The Zionist approach during the Mandate was to buy land from the big landlords and evict the tenants. The government hoped that a mass transfer of the tenants from Palestine could be organized, preferably as part of a general solution to the situation, but was prepared, in the short term, to put up with small evictions here and there. When the ‘mass transfer’ happened, in 1948, it affected Palestinians from almost all walks of life. In the meantime tenants were losing their land without any compensation or work elsewhere.26 The easiest course for the Zionists was to buy land from the most a-national of the notables, the absentee landlords, who during the Mandate owned more than 20 per cent of private land.27 The largest landowner in Palestine was Abdul Rahman Pasha, who lived in Damascus and owned 200,000 dunams (the richest of the local notables, such as the Husaynis in Jerusalem, owned just 50,000 dunams).

• A History of Modern Palestine Page 146, Ilan Pappe

Additional links

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/5/23/the-nakba-did-not-start-or-end-in-1948

https://ismi.emory.edu/documents/stein-publications/website docs 2011-2004/website docs 2000 and earlier/JNF-Stein1984.pdf

https://www.972mag.com/mapping-the-palestinian-villages-erased-and-replaced-with-jewish-towns/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sursock_Purchases

Israel was the state with plans for ethnic cleansing. And there is plenty of historians that disagree with your statement in light of released Israeli archives

https://imeu.org/article/plan-dalet

https://users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0005/The Debate About 1948.html

https://merip.org/1998/06/fifty-years-through-the-eyes-of-new-historians-in-israel/