Israel/Palestine

than it did about peace. If Netanyahu hadn't been obsessed with discrediting and humiliating Arafat, Hamas would never have emerged as a rival for Palestinian leadership(and there was NEVER ever going to be a credible Palestinian leadership that could possibly have settled for anything less than an actual state-none would ever have accepted Likud's proposals for Tibetan-style "autonomy" and nothing more).

As to Right of Return, why can't the Israeli side make a compromise offer? Something like this:

1)physical RoR and restoration of original property and homes for the elders of 1948(there are only a few thousand of them left);

2)Compensation for property loss at real present-day valuation, acknowledgment of dispossession and unjust treatment and sincere, heartfelt apologies for the dispossession and injustice for the rest?

3)Resettlement funds to move the rest into the West Bank with the right to visit their older relatives in group 1 as they wish.

I think the vast majority of Palestinians could live with that.

This is not about antisemitism(though there are Palestinian antisemites just as there are Israeli Arabophobes-and both forms of hate are equal and equally wrong). It is about a huge number of people being driven from their homes, it is about a genuine injustice in that act, and it is about a non-European people(Palestinian Arabs) essentially being punished for the crimes of European Christians(the Inquisition, the ghettos, the pogroms and the Holocaust), crimes the Palestinians bore no responsibility for and could have done nothing at all to prevent.

The State of Israel exists. Everyone knows it exists. It's always going to exist. It should exist in peace(on the pre-1967 lines). It doesn't need to treat Palestinians like this in order to exist.