Reply #158: He didn't ask if the refugees OWE Israel anything...

[Shaktimaan]

he asked if the Palestinians bear any of the responsibility for their current situation. Frankly, I can't see how you would think otherwise. I mean, unless you honestly think that the Palestinians made the right decision EVERY time they were faced by a choice during the breadth of the entire conflict.

As one obvious example, by rejecting the UN Partition Plan and punctuating it by taking up arms against Palestine's Jewish inhabitants they started the civil war which would eventually lead to the Nakba. Admitting that some Palestinian actions helped create the refugee problem is not the same thing as saying that the refugee problem is entirely the fault of the Palestinians themselves.

By saying that they played no role you strip the Palestinians of any real ability to make choices that influence their future. If we expect Israel to react the same way towards the Palestinians, regardless of what they do, we are essentially saying that the Palestinians can't be trusted to make their own decisions. Had the Palestinians won that war and Israel was never born we all would have accepted the reality of it by now. But they lost and here we are now, demanding that Israel apologize for creating the refugee situation in the process of defending itself. That the Palestinians played a role in that historical event is routinely ignored, shifting the entirety of the blame upon Israel. In fact, the whole civil war itself is usually ignored, and the motives behind the Nakba is usually chalked up to racism or some similar evil that fits with people's preconceptions of Israel.