These talks numb the mind, they go on and on, but I really did think that Abbas had backed off the “refugees” problem. This is a good article.
The number of Jews run out of Arab lands exceeds the number of Arabs who left, most voluntarily, their homes in Israel by a few hundred thousand. Beyond that in terms of monetary damages, the loss to the Jews, including industries and large farm holdings, many businesses,expansive homes and properties, runs into into several billions whereas the Arabs’losses are only a fraction of that. Let them pay the difference in compensation and we can call it square.
The Jews, having then very limited resources, absorbed their refugees and set them on their feet. The Arabs, awash in so much money that they build skyscrapers on top of luxurious skyscrapers just let their people rot in camps living on handouts from the UN, they don’t even support their own.
From JFK through Clinton, no US president had the guts to tell the Arabs straight out that their refugees are not returning into Israel. Bush did that and despite the ill-informed criticism of Obama that he did nothing, that’s the sort of nitty-gritty thing you had to do for meaningful negotiations, not the headline-grabbing but useless tete-a-tetes with Arafat in the White House that Clinton used to stage. In the end all Israel got out of that was a massive terror campaign triggered in no small part because of Clinton pussyfooting around this issue, which Arafat used a pretext to launch his intifada.
