Hamas doesn't want to destroy Israel[Yahoo News].

[StupidMoniker]

Originally posted by tigermission1 WOW! Having a good fourth of the West Bank being settled illegally by Israelis is giving "nothing" away?

That is the status quo, so no it is not giving anything away. The Palestinians do not have that land, the settlers do. If anything, they are giving up some sort of right or claim to that land, an abstraction, not the land itself, which the Israelis already have. If that is your point of view, then the parcel of land I am sitting on really belongs to either some NA tribe, or Mexico.

What about the fact that some four million Palestinians will never be able to go back "home" again to what is now Israel? That counts for nothing in your book? It isn't enough that the Palestinians have been kicked out of their homes, put in refugee camps and scattered across the Arab (and Western) world after 1948 through today? Boy, please go back and learn your history to better understand what the Palestinians had to give up and concede

Four million Palestinians were not kicked out of their homes. Four million is the number they get when the use the special definition that only applies to PALESTINIAN REFUGEES which takes the standard definition of refugee (someone that was forced out of their home) and tacks on ALL OF THEIR DECENDENTS. Most of the true refugees are dead or will be dying in the next decade or so, as they left their homes during a war that took place around the end of WW2. The UN decided to create a special agency just to deal with Palestinian refugees, called the UNRWA . This agency was the one that made the decision to give refugee status to decendents of refugees, counter to the definition used by the UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency, as per their website). Really, less than 1 million people fled their homes, most because the incoming Arab armies told them to get out of the way, and many of them are gone. There is a reason that the average Palestinian "Refugee" is younger than the event which caused them to "flee their home". If you were not born in a country, you really can't expect the right to "return" to that country.

That doesn't even address the issue of the Jewish refugees that were forcibly expelled from the Arab nations and had all of their property confiscated. They were approximately equal in number to the total number of Palestinians who left Israel (not forcibly expelled, BTW, but told to leave in anticipation of a swift victory by a coalition of Arab states).They were generally just resettled in Israel, something that the Arab world should have done with the Palestinians about 50 years ago. The Palestinian refugees are forced to remain in camps by their Arab neighbors because they are a useful tool to portray Israel in a negative light.

Maybe I am not the one that needs the history lesson.