“The Arabs rejected the partition plan, and a day after Israel proclaimed its independence in 1948, the Arab countries attacked the new state. They were defeated. Amid violence by militias and mobs on both sides, huge numbers of Jews and Arabs were displaced.”
In fact, the violence began in late 1947 between both sides and half the expulsions and the Deir Yassin masssacre of April 1948 took place before the Arab armies attacked.
And “huge numbers of Jews and Arabs were displaced” is meant to downplay the deliberate expulsion of the Palestinians, the Nakba. The borders of the Jewish state laid out by the U.N. Partition Plan contained only a slim majority of Jews; after the Nakba and the Palestine war/Israeli war of independence, those borders were greatly expanded, and 80 percent of the Palestinians who had lived there were gone, and not allowed to return. The numbers of Jews displaced from Hebron and Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank were far smaller. (The Times’s use of the phrase “violence by… mobs on both sides” is eerily reminiscent of Donald Trump’s equivocation after Charlottesville.)
This is hasbara, or explanation of the conflict that serves Israeli claims. There is no comment section on the piece, of course.