This split-personality theme has been infamously adopted by Benny Morris who pored over hundreds of declassified Israeli files. Morris confirmed in minute detail that, in 1948, Israeli invasion forces committed massacres, expelled Palestinians, destroyed their villages, looted their property, burnt their crops, poisoned their wells and shot on the spot any Palestinian who tried to return to his home. Referring to the remaining minority, Morris then solemnly declared that he was sorry that Ben Gurion “did not finish the job”

Both Alex Stein and Menny Morris escape from the fact, slowly seeping into the Western conscience, that Palestinians were - and are today - subject to the most massive, comprehensive, meticulously planned and executed and continuous ethnic cleansing operation in modern history. This has long been denied by Israeli historians. A notable exception is a brave and honest Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe.

The sensation created by Benny Morris’s revelation al-Nakba, grudgingly accepted by some Jews, is a stark measure of how the West was taken in by the Zionist propaganda for several decades. The Palestinians do not know to laugh or cry. For the ‘revelations’ are only some of what they have been saying all along since 1948. Hundreds of thousands of refugees gave graphic details of their plight but these were dismissed by the Zionist Europeans as “a figment of oriental imagination”, until an Israeli historian found damning evidence in Israeli files.

Facts have a way of surfacing. The facts, documented on maps and records, show that in 1948 Israelis depopulated the Palestinian inhabitants of 675 towns and villages, that their land represents 93% of Israel’s area, that half of all the refugees have been expelled in the last six weeks of the British Mandate, before the state of Israel was declared and before any Arab regular soldier set foot on Palestine to save its people from the invasion of Jewish European immigrants who had just waded into their shores to build Israel on the ruins of Palestine.

What is more natural than a person returning to his home? If Stein does not believe this is “sacred”, he has to ask 6 million Palestinian refugees (two thirds of all Palestinians) why are they still determined to fight for their right to return over a period of 6 decades through three generations and many wars? That the Right of Return for Palestinians is affirmed by the UN more than 130 times is enough to put this matter to rest. No need to spill more ink on that score

If defeated on both counts, Zionists usually resort to their last defense: that the Right of Return is not possible to implement.

This is what the international community insisted upon, sometimes using military forces, in implementing the return of refugees to Bosnia, Kosovo, Burundi, cambodia, East Timor, georgia, Guatemala, Mozambique, Ruwanda, South Africa, Tajisistan, Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan

This is also what the European Jews rightly got when they returned to their former homes (if they so wished), recovered their property in Europe and received massive amounts of compensation for their suffering during the second world war, without the benefit of a single UN resolution.

Thus the pretext that the return is not possible because of the influx of Jewish immigrants to Palestine to replace the expelled Palestinians is not a valid one, neither morally, legally or politically. But we are spared the argument on this point. Here we have yet another one of the misconceptions designed to mislead and misinform the Western public. It is not true that it is not possible physically to implement the Right of Return.

Palestine is the most documented among conflict-torn countries, certainly much more than Bosnia and Kosovo. We have complete UN-documented ownership records of every acre of land. Not a single Israeli Jew has an equivalent title deed after al-Nakba. We have detailed maps of what every acre was, what it is today and can visualize what it could / should be in the future.

We have a huge database of millions of Palestinians, where they come from in Palestine, and where they are residing today, their family structure and their ages. Ninety percent of them reside today within 100 km of their homes, 50% within 40 km and many can actually see their home on the opposite hill.

That is not all.

This small number of population, in addition to the army, use and control 85-88% of Israel’s area, which is the patrimony of 6 million Palestinian refugees. To take an example, all the rural Jews in the Southern District from Ashdod (Isdud) to Eilat (Umm Rashrash) are less in number that one refugee camp in Gaza. Their density is 6 persons per square km while that of Gaza population, the owners of this very land, is 6000 per square kilometer. These owners of the land are held captive by the occupier in a concentration camp called Gaza. The Russian immigrants who were absorbed in Israel in the nineties are equal in number to all registered refugees in Lebanon and Gaza. Imagine how much peace would be close at hand if the Palestinians returned instead of Russians imported..

It is truly amazing that Zionists publicly advocate a racist and immoral objective, namely ridding Palestine/Israel of its Palestinian inhabitants so that the Jewish immigrants would maintain their Jewish purity and majority?

What would Stein say if the English citizens in north London declare one day that if the number of Jews there, who immigrated from Spain, exceeds 20% they should be shipped to concentration camps (as in Gaza) or to Siberia? The irony is that, in Palestine, it is the ‘immigrants’ who call for the expulsion of the Palestinian natural inhabitants of the country as a dangerous “demographic threat”.

The writer is the general coordinator of the Right of Return Congress.