"All" Palestinians being forced out by Israelis at gunpoint is definitely not correct. A large number were displaced earlier, when Jewish groups bought land from landlords, displacing tenant farmers. So they were forced out, but not at gunpoint by Israelis (since there were no Israelis).

But this question is really about the period of 1947-1948, when the bulk of the Palestinian population was displaced. Here, too, there's a mix, and a lot of it depends on definitions. A large number of the population fled impending war without ever seeing an Israeli (or someone who would soon become an Israeli), and were not allowed to return or reclaim property. So they left willingly, but still under threat. Just not of the form of a person with a gun kicking them out. This fear was sometimes artificially inflated, both by rumors floating around, Arab leaders both in Palestine and elsewhere, and by active encouragement by Jewish groups, who wanted the Arabs out--fear-mongering was an easy way to do that.

But many were forced out at gunpoint, particularly when their city/town/village either was a major center for resistance. One particularly well-documented and large one was in Lod and Ramla (or Lydda and Ramle, depending which language you're transcribing and how), two adjoining cities. The cities were along the route to Jerusalem, which was a strategic objective of Jewish military groups/the IDF, and had resisted Israeli advance to an extent through irregular forces. The inhabitants were expelled after the IDF captured the cities.

The exact nature of these, such as how much of the fear-causing was intentional, how much of the expulsions were due to attacks from civilians, and how much of a centralized effort of ethnic cleansing it was is a massive historiographical debate, which is so bound up in history I won't even attempt it. But it is definitely incorrect to say that all Palestinians were expelled at gunpoint, but it is certain that some were.

My main source of this is Benny Morris's Righteous Victims, though as I mentioned details on this issue are a good way to cause historians to get mad at each other (so I'm well aware it's not unassailable, but the main point that some, but not all, Palestinians left at actual gunpoint is relatively uncontroversial, though some do see the non-gunpoint exodus as due more heavily to a less direct threat of violence).

tl;dr: The poster is most likely wrong, and needs to learn a little more about the history of the conflict before making such a sensationalist/categorical claim.

Hi! Author of the FAQ-quoted post /u/dmar2 brought up, let me try to explain the little bit I devoted to it in the other post.

If you'd like to read this on a Scribd online document format, as many did last time, you can go here for that. Feel free to read, and let me know what you think here!

The real question is, depends who you ask. The issue of being forced out at gunpoint definitely occurred. We also know some Palestinians fled. We also know some were urged to leave. The question is, how many?

I highly encourage you to follow along the timeline in cohesion with the other post that I made, linked here. That way, when I say "April of 1948", you can look at that (which is very neatly divided, I think!) and see what was going on around then, be it civil war or war or some big event in the war...that will help you get a more cohesive narrative and help you understand the truth of this tale.

New Historians: Late 1980s Revision of Accepted Narratives

Simha Flapan's Account

Simha Flapan, a "New Historian", discusses the issue in an article called The Palestinian Exodus of 1948. In this article, we are automatically notified that 600,000-700,000 Palestinians were evicted, or fled. This number has been backed up among numerous sources. The question, then, is how to see why they left, and how many left for which reason.

Flapan notes the official Israeli narrative: That Israel wanted to stop the exodus, and was not responsible for it. He notes that the major of Haifa (Shabatai Levy) and the head of the Worker's Council (Abba Hashi) pleaded with the Arabs to stay and surrender to the Haganah. Ben-Gurion also sent Golda Meir to attempt to convince them to stay. The efforts were unsuccessful.

Flapan believes that these efforts were purely politically calculated, and that Ben-Gurion didn't actually believe in trying to keep the Arabs around, basing this claim on Ben-Gurion biographer Michael Bar-Zohar. Zohar points to what he says are Ben-Gurion's claims that fewer Arabs left would be better, quoting his diary saying "We must afford civic and human equality to every Arab who remains, but it is not our task to worry about the return of Arabs".

This is, obviously, a little shaky. It's interpreting Ben-Gurion's stance off one diary entry that doesn't even mention evicting the Arabs. However, in 1950, Ben-Gurion was quoted as saying "These Arabs should not be living here, just as American Jews should not be living in America". This, however, came after the 1948 War, so we're not sure if it was his belief the whole time! Flapan does provide another quote, however, pointing to Ben-Gurion giving orders to "destroy the Arab islands in Jewish population areas". This cannot, though, explain everything, as Jewish population areas weren't the only places that existed obviously in the new state.

Flapan posits that the idea that the Palestinians were urged to run, part of the official narrative, is bunk. He argues that there's no evidence for it (and notes that thousands of new documents were just released when this was published in 1987). He also notes its improbability, as the local population being urged to run would mean the Arabs didn't want the local population to stick around and help the armies as they approached with supplies; hardly logical. Flapan also says that the declassified trove actually supports the theory that the Arab countries tried to get the Palestinians to stay, not to run.

A report of the Jewish Agency's Arab Section on January 3, 1948 (at the beginning of the flight, which took place in waves, as I'll get into later), mentions that the Arab Higher Executive (AHE) had succeeded in imposing significant scrutiny on those attempting to flee. The old, women, and children were allowed to flee, but overall Palestinians were encouraged to stay in place, and even granting visas to those women and children was often opposed.

Flapan also contends that the AHE statements which were purported to show how the Arabs encouraged the flight are now seen to be largely fabricated. Parts of them that weren't fabricated, however, did contribute to the panic and the flight. Things like "...in a very short time the armies of our Arab sister countries will overrun Palestine, attacking from the land, the sea, the air, and they will settle accounts with the Jews" were intended to deter Arabs from collaborating or surrendering to the Israelis. However, Flapan believes they had the opposite effect, increasing Arab panic and flight due to the impending disastrous effects of war. There are command records, however, that show Arab forces being commanded to return Palestinians to their homes by force if they were caught trying to flee.

Once the flight began, however, it wasn't that Jews necessarily looked to expel the Palestinians (again, working off Flapan here, I'm going to go more into it later). Flapan believes that Jewish leaders merely encouraged it (while there were some expulsions, again, get into that later). Chaim Weizmann, prominent in the Zionism community, had declared that "Jews are not going to encroach upon the rights and territory of the Arabs." However, that didn't mean the Jews didn't encourage the Arabs to abandon their territory. Moshe Sharett (foreign minister of Israel's provisional government) immediately declared that no mass return of Palestinians to Israel would be allowed, and Aharon Cohen (prominent political Zionist) insisted that "the Arab exodus was not part of a preconceived plan, but a part of the flight was due to official policy...Once it started, the flight received encouragement from the most important Jewish sources, for both military and political reasons."

But now that you've got a good idea of the narrative up to here, and you've understood that the argument of flight and expulsion is the main narrative Flapan argues for, let's see what Flapan tallies it all up to. Keep in mind, Flapan believes there were far more expulsions, making the "encouragement" claim insufficient to explain the exodus.

Flapan notes that according to IDF intelligence estimates, as of June 1, 1948 (in the next 6 months a similar sized exodus would occur again), 370,000 Arabs had left. 84% were due to direct Israeli actions (55% due to attacks, 15% due to terrorism, 2% due to whispering campaigns, 2% due to evacuations by the IDF, and 10% due to general fear). About 5% left on orders from Arab bands. And finally, another 11% left voluntarily.

I'd like to categorize those numbers slightly differently, if I might. I'd say the general fear is hard to pin on either side (as Flapan noted the fears compounded by Arabs), so it ought be separated. Also, we must note that attacks by Israelis are military attacks (since they are described as separate from the terrorist attacks of Irgun and Lehi, two prominently radical fighting groups), and likely resulted in some expulsions and some running from the people now in control.

Flapan goes further into the issue of how they were encouraged to leave, what methods were used, what expulsions were like, etc. However, these are details that don't detract or add to the point above for the most part, so I'll move on to the next portion of my post: Ilan Pappé.

There's a really detailed post in the FAQ that goes through the entire history. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23w18h/what_were_the_mechanisms_by_which_the_state_of/ Read it all for context, but for what you're asking, scroll down to "Part IV" which discusses the 1948 Arab–Israeli War (there are a variety of different names for this conflict). This is when the majority of Palestinian Arabs refugees left modern-day Isreal. Unfortunately, as the poster mentions, there is a ton of disagreement as to the exact circumstances as to why they left. I'll quote from the post.

Jews maintain that the Palestinians ran at their governments' urging, while Arabs maintain that they were forced out. A wave of what are being called "New Historians" are Israeli historians (like Benny Morris) who accept the Arab claim that they were forced out, but even then justifications are given. I won't go into the claims of each group, but know that there were indeed instances (no matter how widespread or not) where people were forced out, and instances where they ran.

I am not a historian, just a reader of this sub, so if anyone has a more detailed response that goes into details about specific claims and the historiography of this question, that would be really great - I'm curious about this as well.