In 1931, there were more than 850,000 Palestinian Arabs in the region.

But with the rise of Hitler, Jewish flight from Europe became even more urgent and Palestine started to see the biggest wave of Jewish immigration yet.

A U.N. special committee proposed the land be divided into two states, a Jewish state and an Arab state.

Within this proposed area were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who had lived there for generations.

By the end of 1947, Zionists had several well-developed paramilitary forces, the largest one known as the Haganah.

The Haganah adopted what was called Plan Dalet or Plan D, a set of brutal instructions called for the destruction of Arab villages by setting fire to, blowing up and planting mines.

Plan D became the blueprint for carrying out the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine to make room for a new state.

Roughly 750,000 Palestinians had been forcefully expelled.

And more than 500 villages destroyed.