In any war, and in lots of other situations, you get refugees fleeing their homes. When the troubles are over they mostly go home and try to pick to the pieces.

Whether there is or is not some radio broadcast advising them to go or not is completely irrelevant. They flee because they are frightened, with good reason. In the case of 1948 the massacre at Deir Yassin was quite a big factor in that.

When people aren't allowed to go back home because they are the wrong ethnic group, that's ethnic cleansing. And it is an evil thing to do, whoever does it.

The exiles have every moral right to go back to the places they were driven from, and to have their property restored, and their well being protected. That applies to both Palestinians and Jews, Bosnians, Serbs, Croatians, Albanians...

In the tragic circumstances of the real world, moral rights have to be set aside sometimes. It's impossible to untangle one set of injustices without creating fresh injustices.

But admitting the truth about injustice is always possible, and necessary. At least it's a start.

And when exiles are told that they are only exiles because of their free choice, that's a libel worthy of people like Milosevic, and the butchers of Srbenica.

I mentioned Deir Yassin up there. Here is a link to a page in the site of the PEACE Middle East Dialog Group about that, and here is a quote from the page which is worth pondering:

Each side in the Mid-East has its own history of horrors, and is all too eager to point the finger of blame at the other side. If we are ever to make peace then each side must first point the finger of blame at itself, come to terms with its own conscience, and apologize for the lost lives, the lost loved ones, the dread and the sorrow we have inflicted on each other.