an entirely workable plan that would have gotten the Zionists what they wanted without ethnic cleansing, they accepted it, no further violence needed to occur. The proof is in the pudding: if ethnic cleansing was core to the project, such a plan could not have existed and/or the Zionists would not have accepted it.
Instead, the Arabs refused this, had zero interest in trying to negotiate any kind of peaceful solution, began to ethnically cleanse Jews throughout the Arab world [0], and launched an international war effort to subjugate or oust the Jews from the region.
The Israeli defense and retaliation ultimately included ethnic cleansing of its own. That's undeniable. But even here it wasn't core to the project; it wasn't a war goal at the beginning. Per Wikipedia [1]:
Initially, the aim was "simple and modest": to survive the assaults of
the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states. "The Zionist leaders deeply,
genuinely, feared a Middle Eastern reenactment of the Holocaust, which
had just ended; the Arabs' public rhetoric reinforced these fears". As
the war progressed, the aim of expanding the Jewish state beyond the UN
partition borders appeared: first to incorporate clusters of isolated
Jewish settlements and later to add more territories to the state and
give it defensible borders. A third and further aim that emerged among
the political and military leaders after four or five months was to
"reduce the size of Israel's prospective large and hostile Arab
minority, seen as a potential powerful fifth column, by belligerency
and expulsion".
It's tragic that they arrived at that "third and further aim"; I'm looking back on this with 80 years of both distance and hindsight, but I can at least conceive of a world in which they didn't.I don't mean to whitewash what the Israelis did in the war - any more than Palestinian supporters want to whitewash what the Arabs did and intended to do, I suppose. But I was replying to someone asserting that the State of Israel simply could not exist without ethnic cleansing, that to be a Zionist fundamentally means to support ethnic cleansing. This is what I'm disputing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War#...
