And yet those Zionists signed up for Balfour and San Remo giving equal rights as citizens to the people already there and indeed 20% of Israeli's citizens are Arabs/Palestinians. Which gives them far more right than in neighbouring Arab states like Lebanon where the Palestinians are forbidden to own property and banned from 40 professions.

Indeed there are plenty of records of the Zionists in the 1920s wanting the local population to stay and was endorsed by the rulers of Egypt and the Arab Mayor of Jerusalem. Yet the British released Al -Husseini out of prison to counter all this good will and riots ensued. The focus of the Zionists was not the Arabs but getting rid of the British. And the Peel commission on 1937 and UN partition plan of 1947 the Zionists said yes to which is hardly evidence of ethnic cleansing.

Meanwhile, more than a million died in forced population transfers in the partition of Pakistan and India which happened at the same time. But because of that exceptionalism the original posters talks of, no one cares about that, just Israel.