Last week my local newspaper, on its editorial page, featured a lovely cartoon showing a rather battered looking city, with an Israeli tank moving through the ruins, and on a wall the graffiti: "Walk the Israelis into the sea". This, presumably, was a sample of the "moderation" of the new Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.
The old Palestinian resistance slogan, "Drive the Israelis into the sea", is basically the same as one that we sometimes meet here in America: "Send 'em back where they came from." Had I been older than six years of age at the time Israel was first established as a state, and politically engaged, I would probably have felt a whole lot of sympathy for this Palestinian slogan. The Jewish invaders who basically ― through actions that we today would (and the British administrators of the area at that time did) have no difficulty labelling "terrorism" ― essentially displaced the Palestinians from land that they had occupied for a couple of thousand years. That the Jewish invaders had legitimate complaints of there own was irrelevant; those complaints should have been aimed not at the Palestinians but at the European powers that had caused them. The Palestinians in my opinion had good and legitimate reasons for wanting to drive the Israelis into the sea. More power to them!
Cut to 2005, almost sixty years later. Time, it is said, heals all wounds. I don't know about that, but history shows that time legitimizes all sorts of criminal actions ― that's why we have a statute of limitations. In the case of Israel, "send 'em back where they came from" strikes me as being, today, a pretty useless exercise. There are still a lot of immigrants in Israel ― see e.g. my reviews of the poetry collections of Mikaelo Giŝpling El sisma zono, Eola harpo and Tie ĉi tie ― Giŝpling is a Russian Jew now living in Jerusalem. But today, such immigrants are a minority (though an influential one). The average Israeli of today was born there. Tell him to "go back where you came from" and he will mention Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Haifa. Driving him into the sea would be as unjust as was the original Jewish invasion of Israel more than half a century ago. He didn't do it; he was born where he was born; he has as much right there as anybody, including those Palestinians whose ancestors had occupied that land since the end of the first century. To believe otherwise would be to believe that I have no moral right to the land on which my house sits and on which my children grew up, simply because that land was stolen, presumably by ancestors of mine (at least culturally), from its earlier (though perhaps not original) owners a century and a half ago.
On the other hand ... settlements. Because you got away with it in 1948, and because time legitimizes all such crimes, is no excuse for committing similar crimes today.
Time for everybody to stop where they are, think things over, and then try to come to some kind of agreement.