Agreed. But prior to the creation of Israel, would they have been? Why were the villages destroyed? The annexation of land to create "Israel" p-o'd a lot of people in the region. It is my understanding (possibly in error?) that at least part of that animosity was "we don't want the Palestinians in our territory", but displacing them to create Israel meant they had to go somewhere. Was that why they were destroyed?

It's insanely complicated, but yes - tensions were already worsening in the area long before the creation of Israel. The Ottoman state was allied with Germany and the Central Powers in WWI, and they were worried that the Jews in the region would support the Allied Powers - and in particular the British. So the Ottoman started to clamp down on Jews in the area as early as 1915, and in early 1917 they drove all the Jews out of Tel Aviv and Jaffa (the ones that survived were able to return after the war under the British Mandate). The Balfour Declaration was issued, in part, in an attempt by the British to get Jewish support in the war effort. Which largely worked.

So after the Ottoman Empire collapsed with the end of WWI, and Britain took over, there were a lot of bitter recriminations that led to increasing hostility towards the Palestinian Jews. They were disliked by some because they had allied (in this part of the world) with the Allies in WWI, by others because they were cooperating with the British (as the governing colonial power). Because of that history and the pressures caused by Jewish emigration and zionism, the conflicts between Jews and Arabs started to really heat up. That was nearly three decades before Israel was created. Arguably, the first violent conflict between the two groups was the fighting at Tel Hai in early 1920 - barely a year and a half into the Mandate. Things only got worse from there. On top of that, you had the initial skirmishes in the uprising of the Palestinian Muslim population against the British - which really boiled over in the 1930's - and the Jews were now firmly allied with the Mandatory government.

Note that the British weren't just - or even primarily - hated over anything having to do with Palestine. The UK had promised a huge independent Arab state to the Arab leaders in the area in exchange for their support against the Ottomans, leading to revolts against the Empire throughout the region. When the Sykes-Picot Agreement was made public - revealing that Britain and France had agreed back in 1916 to carve the area up for themselves - the Arabs were outraged at the UK, and livid at many of the choices they and the French made in carving up the region.

With Syria and Lebanon and Transjordan (now Jordan) revolting against the French and British at the end of WWII, and Iraq pushing the British Mandatory government out in 1947, the whole region was well boiling even before the UN adopted the partition resolution.