Avineri on responsibility

Until They Accept Responsibility - Shlomo Avineri

To this day, no book in Arabic has raised the question of whether the Arabs erred in rejecting the [1948] compromise UN partition plan.

It is for this reason that the Palestinians' customary comparison between the Nakba [Arabic: "catastrophe" referring to the establishment of Israel] and the Holocaust is so outrageous. Did the Jews of Germany and Europe declare war on Germany? Were the world's Jews offered a compromise that they rejected?

There will be no true compromise between Israel and the Palestinians without a readiness on their part to admit that they, too, are responsible for what happened to them in 1948.

(Ha'aretz)