For Israel to exist it was necessary for the Zionist militias to expel more than 750,000 Palestinians for the crime of not being Jewish. If that's not a "racist endeavour," then the term means nothing.
The Zionist movement, led by the so-called "labor Zionists," understood this very well and had planned the ethnic cleansing for decades before it took place in 1947-49. They euphenistically called it "transfer".
You can read all about this in Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha's seminal book "Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of 'Transfer' in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948". The Nakba was no accident of history.
By the way, Masalha was born in the Galilee and reads Hebrew fluently and his book draws extensively on primary Zionist & Israeli sources. An essential work for anyone who wants to understand the true nature of the occupation of Palestine.
But Nur Masalha's work is less well known than other "new historians" because he's Palestinan, and there is still a racism on the left that assumes a Palestinian scholar is less reliable, "objective" or trustworthy than an Israeli or Jewish scholar.
