Thank you for the article. It puts the palestinian perspective in a nice and persuasive package. To not have empathy for what Palestinians have gone through shows a lack of humanity by anyone. Yet it does not cover what happened prior to the state of Israel, what happened to unarmed Jews in Palestine even prior to the political zionism movement. Before the term zionism was even coined. It ignores that for thousands of years, Jews woke up every morning saying "Next year in Jerusalem" and dreamt of even touching the soil of the land of their ancestors. Zero recognition that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel and that any Palestinian who claims the same, can only do so, under every definition of indigenous, if they were(and many were and are) descended from Jews and Samaritans who converted to other religions.
I don't deny Palestinians a deep connection to the land, whether they were there a few generations or descended from those who were there as Jews or Samaritans dating back a millenium. Linguistically, culturally and genetically a significant portion of both originated in the levant. Not once in your article did you mention anything like that, rather framing it in some European colonialism and imperialism terms. If you walk down that path the easy counter is to discuss Arab imperialism and colonialism and the arabizaton of local populations beginning from the time of Caliph Omar. but frankly, that whole argument leads nowhere and gives no framework for the future.
What we have is two populations with significant portions of each population believing the entire land "river to the sea" is theirs and anyone else shouldn't be there. Then there are others who are either resigned to the fact, or have empathy for their fellow humans, who understand the land can and must be shared. You can argue about who started what- and I can bring the receipts of 1400 years of Arabic and Turkish(Ottoman) rule( to be fair better usually than Christian European rule for Jews but also not rainbows and unicorns). Or we can discuss the last 150 years, or even the 1920s onwards. Again gets us nowhere.
We can talk about current Israeli policies and probably find much common ground as there is plenty I can disagree with there.
But it comes down to this. What next? Okay, you talk about right of return for refugees. And? There are millions of Jews living in the area known as Palestine, the former mandate. Plenty have had a 1400 year experience living under Arab rule and not found it desirable. What autonomy or state would the Professor grant them or should Palestine be Judenrein like the West Bank under the Jordanians( did you forget to mention the expulsion of Jews from these areas and the destruction of over 30 synagogues in Jersualem under Jordanian rule? Must have been an oversight.)
