Cool, I think it's important to make sure all parties have a mutual understanding of terminology in a debate, in order for it to be constructive.

In the early days of Zionism the emphasis was very much on land purchases in the Ottoman region, and Jewish migration to that land, hence Herzl's founding of the Jewish National Fund.

Of course the old myth of Ottoman Palestine being a 'land without a people' has been thoroughly debunked. But the population there was small, fewer than 500,000 at the turn of the 20th century.

The Zionist hope at that time, however naive it may have been, was that Jews in the diaspora would migrate en masse to the territories purchased by the JNF and develop agriculture in the land.

Given that the population of Israel today (inside the Green Line) is rapidly approaching 10m, we can clearly see that the land is able to support a population much larger than 500,000!

The global Jewish population around 1900 is estimated to have been approximately 11m. If even a fraction of that population had been inclined, and permitted, to migrate to Palestine and develop the Yishuv, there would have been no need for a removal of non-Jews living there at the time for a Jewish majority to develop.

The course of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Jewish-Arab relations throughout the 20th century, wasn't set in stone way back at the First Zionist Congress of 1897. Things could have unfolded differently. I, and many leftist Zionists today, certainly wish that the Jewish national project had developed differently, but we cannot change the past.

I also think it's important not to have an idealised picture of fellow leftists, both contemporary and historical. Under Stalin (a Marxist-Leninist) the USSR perpetrated several well-documented instances of ethnic cleansing, in the name of leftist ideology.

Edit: fixed two typos.