Forced expulsions, and systematic dispossession and disenfranchisement are not the elements of “legal agreements and monetary compensation.” They are the tools of ethnic cleansing. Your refusal to admit this is pure denialism, and nothing more.
Your arrogance is truly breathtaking.
What about the Romani? Weren’t they exiled from their homes in the Indian Subcontinent, forced to wander through the Middle East and Europe for centuries? Weren’t they persecuted? Weren’t they victims of genocide in the Holocaust? Aren’t they a minority in every country in which they live? Where is their homeland? When will they be given the right to ethnically cleanse part of India so they can establish a Romani state? There are other, similar groups…Kurds, Tartars, etc. Unlike you, few have the audacity to claim that victimhood begins and ends with their respective groups, or that they are unique competitors in the Olympics of suffering.
How utterly racist and offensive.
I would have thought that someone who lives in the Middle East would have a somewhat more nuanced view of the people who inhabit that area, but apparently to you all of the Gentiles living between Marrakech and Muscat are all the same, and can be lumped together as “Arabs.” There are myriad different cultures, ethnicities, and histories within that group. Moroccan Arabic isn’t even mutually intelligible with Iraqi Arabic or Gulf Arabic, etc. The fact that the Moors were expelled into the Arab world doesn’t mean that their national aspirations were satisfied.
Many of your past statements speak otherwise.
You’re describing the very same Bantustans I already referred to - a series of semi-autonomous, landlocked Palestinian settlements, surrounded on all sides by Israel. The Israeli government has repeatedly made it clear that even this husk of a Palestinian state wouldn’t be fully independent. The offer is so insulting, its laughable. It would probably be better for the Palestinians to wait for their population to grow over 30-40 years and let demographic realities do in Israel the same thing they did in Apartheid South Africa.
Technically those are their rights according to international law. No government or international body officially recognizes the legtimacy of Jewish settlements beyond the ‘67 lines - they are there illegally, period. And there are several international treaties in place both banning the forced expulsion of noncombatants, and guaranteeing war refugees’ right of return.
That said, if the Palestinians were given a fully independent state along the 1967 boarders, I don’t think its realistic to expect right of return to Israeli territory. However, as I already pointed out, I don’t think an Israeli offer of even such a state is forthcoming.
Italy and Poland weren’t created through the systematic dispossetion of a settled population 60 years ago. This is not an analogous situation.
“Israel” is a post-colonial construct. The Palestinians settled there were citizens of the Ottoman Empire, then became British subjects when sovereignty shifted after WWI. Their rights to inhabit the area as citizens when sovereignty shifted again are established by the conventions of historic precedent and international law. The act of disenfranchising and expelling them was an act of denaturalization.
The entire world recognizes that this was an overwhelmingly one-sided process.
It’s like hearing a Nazi war criminal rationalize the massacre of thousands of civilians in the Warsaw Ghetto by pointing out that the “rebels were killing German soldiers, and the German soldiers were killing the rebels.”
That simply isn’t true. Numerous international human rights organizations (not to mention the State Department of Israel’s biggest benefactor) have pointed out that the JNF continues to enforce discriminatory policies in land rights, and that challenges to its authority have gone unenforced. Frankly, I believe them over you any day. Also, why don’t internally displaced Israeli Arabs have the right to claim property lost during the wars, when Israeli Jews do?
The right to equal access to property is an individual civil right. The right to equal funding for government schools is an individual civil right. The right to marry “foreigners” of one’s choice is an individual civil right. The fact that Israeli Arabs are denied these basic rights demonstrates their secondary status in Israeli society.