One intriguing might-have-been is to consider what would have hapened if there had been no war in 1948, and if the partition of Palestine had been accepted by all parties, with no flight/expulsion of refugees. Israel would have developed as a state more or less equally made up of Jews and Arabs, and, for all that, it would still have been a Jewish homeland. And I think most people who wish well for both peoples must profoundly wish that this had been what happened.

And yet the argument which is raised against any right of return by Palestinians to the land which they and their families fled is that this would imply the destruction of Israel, and of the Jewish homeland.