Why is everything Israel’s responsibility? They’re fighting a war of self defense against terrorists who use the citizenry as human shields. Given those circumstances, I feel like they’ve done far more to avoid casualties and help the civilians than any other government/military would. The UN needs to stop undermining Israel and supporting Hamas implicitly via such lazy statements and actions.

What’s the UN’s responsibility in providing those conditions? What are the complaining countries doing to bring aid to Gazans or a viable ceasefire deal with release of all hostages? Many UN members like Egypt, Jordan, South Africa are all doing nothing to help but instead just complaining about Israel. Do they even care about the Gazan residents or is this just a political opportunity for them?

> The main agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, announced the suspension of distribution in Rafah in a post on X, without elaborating beyond citing the lack of supplies.

The article seems very vague - what specifically would cause the pier to fail? If distribution is a problem then isn’t it an existing problem that UNRWA has allegedly been handling this whole time? It’s hard to trust UNRWA and their claimed reasons. Some of their staff allegedly has ties to Hamas (which US intelligence confirmed), their buildings (like schools) have housed Hamas fighters, and aid funneled through them has ended up in Hamas’s hands.

"Moral responsibility" is a non-sequitur. The discussion is whether UNRWA perpetuates the problem it purports to solve. Several of us have demonstrated that they do this.

You seem each time to reject the evidence because you find the premise itself incredible. It is indeed a bitter pill to swallow, that one of the bulwarks of civilization such as the Union of Nations would be so corrupt, but the evidence is clear.

> ecause without it one side might "drop the idea" of making war -- or, more sinisterly, "drop the idea" of defending themselves.

Well, see, you are taking sides in this conflict. Historically, Israel only attacks when it is attacked. In other words, Israel would like to be left alone. No one argued against Palestinians defending themselves, but there is no legitimate reason to attack Israel, and particularly not Israeli citizens. As we've demonstrated repeatedly in this thread, UNWRA has enabled Palestinians to maintain a perpetual war against Israel for 75 years. If UNWRA had not been doing this, it's at least arguable that Palestinians would have devoted their energies to making a legitimate state that took care of its citizens rather than the situation as it is today: Gaza ruled by a well-funded terrorist organization that literally has "destroy Israel" and "never compromise with Israel" in its charter, while legitimate government operations are left to UNRWA. Even if you believe the Palestinians have some kind of right to "resist" the "occupation" of "their land" (which is taking a side) and so commit acts of terror, it should not be the UN that funds it.

What about recent events suggests Israel isn’t held, and does not hold itself, responsible for Gaza’s affairs? The principal complaint is that they’re holding themselves too responsible.

I mean, I think it's unlikely Israel will be completely annihilated, but a larger conflict in which we are attacked from several different countries can be devastating. And it's definitely a real possibility that Israel could be conquered.

> It is not a matter of bias against Israel, but rather an attempt to hold all nations accountable for their actions.

Well, do you think the fact that there are more resolutions against Israel than against all other countries combined is reflective of Israel being worse than all other countries combined? If not, how do you explain it?

> Although there are many Arab nations, the resolutions are passed based on the consensus or majority vote of the member states, which includes a wide range of nations with different perspectives and interests.

There are many Arab nations. There are also a huge number of Arabs and Muslims, many of whom are ideologically opposed to Israel. Many of them live in various countries, including many countries in Europe. Just look at the vast anti-Israel protests that are happening across many countries.

This gives a lot of political pressure to many countries to oppose Israel in various ways. Voting against Israel in the UN is a cheap way to appease large blocs of voters.

I'm not saying this necessarily means the UN is biased against Israel, but for sure take that together with the fact that a majority of resolutions are against Israel, and it paints a picture in my mind. (Remember, big as the conflict with Palestine is, the number of dead is tiny compared to any other conflict, including some happening as we speak).

Btw, here's one example of why Israelis dislike the UN so much - it is fairly common knowledge that Palestinian children, taught in UN-run schools, get material which teaches them to hate Jews/Israel.

Here's one video on the subject I randomly found on YouTube, there are lots of others but I tried to find one that isn't from an Israeli channel (just in case you don't trust it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkOPVXiTqoI

> >> Israel withdrew from Gaza

> I believe statements like this is where you and I will strongly disagree.

> When I see snipers shooting children who are fenced up, shooting medical personnel, shooting journalists, all deliberate, done with intent by IDF snipers; I don't call that withdrawing from Gaza.

To be clear, by withdrawing from Gaza, I mean that Israel literally removed 7k of its own citizens, that were settlers in Gaza, removed them and forced them back into Israel. The existence of these settlers were one (very valid) complain the Palestinians and the international community had against Israel.

So Israel forcefully removed these settlers, withdrew all soldiers from Gaza, and said that Gaza can govern itself. Gazans then elected Hamas (or Hamas took over, not sure what's the correct way to put it), which caused Israel and Egypt to blockade Gaza fully in order to keep weapons out of their hands.

> This is a recorded video of the practice and performed by Israeli snipers: https://youtu.be/HnZSaKYmP2s?t=2844

While I certainly condemn killing anyone unarmed and for no reason, this video doesn't give much context on what's happening. I don't believe there's large-scale targeting of medical personnel and journalists. But the border is the border, and soldiers do defend it.

As far as I can tell about that specific clip of a sniper, while it's a pretty horrible video, there does appear to be important context. For one, that person wasn't killed (which is unclear from the video). For another, it appears he was trying to plant a bomb on the border. (I don't know for sure that's true - I just tried to search for a bit of context online about it and that's what I found.)

But it's just not true that there is a large scale IDF campaign of shooting random civilians. Yes, the IDF gets things wrong, and yes, they do zealously protect the border. But that's a very different thing than what you're alleging, and despite the fairly horrible video, it's not evidence of what you claim. I can find thousands of videos of US soldiers doing horrible things, that doesn't mean the US is using its army to commit terrorism and war crimes.

> While I may not fully endorse Hamas, I hesitate to label it as a terrorist organization without further examination.

Ok let me disagree with you strongly here. In what sense is Hamas not a terrorist organization?

On October 7th, Hamas entered into Israel and killed 1400 people, and took 200 people hostages. Most of those were civilians. They raped and tortured people, did absolutely horrendous deeds. In what way does this not fit your definition of a terrorist organization?

Have you seen some of the stuff they did on October 7th? It is absolutely horrible, the worst crimes imaginable. If you have not, I urge you to look into it if you want to actually understand what Israelis feel they are up against. (Though don't watch if you don't want these kinds of horrible images burned into your brain forever).

Btw, if we're already talking about international recognition, Hamas is designated as a terrorist group by the US, UK and Canada. (And iirc, not by the UN, which again leaves many Israelis questioning the UN.)

Why? They don't care. They are mostly dictatorships, and it seems to me that it's good for the dictators if the conflict continues, so they can use Israel as something external to try to keep the people angry at (lower risk for revolution).

You don't understand Israel at all. It would be surprising if they didn't supply power.

Israel doesn't hate Gazans, they just want Gazans to stop attacking them. They pulled out of Gaza to give them less of a reason to hate Israel, but that didn't work.

Israel has little interest in giving them a country, it is true. But not because they want to deny them a county but because they don't think it will help. After all pulling out of Gaza did not help - in fact it made it worse.

Israel doesn't care about the UN because the UN is utterly obsessed with Israel, and essentially they don't consider the UN legitimate in this regard because of that obsession. Most of the world considers the UN a joke for exactly this reason (plus things like allowing known human right abusing countries to chair human rights commissions).

I don't really understand that line of reasoning, doesn't Israel owe its existence to the UN security council resolution in 1948?

Well, yes.

Here's how. People who make arguments for "good Palestinians unrelated to Hamas" and for "ceasefire", against "humanitarian disaster" all very obviously blame Israel for harming those "good Palestinians" and not stopping firing etc. Which definitely helps Hamas and doesn't Help any Palestinians, nor Israelis.

For the most part it's just stupidity of people uninvolved with the conflict who found it easy to believe a story of oppression by a superior military / economical power. This is also what pushes the idea of "Hamas not representing Palestinians". While, unfortunately, it does. But every Western society rejects this grim reality. Because admitting it would lead to asking very inconvenient questions, revision of previously established policies... basically, admitting to being stupid and being manipulated by some "Nigerian prince".

Here's one example. Every political / military organization which wants to kill all Jews and establish Palestine "from the river to the sea" tries to legitimize this claim by appealing to UN's charter that warrants every nation the right to rule over themselves. In the case with Israel, there's what appears to be a conflicting resolution from the UN legitimizing Israeli state. While UN finds time to condemn Israel on a monthly basis, it could never find time to resolve this dispute. They'd have to go back and revisit this claim about every nation being able to rule themselves, amend it with some cases where that doesn't apply... but they are happy to sit on their hands, and the conflict keeps going. UNRWA is the same story: bad decision that keeps fueling the hatred, but UN will never admit they did something stupid, and will never reverse their decisions.

So, back to blaming humanitarian disaster on Israel: Israel is as much responsible for the humanitarian disaster as the world's oceans are responsible for the rising sea level. Israel is playing its hand the best they can. But, they aren't the reason civilians are dying in Gaza. No more than gravity or the engineers who designed fighter jets.

So, why is it surprising that Israel doesn't want to hear itself blamed for something that had no influence over? They are facing the same media device that's used by Americans who claim that "blue lives matter" -- a superficially innocent claim that, out of context could just mean that someone wants to support the police doing quite dangerous job, while, in reality, it's a reactionary stance that's meant to counteract the other sentiment: "black lives matter", instead of being used to actually help the police.

People behind the tag of "SavePalestine" don't really want to save Palestine. They are manipulating public sentiment to be against Israel. Had they really want to save Palestine, they'd be appealing to the UN to cancel UNRWA, to work with Israel in declaring Gaza a "failed state", preventing Gaza from having its own government, military, courts etc. instead having some form of international government, blue helmets etc. take control for the next 3-5 decades at least.

Definitely. It has settled 1/10th of its civilian population in an occupied territory, something that is for obvious reasons forbidden by the Geneva Convention. It declared undivided sovereignty on Jerusalem, has annexed the Golan Heights. It has closed almost 2 million people in a total embargo- nothing goes through the land and sea borders or the airspace of Gaza without the approval of Israel, be it people or goods- this means that the entire region is close to the collapse. In the recent border protest (which took place inside Gaza's border) Israel has fired live ammo on protesters day after day, killing 168, wounding 17 thousand! The UN General Assembly passed a condemnation resolution that was voted against only by Israel, the US, Australia, and a few tiny atolls of the Pacific. Every other nation in the world condemned Israel or (cowardly) abstained. Among those who voted to condemn Israel are Switzerland, Ireland, Japan, France, Finland, Norway, Belgium, Spain and Portugal.

> as do many countries

No other country that we consider civilised, no.

> this is literally what every country does though - US citizens have rights in the US, and everyone else doesn't.

Here I'm not sure whether you don't understand or just pretend not to. It's not that non-citizens don't have political rights inside Israel. It's that Israel is applying its law and jurisdiction outside its borders- so on Israeli and Palestinians alike- but only the former have political and civil rights. It's almost a clever technicality: Israel is not an apartheid state, it's just that, in the Occupied Territories, the State is wherever the Israelis are. The others, even if they happen to live only a few hundred metres away, have no rights.

> Hell, I'd rather live in a world in which the fact that I am Jewish doesn't mean that I have to protect myself from other people

The precondition to not have to protect yourself from other people is to be in peace with your neighbours. Tit-for-tats, or imposing your dominance, don't work (unless you want to just exterminate your enemy- which today is not an option). Israel was born with the original sin of seizing half of the country from their original inhabitants. We can't and don't want to go back on this, but Israel has to find a firm moral rule, define its own borders once and for all in agreement with what was established (at least the 1967 borders) and start building a cooperation with Palestinians. The issue with Israel is that it lives in a conflict of interest: on one hand, it wants not to be attacked; on the other hand, it's more than happy of acquiring new territory, which is only possible if the borders are ill-defined and through the cycles of provocation, violence and retaliation.

No, they do not. There are still less full aid trucks even after the murder of the World kitchen volunteers massively increased international pressure on Israel to let aid in.

Northern Gaza is now in full blown famine as defined by top US officials that define famine, with southern Gaza on the brink of famine, as all farming infastructure inside gaza gas has now been destroyed. They need drastically more full trucks than the the 500/day that was the norm before the war started, not drastically fewer.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/un-aid-coordinator-says-israel...

The reason students are asking their schools to divest from Israel but not from Hamas is because no western schools are funding Hamas or corporations that sell weapons to Hamas. You want protest camps set up to demand schools keep not doing that?

> the UN just updated its casualty statistics

I just looked them up (https://www.ochaopt.org/). 34,904+ killed, 70,000 homes destroyed, and 1.7 million people displaced in Gaza. I agree Hamas is probably worse than the Israeli government in some sort of doctrinal or deontological sense, but in terms of actual atrocities committed, it is not even close at this point.

This is one aspect of the whole conflict that has always seriously irked me.

The West effectively treats Israel as if it were the legal guardian of the Palestinians: Israel controls the entire territory, controls the tax revenue, population registry, borders, airspace, energy and water supply, can precisely restrict what (is allowed to) go in and out, can construct or demolish buildings at will, can arrest people at will, or even shoot them, can arbitrarily set the rules for court proceedings, etc. Western and neighbor countries fully support this view, to the point where, if Palestinians import or export goods into their own territories without Israel's authorisation, this is called "smuggling".

Yet at the same time, Israel seems to have no obligation to actually consider or represent the interests of the Palestinians: They are not allowed to vote in Israeli elections; they don't have any representation in the Knesset; laws can be passed that arbitrarily disadvantage them without loss of democratic status; Israeli politicians openly call the Palestinians "our bitter enemies".

In any situation where any individual person were the legal guardian of another person and at the same time called them "their bitter enemy", we'd be deeply alarmed and suspect an abusive relationship. Yet in the case of Israel and the Palestinians, that's "how things are supposed to be" and everyone who tries to change that status quo is the problem.

This feels extremely wrong to me.

(The UN is clearer here: They give Israel the specific legal role of "occupation force" and point to various obligations towards the occupied population that come with that role. However, the western countries somehow both deny that any occupation even takes place and demand that Israel must continue to have full control over the territories - which is contradictory in itself)

My impression was that the Palestinian issue was not at all at the heart of anyone's objectives, that some outside powers mentioned it in passing, and that Israel said nothing about it. I read that the Palestinians were very concerned about being abandoned by the world (they already see it that way, but thought the deal would be the final nail), and after the attacks I read that Hamas said that was an impetus for the attack.

> Hamas uses civilians as protective shields, hides under hospitals etc. to generate outrage. And you can see it working pretty well. Or shooting rockets from the rooftops of civilian's houses. I don't envy Israel: either shoot civilians or loose your own in rocket attacks.

That's Israel's argument and I expect it's at least somewhat true, but it's one of those things repeated often but that I haven't seen much factual support for. I don't expect much factual support: Who has access to Hamas planning, witnesses enough attacks, etc. to provide some objective verification? So that doesn't make it true or false, but I still have questions: In densely-populated Gaza, does Hamas have a non-civilian place from which to operate? And Hamas is an insurgency; they can't operate openly (have bases, open formations, etc.) - they would just be target practice for the Israeli bombs. I'd like to see a military expert talk about it.

Israeli partisans like to frame the issue with the last sentence quoted, but they have many other options of kind and degree, and they've had other options for many years. Israel has chosen in the recent past (~ last 20 years) indefinite low-level warfare, which is a self-defeating choice.

I'm mostly objecting to these points. I don't think they represent Israel's real position and needs well, but undermine it.

> Talking about history, I don't understand the whole fuzz about this anyway. Jews have been there for thousands of years.

I'm not sure what fuzz you're referring to here?

Length of tenure doesn't entitle anyone to real estate or the world would be really screwed up: every square meter has had many occupants, especially the Holy Land. It is a popular way aggressors justify themselves - 'it is our ancestral land!' Putin, for example, uses that for Ukraine.

Based on what? What do you think rockets that Hamas fires at Israel are made for? Fireworks or something?

I witnessed two of my coworkers die because of a Palestinian suicide bomber (whom I also marginally knew) and a bunch of people wounded. Another time an IED went off in the garbage bin not far from the bus stop I had to get off. Luckily, nobody was harmed.

Palestinians are getting more military aid, and it's becoming more sophisticated and hard to counter. Israel doesn't have a good outcome for this Gazan flair-up. Everything they do will suck for them. Ceasefire: in the short term, more Israelis die, but it will also be seeing as them caving in to Hamas. It will embolden and encourage the other side to do more of this.

Going in and killing as many of Hamas members as they can will restore the status quo for a few years. But Hamas v2, or Fatah, or PIJ or w/e new thing will inevitably take place of present day Hamas, because killing Hamas doesn't solve the problem -- and here it's important to loop back to the fact that Hamas does represent Palestinians. They aren't an oddball. They are the natural result of Gazans, and especially the refugees from Gaza wanting a rematch.

The only way this problem can be solved is if UN initiates and enough countries follow through with the plan of dismantling all Gazan local authorities, while replacing them by international temporary ones. Gazan population today cannot be trusted to create a government, police force or courts that will not do the same thing Hamas is doing now. Just like Japan or Germany after WW2 they need an external supervisor to make them rebuild and rejoin the world community.

But, UN will never as much as even discuss such a program. And the cycle will continue.

> UNRWA

Your Wiki reading is very selective. Also, your understanding of how refugees interact with the local authorities is based on fairy-tales. Any refugee in order to be given this status needs to show that their life is in danger or something like that. Conflicts are eventually resolved, and you cannot make claims about your life being in danger a decade ago. That just won't be enough to get you a refugee status. Of course you cannot inherit it from parents... unless you are under UNRWA umbrella.

What happens to someone who fails to prove they are eligible for this status? -- expulsion or jail. In European countries it would be difficult to get rid of someone once they are there. So, they might be staying in a camp for years (my wife volunteered in one such camp on Lesbos). But if you are in a less "welcoming" country they might just bring you to the border and leave you there.

Similarly, it's a fairy-tale that UN decisions "can't make anyone stateless". It's right in front of you, couple million people in and around Israel. But you chose to "believe"...

But it's not limited to this situation with Israel. Take for example the Hague convention on adoptions. All signatories are required to not adopt children from another country-signatory w/o that country's permit. But, not all countries grant citizenship at birth. If you are born in such a country and nobody knows anything about your parents -- tough luck. There are plenty of UN-affiliated bodies who beat themselves on the chest and declare that no child should be stateless, and yet they are in the millions.

I know this because we adopted, and I know how the system is broken in many ways also because of the lack of insight on the part of people writing these conventions.

> right of return

It doesn't matter that it was created after some time. It was created before the window of opportunity closed. That's enough. The fact that you didn't know anything about, while this is one of the key problems in Israel-Palestinian conflict only emphasizes how much you are not competent to discuss it.

Not really. The territory abandoned was systematically kept down to the point where any kind of improvement was destroyed again. And much more is being destroyed right now. What do you think all these bombings will do short of just creating the next 20 years of personnel supply for Hamas?

> Abandoned the territory settled?

No, it wasn't just abandoned. The houses that were there were gone and the houses that were built were demolished. So the land was barren. That's not giving the other party a chance, that's the kind of scorched earth tactics that make things worse.

> Imagine if Hamas controlled both Gaza and the West Bank? Israel would be destroyed.

Yes, Hamas is a problem, we are in agreement on that. But so is the Israeli government, the problem is to get them both to back down from their violence-begets-more-violence cycle. And it looks like things are going to get a lot worse rather than better. So you can expect many more Israeli lives to be lost as well as many more Palestinian lives.

> UN peacekeeping is bullshit. What country is going to trust the UN to guarantee it's security. There is UN peacekeeping in Lebanon where attacks against Israel are and were coming from, they do zilch. The history of UN peacekeepers in the region is that at any hint of violence they move away.

I have had family members in Unifil deployments and that's not what I hear. Both sides criticize the UN peacekeepers as being on the side of their enemy, that's usually a good sign.

> On the Israeli side nobody will trust the Palestinians over anything.

Makes you wonder why there isn't a solution possible. But: with the dubious ways in which Hamas was financed there may be enough blame to go around for everybody.

> There's also a minority that believes the entire land belongs to Israel and screw the Palestinians.

Unfortunately that minority has a disproportionate effect on Israeli politics. It should be obvious that this is one of the root causes of this ongoing conflict.

> On the Palestinian side (IMO) there's a majority that is unwilling to take any settlement other than all the Jews should leave the middle east. There's fractures and nobody that represents all of them that can agree and/or enforce any agreement. So here we are.

I'm missing the proxy war that the Arab world has been fighting against Israel using the Palestinians in just as much a cynical way as the right wing in Israel has been using them to keep the conflict alive as much as possible.

I wish I could agree, but foreign aid is being forced to leave Gaza as a result of the IDF's actions: https://www.inquirer.com/news/nation-world/israel-strike-kil...

> I don't see it as having overtaken the response towards an attack towards Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine

The violent Islamic expansion was not a war between countries. Is Islam a country? It was a rampage for land, pure and simple [1]

> Any mentally sane human would have rejected that "resolution", which is/was non-binding anyway

Hear, hear, now hardly a day passes without another UN resolution against Israel, sponsored by the same elements, who then accuse Israel of not complying with the resolutions. If the resolutions are non-binding, why do they keep accusing Israel of not heeding them? On the other hand, do we get to pick and choose which resolutions we will heed or not?

> Why are you saying "accused" when Israel has a documented track record of ignoring international law

International law should be followed by all, at all times. The Palestinians and their backers have no moral high ground here, not at all.

> Again, that's a complete lie and I have linked you a detailed documentary[0] which exposes that narrative as a fabrication of the israeli hasbara ministry

Was Egypt not massing troops in preparation for an attack on Israel? Or are we living in separate universes.

> It's truly fascinating how you, as a black man, are so hellbent on defending an apartheid ethno-state with such cold-blooded dishonesty.

You are avoiding my question: In your opinion, is the conflict not be resolvable until Israel is obliterated? And, what does the fact that I'm black have to do with anything?

> Any sensible human wants to see an end to apartheid and occupation first. The call for a ceasefire has nothing to do with that,

Oh, so you don't want a proper solution for now. You just you want a ceasefire that gives Hamas a reprieve to continue to build up their capacity to massacre Israeli civilians again.

> That's Israel you are talking about and this description perfectly describes Israel's genocidal behavior

Again, you don't answer my question: How do you live with, or negotiate, with an adversary who is only seeking your total destruction? What exactly does Hamas want again?

> I've used it precisely 2 times, how is that many times? You guys can't just stick to debating facts without dishonestly accusing others of antisemitism because you know that your arguments are all based on lies and distortions.

It is you who cannot stick to the argument without resorting to name calling and ad-hominem attacks. You have called me a liar, cold-blooded, not mentally sane, and the like.

[1] https://medium.com/@mehrdadyousefi_/was-muslim-conquest-of-p...

Sounds good. When are we putting Hamas and other militant groups going to the ICC (because their local justice systems are so unable to promote justice)?

>We need also to stop tolerating to be labelled as "anti-semitic behaviour" to bona fide criticizing Israel for breaking repeatedly a lot of international laws about human rights, each three years, and for treating palestinian people as human cockroaches.

Seems fair to hold Israel to any standard every other country is held to. Do it!

>In the last years USA and Europe were repeatedly urged to pay with trucks full of money the last "Gaza reconstruction". We paid for rebuilding exactly the same UN schools and hospitals that Israel bombed meticulously the last year, in some cases even with UN workers inside.

If Israel meticulously bombed the schools and hospitals, would any be standing? They have a lot of bombs and the ability to target fairly precisely for a military- isn't it weird so many hospitals and schools are undamaged? The Israeli military are either incompetent or didn't meticulously target these places.

>with the silliest excuses. What would an unsilly reason look like? Indiscriminate attacks on civilians doesn't seem to fulfill your requirements.

>There is also the problem that Israel controls the economy of Gaza, so there is not any guarantee that the money for palestinians will not be used instead in buying new bombs to replace that were dropped.

I didn't know Israel controls all money going in to Gaza. I know they collect tax money on behalf of the PLO and monitor, along with Egypt, all good coming in (excluding those that are smuggled in of course). It's worth looking into how Israel's gets military aid- a coupon from the US government. They aren't stealing other people's money and spending it. Even the tax money they're withholding from the PLO is sitting in accounts, not being spent.

Haha. No. The UN decided to split Palestine in two states, giving half of it to the Jews. Of course the Jews had everything to gain from this partition and the Palestinians everything to lose, since they were the sole owners of the place. Of course they rejected the partition and there was a war, but the Palestinians have been actively expelled by the Israeli army. In fact, 200 thousand of them had already fled their villages before Israel's declaration of independence, to escape from violence- episodes like that of Deir Yassin, where a Jewish commando massacred the inhabitants of a Palestinian village- women and children included-, throwing grenades inside the houses. It was a proper ethnic cleansing operation.

> Israel didn't really do anything wrong

No, as far as ethnic cleansing goes, Israel didn't do anything wrong.

> At the end of the day, the right of return is something that simply can't be granted, not if Israel wants to remain a Jewish country

I agree with this. However, I also think that the right of return is mostly aspirational, and given good will on Israel's part, the issue could be just ignored long enough until it's not an issue anymore. By good will on Israel's part, I mean: establish a border once and for all (on the green line), abandon all settlements beyond that border, either renounce completely to Jerusalem east or share the undivided capital with a Palestinian state, completely remove the blockade of Gaza (and create a wide corridor between Gaza and the West Bank). Stop opposing the creation of a Palestinian state, and contribute to it with aids and reparations (that would make up for the right of return).

You'll say: this is a lot to ask from Israel. And it is, because Israel is currently enjoying great profits from its illegal and immoral actions, and there will be no end to the conflict until it decides to abide to international law and moral standards.