Reply #12: of course

[Shaktimaan]

so you don't mean Israeli Arabs... you mean Arab Palestinians, who never had the right to vote. That's quite a bit different.

Look, the people you're talking about never lived in Israel. They lived in the land that existed prior to Israel's formation... Palestine. So they weren't thrown out of their country or anything. The majority were internally displaced. Correct, they can not vote in Israeli elections. But WHY do they want to? Since when do they want to be Israelis so badly? I thought this whole thing was about securing a state for the Palestinians. When the Jews got their state they didn't complain about how it's OK and all but they also want the ability to go back to Iraq and Morocco and France, etc. It defeats the whole point of having a state for youselves.

Beyond that, I am really perplexed as to why it is considered so monsterous that a Palestinian Husband and his Wife should have to live the rest of their days 25 whole miles from the land that they grew up on and considered their own... never getting to see it again. It's not like they were moved off to Bolivia. They are still in the exact same country, just one town over.

And this happened post WWII!!!! Do you know what the rest of the world was dealing with then? Huge scale forced transfers. Communist takeovers. Widespread pogroms. Retribution killings. Genocide. Ethnic cleansing. But here we are 65 years later, everyone else has their shit together except for the Palestinians, who still can't get over the fact that they had to move down the street, to a new place, in the same country. OK, maybe they lost their house and got a tent instead. But it's been 65 years now and I'm getting a little suspicous of the whole tent thing. Not to be rude, but if this is the best they can do after 65 years and they haven't made it out of the tent yet I have somewhat less than stellar hopes for the success of their fledgeling nation.

I freely acknowledge that Israel is never going to let the Arabs it ethnically cleansed return, but unless it does it will continue to deserve the tag of "apartheid state". Arguably, in fact, that comparison is unjust to South Africa - at least the black population was still allowed to live there.

This is getting so weird. At this point it is OK to just use the word "apartheid" while attaching any meaning to it at all? It's like a Twilight Zone episode. The Palestinians don't WANT ROR, they want their own state. They don't get to ask for both. Doesn't matter anyway, because they were never Israeli in the first place. Not to mention that population transfers of this sort were considered normal, or even preferable when de-colonizing new states during this time period. Israel did not steal that land from you. You had plenty of room to make a state in Gaza and Jordan. What happened? You meekly allowed yourself to become subjugated by your Arab "friends."

Feel free to complain about the Nakba and ROR but bear in mind that you then lose the right to complain about settlements. After all settlements are just ROR for Israelis to Palestine. In that case your only logical argument can be "No settlements on Palestine land, unless we also get to do the same thing aka: ROR."