Are you kidding me, man? Please, do not respond to this conversation until you have an inclination as to the meanings of the words ‘just’ and/or ‘moral.’ Please.

Sorry, but that’s a fact. So let’s just call the “displaced” person argument a draw.

When borders change, people move. More than 12,000,000 moved when Pakistan and India received independence. More than 3,000,000 ethnic Germans had to move after 1945. Those 400,000 Arabs who left Israel are a drop in the bucket of the postwar world. Get over it and move on. Everyone else has.

(1) The Ayrabs are not collectively seeking the restoration of Ayrab control to what is now Israel. In fact, it is the Palestinians who lived there–continue to live there–and whose properties were stolen and existence denied, and who are still alive, that have legitimate contemporary (not historical) claims to Palestinian land and more specifically to the properties of which they were dispossessed. Most Ayrabs, contrary to what you’ve implied by putting them on the same level as the early Zionist immigrants, do not advocate the expulsion of the entire Jewish population of Israel so that they can ‘win the land back.’ The popular view is to have one state under which all inhabitants, regardless of race and religion, coexist and live with equal rights. This is not the same as the early Zionist aspirations, which explicitly included designs to expel the native population. A poll by Haaretz earlier this year showed that over 60% of the Israeli population today favors giving incentives to the Arabs in its borders to leave the state. Just last week Avigdor Lieberman, an expulsion advocate, was integrated into the supposedly “moderate” and “peace-loving” Kadima party. At least on the Palestinian side, expulsion is not given the legitimacy it has in Israel, either in history or in contemporary times.

(2) The contemporary definition of Ayrab is not defined racially or ethnically, but linguistically, though there is some overlap and some confusion here and there. The ‘authentic’ Ayrabs came from Yemen and the Ayrabian Peninsula. Everybody else has questionable lineage–I suppose along the same lines as the Ashekenazi European Jews–but they call themselves Ayrabs, and therefore are Ayrabs. You are not within your rights to deny them this identity, unless you also concede that Ashkenazi’s are not actually ethnically Jewish. This would be absurd, but maybe acceptable by your logic. The implications are devestating for your argument.

(3) Yes, the Middle East is indeed the home of many peoples, religions, and cultures. It is unfortunate that the vast majority of every minority you pointed out though identifies as Ayrab, was opposed to the creation of Israel, and today continue to advocate the rights of dispossessed Palestinians. Unless you believe that the Ayrabs have brutally conquered and forcibly converted the hearts and minds of these mindless minorities to the Ayrab cause.

Read it again if you don’t get it.

It is the ARABS who have no historical claims to the Levant. It is THEY who came from the desert and laid waste to and destroyed the existing high civilizations of the area, from Persia to Egypt. It is they who imposed their alien “religion” by force.

The historical Middle East is the home of many peoples, many religions, and many cultures. They are still there, even after centuries of oppression and violence from their Islamic rulers. As the Copts. Ask the Druze. As the Assyrian Christians.

Yes, but what about the rights of the people of Israel?