Reply #168: But they are in the place of their ancestry.

[Shaktimaan]

You don't really care about the conditions of those people at all. You just want them to accept that they won't ever get to go back to the place of their ancestry. You should understand how cruel it is to insist that they can never return, or that they can never even get an admission that Palestine had been their home.

Well, I certainly care about the conditions of those camps. Remember when Israel occupied Gaza they started building more permanent housing only to get criticism from the UNRWA who accused them of trying to settle refugees and force a premature end to the refugee crisis. It was a Palestinian decision to keep them in squalid camps for political reasons.

That said, the refugees shira mentioned ARE in Palestine. They were internally displaced, sure, but they are still in Palestine. You can not argue that every group of internally displaced refugees from the past 100 years have the right to return to the exact spot they came from.

The truth is, if they were resettled in other Arab countries, they would STILL always see themselves as Palestinian. They would never accept that they were "generic Arabs" because Arabs are no more generic than anyone else.

So what. There are dozens of types of Jews who have to share one small country. No one guarantees that Iraqi Jews get one state while Syrian and Russian Jews get another. Right now how many Jordanians are Palestinian? Half? What about that does anything to de-legitimize their nationality or cultural heritage? Lebanon is made up of several different groups. How would it be cruel to allow the Palestinian refugees who have been there for decades the right to finally have equal rights as citizens?

It's not asking too much to acknowledge their humanity.

Precisely my point. The PLO and Arab League have been denying these people their humanity for generations to make a political point. Tying their humanity to their political demands is absurd. Many millions have had to re-settle as refugees across the globe in the 40's and 50's. A million Jews from Arab countries moved to Israel and did just that. Their humanity remained intact because they were allowed to live as humans and not as political pawns in squalor.

By pinning the treatment of these refugees to the politics of another country the Arabs denied these people their humanity. Not Israel.