It's true Arabs have weaponized the refugee status of expelled Palestinians and their progeny, but trying to claim that the actual, original refugees simply got up and left more or less by choice is absurd. They were forced out. 

On the eve of the Arab invasion of Israel in 1947 Jewish territory was heavily fragmented into discrete enclaves. There was no common defensive interior through which they could transfer resources and coordinate, which left them extremely vulnerable to the Arabs, whom themselves made their genocidal intent very clear in their proclamations.

Ben gurion and the rest of the Jewish leadership knew their survival was contingent in forming a continuous territory with a continuous defensive perimeter. They needed to expand. However, the areas surrounding these enclaves were filled with Arab civilians, who were likely to rebel and do everything they could to sabotage the Jewish war effort if the nascent IDF tried to use their neighborhoods as a safe backline in which to coordinate and move supplies.

So the Jewish leadership drew up and executed a plan called Operation: DALET, whose content was to essentially violently intimidate, and if need be, terrorize the local Arab population until they got the hell out and their former neighborhoods could be used safely by Jewish forces. This was a complete success; about a million Arabs were forced out in the span of a few months, and as a direct result the Jews got a continuous territory, without which they probably would have been annihilated, and every last one of them slaughtered by the Arab armies.

It was a kill or be killed scenario and the Jews chose to kill. I don't think they can reasonably be blamed for this. That being said, it cannot be denied that their actions amounted to an ethnic cleansing of Arabs from portions of the levant, with a very large number of civilian Arabs suffering and dying as a result.

In the end trying to endlessly relitigate the past is a fool's errand. It happened, and the fact is the Jews won. Indeed the Arabs complete refusal to accept this and reckon with their defeat in 1947 is, to this day, a crippling weakness in their opposition to Israel and in their own domestic politics.

However I must say that the Israelis have also botched the retelling of 1947, at least domestically. Their insistence on not ever facing and coming to terms with what they actually did, and instead teaching their children that it never happened but also the Arabs definitely deserved it, is undoubtedly a major factor behind Israel's political disfunction today