The problem we always run into in talking about the Middle East is that there is so much long-standing misinformation about the subject that it requires an extreme effort to discover the truth. This is not a one-sided situation. I remember being taught, when I was growing up, that all of the Arab residents of Israel who left in 1947 did so voluntarily, at the urging of their political and religious leaders. We have long since learned that this is only partially true; that a significant number were driven out by hostility and threats from Jews.
The same is far more true on the other side. The greatest success at this maneuver has been getting the world to swallow the whole notion of a "Palestinian" people, an ethnic group whose claims stand against those of the Jews, but which was never heard of before 1967. This has enabled them to portray the Jewish migration to Israel as a specimen of colonialism, an easily sold fabrication which flies in the face of the obvious fact that you are not a colonialist when you are returning to your homeland. Another is that there was a large population of Arabs in the area of Israel that had been there for a long time- a claim that is easily falsified, as we know that this land was largely depopulated as late as the 1860's.
Another is the endlessly repeated claim that it is a war crime to expel an unalterably hostile population from your country after they have joined in a war against you. At the very time that Israel was founded, the victorious countries of World War II were in the process of removing millions of ethnic Germans from various countries in Eastern Europe, most notably the Sudetenland, where 3 million ethnic Germans were forced to move back to Germany as a result of their hostility to Czechoslovakia in the war. This establishes a clear international precedent for the Israelis to refuse to allow the repatriation of an incurably hostile minority.
Anyway, discussion of this issue inevitably declines into wasting time wading through the falsehoods on both sides, and never ever reaching the point where we can deal with the truth. This is the problem I have had with Sam. I just don't have the time or energy to enter into endless circular arguments with people who do not have the will to discover clear historical fact.
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