The research by Pappe does not settle the dispute:
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The principal factor causing the exodus was the flight of the urban upper class from Palestine, who had begun leaving already in September 1947. This was a voluntary exit of about 70,000 Palestinians, mainly from the mixed towns of Palestine. For Teveth the departure of this group is crucial for understanding what happened next. He has no doubts, as he states clearly in the article, that had the elite stayed the picture would have been different. But how different? Teveth sees the elite’s behaviour as setting a code of conduct for the rest of the population. Here Teveth reproduces the ‘Domino Effect’ put forward by Ben Gurion in 1961 and mentioned above. It started a series of flights, as he calls it. The elite’s departure undermined the moral and economic foundations of the society as a whole. The elite evicted vital civil service positions in the economic infrastructure of the towns. The collapse occurred around March and April 1948 and it was the fall of Haifa (on 21 April 1948) which played a particular important role in accelerating the process.
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The gist of the common ground is a consensus between the ‘new historians’ in Israel and many Palestinian historians that Israel bare the main responsibility for the making of the problem. If Plan D is not seen a master-plan for expulsion, even Benny Morris agree it was not born out the blue - expulsion was considered as one of the principal means of building a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The plan reflected the mood of the Jewish soldieries before and after the war, a mood which is echoed very concisely in Ezra Danin’s words to Ben Gurion: ‘The Arabs of the Land of Israel, they have but one task left - to run away’.
The British and the Palestinian leadership share the responsibility. The British for the period which lasted until May 15, at least, when they were responsible for law and order. Expelling people meant that they were not fulfilling these functions. In fact, British policy makers were concerned only with the safety of their withdrawing troops and clerks and nothing more. As in India, chaos anarchy and bloodshed was left behind without anyone in Whitehall looking back ruminating in remorse about the negative British legacy.
The Palestinian leadership played a negative and important role in the dynamics of exodus. Not only did the political elite forsake its constituency in its most crucial hour; it also failed to give coherent guidance from its exile to the besieged communities in Palestine. The escape of those who were able to flee in relative security - the professional and business class from the major cities - augmented the terror and confusion.
An Israeli recognition of the central role the refugees play in the national ethos and memory of the Palestinians can be one of many fruits produced by the historiographical debate on the question of causality and responsibility. The next is a recognition] in the Israeli guilt. Another is a revision of the PLO’s demand for a transfer of the Jews out of Palestine as the only rectification of the past’s evils. I would like to conclude this article with some reflections on the contemporary implications of this debate.
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As I argued before, Zionism was more then just expelling Palestinians and many Zionists genuinely believed, like any colonialists, that they were modernizing Palestine and Palestinians. I would therefore separate the discussion on the 1948 exodus from a debate on the nature of Zionism. Such a debate is not focused on 1948, it owes more to the adoption of a colonialist perspective of Zionism and recognition of the inherent contradiction between democracy and a Jewish nation-state. These are more useful means for exploring the moral validity of Zionism - as a past ideology or a present institutionalized interpretation of reality. Israelis, such as the ‘new historians’ come closer to the Palestinian version of what happened in 1948, without necessarily sharing the Palestinian perspective on Zionism as a whole. The most important political implication is that this new Israeli perception may bare upon the chances of Israelis accepting, at least in principle, the Right of Return for the refugees of 1948.
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Fatah, founded in 1959, and overtaking the PLO in 1968, was the principal institutional manifestation of the Palestinian longing for revenge and of bringing back the lost time of pre-1948 Palestine. The PLO’s charter spoke of an armed struggle for the sake of the return of the refugees to their homes and of the elimination of the ‘Zionist Entity’ which was founded by ‘Nazi and Fascist means’. The charter predicted the establishment of a secular democratic Arab state instead of Israel. The charter was taught in the refugee camps’ schools and its precepts fed the imagination of playwrights, novelists, and poets in their effort to express the living spirit of Palestinian nationalism.
The Palestinian armed struggle had many sources of inspiration. One of them were the psycho-historical explanation of Franz Fanon and his likes of the purifying and homogenizing effect an national armed struggle can have of the crystallization of a new identify for deprived anti-colonialist peoples. It seems that the leaders of the Palestinian armed struggle were also taken by liberation struggles all over the Third World. A particular influence carried with it the charismatic dogma of Mao Tze Tung. Mao’s ‘peasant revolt’ was emulated by Arafat in 1967 in the wake of the Israeli occupation with little success.
The failure of the Maoist approach had brought Palestinians closer to the Algerian model of a guerrilla warfare. A daily struggle against the Israeli army but also frequent terrorism against the civil population (including the hijacking of airplanes) was the admixture used between 1968 and 1978 by the PLO in the attempt to change the reality in post-mandatory Palestine. But to no avail.
http://www.palisad.org/papers/pappe1.htm
This study does not conclusively say that Israel and the early founders were the only cause of the Palestinains exidus. However, the terrorist philosophy and the implicit psychological intent of overthrowing the Israeli state is the essence of the PLO and later Palestinian organizations. 
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