re: #97 SanFranciscoZionist

It’s taken for granted in all of this that Jews will not be permitted to live as citizens in any Palestinian state, that Israelis will not be permitted to travel freely in the new Middle East, and that reparations for the Jewish refugees will never be discussed, while the Right of Return continues to be something Abbas will nevah, nevah give up.

We know this. It’s fully accepted, so fully accepted that it is considered distasteful and beside the point even to bring it up.

And Iraq deliberately wrote its constitution to prevent Jewish refugees from returning home and voting.

Nothing new.

SFZ, while I think you are correct that reparations for Jewish refugees will never be discussed, I don’t agree that it is taken for granted that there will be continued clamoring for a so-called “right of return” by Arabs to Israel. To the contrary, one of the great flaws of Western thinking on this subject is that Western elites have wrongly assumed that this is an issue that will be compromised on by the Arabs as part of a final settlement. That is the essence of the oft-recited, but misguided, phrase “We all know what a final settlement will look like”. The Arabs have no intention of giving up on this claim -as Abbas recently made clear, again — because they have no intention as yet to give up on their goal of destroying Israel. Until that mind-set changes, there can be no peace, and until the West acknowledges that that mindset exists, the West will continue to wrongly put the onus on Israel to offer grand gestures and territory in exchange for empty promises.