Causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus  The causes and explanations of the exodus of Palestinian Arabs that arose during the 1947–1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine and the 1948 Arab–Israeli War are a matter of great controversy between historians, journalists and commentators of the Arab–Israeli conflict. In the first decades after the exodus two diametrically opposed schools of analysis could be distinguished. In the words of Erskine Childers: "Israel claims that the Arabs left because they were ordered to, and deliberately incited into panic, by their own leaders who wanted the field cleared for the 1948 war," while "The Arabs charge that their people were evicted at bayonet-point and by panic deliberately incited by the Zionists." According to Steven Glazer "[t]he Arab view of history has maintained that the Palestinians did not leave their homes voluntarily [but] were expelled by Zionist aggression... Sources sympathetic to the Arab viewpoint have seen in the events of 1948 the fulfilment of a long dreamed-of Zionist plan to rid Palestine of its Arab population, thus forcibly transforming Palestine into a Jewish state." Nur Masalha and Walid Khalidi points at the influence of thinking about "transfer" of the Arab population to other Arab countries, among Zionists in the years prior to the exodus. In 1961 Khalidi also said that the Zionists had military superiority and that Plan Dalet, the Zionists' military plan executed in April and May 1948, aimed at expelling the Palestinians. In his work dedicated to the topic, "A Historical Survey of Proposals to Transfer Arabs from Palestine 1895 - 1947", Rabbi Dr. Chaim Simons provided examples of the writings and recorded words of important Zionist leaders including Theodore Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Baron Edmund de Rothschild and Moshe Shertok, demonstrating that the concept of 'transfer' was present from the earliest days of Zionism, that it was viewed as being a crucial action, and concludes that 'transfer' was in fact Zionist policy. Simons concludes further that the Zionist leadership has no viable alternative. Writing in 1980 Glazer summarized the position of Zionist historians up to that point, notably Schechtman, Kohn, Jon Kymche and Syrkin, as saying: "... the Arabs in Palestine were asked to stay and live as citizens in the Jewish state. Instead, they chose to leave, either because they were unwilling to live with the Jews, or because they expected an Arab military victory which would annihilate the Zionists.