Questions of Change

The traffic lights change from red to amber,

But does that mean go, or wait for the green?

Take care is the advice, yet what does that mean?

Most of the world’s still on halt remember.

Vaccines are driven down the western road

Where there’s vaults of cash to pay for each dose.

The logistics, though, don’t even come close

To the poor who live in far off abroad.

As if a pandemic isn’t sad enough,

While many still die fighting for breath,

Israeli planes are delivering death

Freely to Palestine. Is that bad enough?

Vaccines or munitions, which will we make?

As lights change, which road will we take?

D. A.

 Oxfam warned today that it cannot reach around 450,000 or more people in Gaza because of fighting and aerial bombardment. The destruction and indiscriminate threat to life makes any emergency aid, at the moment, impossible to mount. 

Many water wells and pumping stations have been damaged by Israel’s bombardments. These facilities are the only way for people living in Gaza to get clean water. 40 percent of Gaza water supplies have been affected. 

People are struggling to secure food, water, and medicines. Many have been forced to spend their savings or are trying to sell assets. 

Many who have lost their homes have been forced into temporary shelters.

As much as 200,000 hectares of agricultural land has been bombed or is currently inaccessible to farmers because of the danger of attack. Transport and movement around Gaza is not only unsafe but now made highly difficult because of the bomb damage to roads and debris from destroyed buildings. Some routes are blocked entirely. Oxfam warns that it could take weeks to start meaningful repairs and organise some recovery and resumption of normality for people in Gaza, even if a ceasefire was declared today.   

Shane Stevenson, Oxfam Country Director for the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, said, “The scale of suffering is immense yet we cannot respond properly. Until the security situation improves things will quickly deteriorate further. The aerial assaults have taken lives and any sense of safety, but they are also taking away people’s options to cope – to buy food and supplies, and to go about their lives.  Families are telling us that they are too scared to leave their homes for food and some have already run out of drinking water. The people of Gaza are psychologically exhausted and fearful and exposed. They need peace now in order to pick up the broken pieces of their lives.” 

Stevenson continued, “Gaza is also in the midst of coping with the Covid pandemic. People need access to water and medicines and hospitals to halt the virus spread and help nurse sufferers to recovery. Adding conflict on top of Covid feels like a recipe for disaster.”

Nearly half a million people out of reach in Gaza – Oxfam – occupied Palestinian territory | ReliefWeb

 The civil service is one of the largest employers in the country, with a workforce of about 445,000 people across the UK. The class composition of the senior ranks of the civil service has barely changed since 1967, research reveals. Within the civil service, the higher you progress, the less likely you are to find people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

 just 12% of senior Treasury staff coming from low socio-economic backgrounds. Overall, only 18% of the 6,000-strong cohort of senior civil servants come from disadvantaged backgrounds, while 25% of this group was independently educated.

 In order to be successful, the research notes, civil servants need to master this behavioural code. It involves using an RP accent (received pronunciation, the middle class accent of southern England); adopting an “emotionally detached and understated self-presentation”; and displaying “an intellectual approach to culture and politics that prizes the display of in-depth knowledge for its own sake (and not directly related to work)”. 

“Those from low socio-economic backgrounds find this code alienating and intimidating but one which they must assimilate in order to succeed,” concludes the report.

 The path to senior positions is like a labyrinth: in theory there is a route to the centre for everyone but it is largely hidden. Although formal promotion protocols are sensitive to issues of diversity and inclusion, interviewees said mastery of a series of “unwritten rules” provided the most effective map through the labyrinth.

Sam Friedman, the report’s author and incoming professor of sociology at the LSE explained, “Strikingly it is those from privileged backgrounds who hold the upper hand in unpicking these hidden rules.”

 In 1967,  analysis showed the proportion of senior civil servants from lower socio-economic backgrounds was higher than it is today (19% in 1967, compared with 18% today).

Class of senior civil servants has barely changed since 1967, report reveals | Civil service | The Guardian

  Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) chief Jan Egeland, said, “We are failing to protect the world’s most vulnerable people from conflict and disasters.”

A person was forced to flee their home inside their own country every single SECOND last year. The number of people living in internal displacement is at a record high.

The total number of people living in internal displacement (IDPs) around the world is a record 55 million, that is double the roughly 26 million people who have fled across borders as refugees.

The report found that three-quarters of the people who fled internally last year were victims of natural disasters, in particular ones related to extreme weather. Intense cyclones, monsoon rains and floods hit highly exposed and densely populated areas in Asia and the Pacific, while the Atlantic hurricane season “was the most active on record,” it pointed out. “Extended rainy seasons across the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa uprooted millions more.” Experts say climate change is increasing the intensity and frequency of such extreme weather events.

A convergence of conflicts and natural disasters was making the problem worse, with 95 percent of last year’s new conflict displacements occurring in countries vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

“Climate change and the overexploitation of natural resources may aggravate instability and conflict, which in turn may trigger displacement.”

In addition, nearly 10 million of those newly displaced last year were fleeing conflicts and violence, the report said. The majority were in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria and Ethiopia. Escalating violence and the expansion of armed groups in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Burkina Faso had fuelled some of the world’s fastest growing displacement crises last year.

Unlike disaster-driven displacement, which is usually short-lived as people return to rebuild damaged or destroyed homes once the storms have passed, conflict-fuelled displacement can last years. All but seven million of the 55 million people living in internal displacement at the end of last year had fled conflict.

Number of IDPs in the world reaches record high of 55m | Humanitarian Crises News | Al Jazeera

“There shall be no buying and selling of the earth, nor of the fruits thereof…The earth is to be planted, and the fruits reaped and carried into barns and store-houses, by the assistance of every family. And if any man or family want corn or-other provision they may go to the store-houses and fetch without money. If they want a horse to ride, go into the fields in summer, or to the common stables in winter, and receive one from the keepers; and when your journey is performed, bring him where you had him, without money. If any want food or victuals, they may either go to the butchers’ shops, and receive what they want without money; or else go to the flocks of sheep or herds of cattle, and take and kill what meat is needful for their families, without buying and selling. And the reason why all the riches of the earth are a common stock is this, because the earth, and the labours thereupon, are managed by common assistance of every family, without buying and selling; as is shewn how more largely in the office of overseers for trades and the law for store-houses…Store-houses shall be built and appointed in all places, and be the common stock.

There shall be store-houses in all places, both in the country and in cities, to which all the fruits of the earth, and other works made by tradesmen, shall be brought, and from thence delivered out again to particular families, and to everyone as they want for their use; or else to be transported by ship to other lands, to exchange for those things which our land will not or does not afford.

For all the labours of husbandmen and tradesmen within the land, or by navigation to or from other lands, shall be all upon the common stock. And as every one works to advance the common stock, so every one shall have a free use of any commodity in the store-house, for his pleasure and comfortable livelihood without buying and selling or restraint from any…The store-houses shall be every man’s substance, and not any one’s.” – Gerrard Winstanley

The World Socialist Movement re-affirms that all peoples should seek their emancipation, not as members of nations or religions or ethnic groups, but as human beings, as members of the human race. They should unite to abolish the division of the world into so-called nation-states and to establish a World Co-operative Commonwealth in which we will all be free and equal members – citizens of the world, not subjects of nation-states.

As an organisation which campaigns exclusively for socialism (as we understand it of course) we are in a unique position to know how people react to the word. Many more people think that Russia was socialist than agree with our definition of socialism.



Many think that we should therefore give up the word and find some other term to describe our aim.

Don’t think that this hasn’t occurred to us.

 Various other terms have been suggested—”world co-operative commonwealth”, “world of free access“. Others, outside our ranks, have come up with “economic democracy”, “self-managed society”, “free society”.



Our experience is that when people first hear us saying we stand for socialism, most do indeed take us to be standing for “state ownership and rule by a socialist party” (a far broader concept than what existed in Russia)

However, when we explain what we do stand for, quite a number say “oh, you mean true socialism” or “pure communism”. Significantly, those who have experimented with other terms are often met with the same reaction.



This reflects the fact that, despite the former regime in Russia dragging the name of socialism through the mud by associating it with dictatorship, secret police, gulags and the rest, to many people the word “socialism” still retains an association with maybe vague ideas of social justice, equality, democracy, community and production for use not profit. In other words, despite Russia, socialism still has an underlying positive image for many people.

Besides, we are part of an unbroken tradition going back to those who first used the word and which has retained the original meaning they gave to it despite and in face of Russia and Labour and similar governments. Why should we surrender the word, especially as Russia has failed and Labour-type parties are now openly pro-capitalist?

The field is now free for us to assert the word’s original meaning. A society where the means of production belong to everybody and run by democratic councils, that’s socialism. With common ownership, nobody or no institution exercises exclusive ownership rights over resources; it is, in effect a condition of “no ownership”. Further, with common ownership, what is produced, as well as the means to produce it, is commonly owned, so that it does not need to be sold. It, too, is simply there, to be distributed to where it is needed, whether this be another workplace for further transformation into a finished product or a distribution centre to which people can come and take what they need. Common ownership means the disappearance of buying and selling and so also money, markets, banks, wages, profits and the rest.



To make decisions—i.e., to exercise democratic control—the members of society need to set in place procedures which allow every member of society the chance to have an equal say in the way things are run. Although this can be envisaged as involving “direct democracy” in neighbourhoods and workplaces, for wider decisions it would also have to involve “indirect” democracy via elected delegates. If such procedures for exercising “democratic control” did not exist, then it would not be possible to talk about “common ownership” either, since, in that case, ownership of the means of production would be in the hands of those who did have the power to make the decisions about how to use productive resources. So, for us “common ownership” and “democratic control” of the means of production by all the people are one and the same thing; they are in the end just two ways of describing the same situation.



Having said this, we don’t make a fetish of the word, “socialism”. On occasions we are prepared to use some other term to express what we stand for since what is important is what we stand for and not what it is called. So we have and do use alternative terms such as “world co-operative commonwealth”.

 Six new audio uploads have been added to the website, as follows –

FAQ The Walking Dead – Paddy Shannon, 24th March, 2021

FAQ Re-imagining the Socialist Standard – Paddy Shannon, 21st April 2021

The Climate and Biodiversity Crisis – Glenn Morris, 23rd April 2021

FAQ Favourite films for socialists – Paddy Shannon, 28th April 2021

May Day – Bill Martin and Howard Moss, 30th April 2021

Is class consciousness a thing of the past? – Anton Pruden, 7th May 2021

 Just twenty companies are responsible for producing over half of all the single-use plastic waste in the world, fuelling the climate crisis and creating an environmental catastrophe. Eleven of the companies are based in Asia, four in Europe, three in North America, one in Latin America, and one in the Middle East. 

“Plastic pollution is one of the greatest and most critical threats facing our planet,” said Dr Andrew Forrest AO, chairman of the Minderoo Foundation. “The current outlook is set to get worse and we simply cannot allow these producers of fossil fuel-derived plastics to continue as they have done without check. With our oceans choking and plastic impacting our health, we need to see firm intervention from producers, governments and the world of finance to break the cycle of inaction.”

ExxonMobil is the greatest single-use plastic waste polluter in the world, contributing 5.9m tonnes to the global waste mountain, concludes the analysis by partners including Wood Mackenzie, the London School of Economics and Stockholm Environment Institute. The largest chemicals company in the world, Dow, which is based in the US, created 5.5m tonnes of plastic waste, while China’s oil and gas enterprise, Sinopec, created 5.3m tonnes.

The enormous plastic waste footprint of the top 20 global companies amounts to more than half of the 130m metric tonnes of single-use plastic thrown away in 2019. Single-use plastics are made almost exclusively from fossil fuels, driving the climate crisis, and because they are some of the hardest items to recycle, they end up creating global waste mountains. Just 10%-15% of single-use plastic is recycled globally each year.

“An environmental catastrophe beckons: much of the resulting single-use plastic waste will end up as pollution in developing countries with poor waste management systems,” the report’s authors said. “The projected rate of growth in the supply of these virgin polymers … will likely keep new, circular models of production and reuse ‘out of the money’ without regulatory stimulus.”

The plastic waste crisis grows every year. In the next five years, global capacity to produce virgin polymers for single-use plastics could grow by more than 30%.

The report said the plastics industry across the world had been allowed to operate with minimal regulation and limited transparency for decades. “These companies are the source of the single-use plastic crisis: their production of new ‘virgin’ polymers from oil, gas and coal feedstocks perpetuates the take-make-waste dynamic of the plastics economy.”

The report said this undermines the shift to a circular economy, including the production of recycled polymers from plastic waste, reusing plastic and using substitute materials. Just 2% of single-use plastic was made from recycled polymers in 2019.

Twenty firms produce 55% of world’s plastic waste, report reveals | Plastics | The Guardian

 A part of the Greenland ice sheet is on the brink of a tipping point, after which accelerated melting would become inevitable even if global heating was halted, according to new research. Rising temperatures caused by the climate crisis have already seen trillions of tonnes of Greenland’s ice pour into the ocean.

The new analysis detected the warning signals of a tipping point in a 140-year record of ice-sheet height and melting rates in the Jakobshavn basin, one of the five biggest basins in Greenland and the fastest-melting. The prime suspect for a surge in melting is a vicious circle in which melting reduces the height of the ice sheet, exposing it to the warmer air found at lower altitudes, which causes further melting. The study shows destabilisation of this ice sheet is under way.

It might already be at the point of no return, or be about to cross it in the coming decades, the scientists said.

“We’re at the brink, and every year with CO2 emissions continuing as usual exponentially increases the probability of crossing the tipping point,” said Niklas Boers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, who conducted the research with Martin Rypdal from the Arctic University of Norway. “It might have passed [the tipping point], but it’s not clear. However, our results suggest there will be substantially enhanced melting in the near future, which is worrying.” He continued, “We might be seeing something that is happening in many parts of Greenland, but we just don’t know for sure, because we don’t have the high-quality data for other parts.”

Large-scale melting of the Greenland ice sheet would have long-term global consequences, beyond rising sea levels. It could halt the Gulf Stream ocean current, with potential knock-on effects on the Amazon rainforest and tropical monsoons.

Greenland ice sheet on brink of major tipping point, says study | Glaciers | The Guardian

 This lengthy audio interview is well worth a close listening to.

https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/03/class-and-race-in-israel-palestine-with-emmanuel-farjoun/

At one time Arab workers in Israel we’re just a reserve army of labour. But now he says, in the meantime they have become as an essential, integral part of the Israeli economy without which it would collapse. That’s the main point he brings out in the interview and why he concludes that it gives them some leverage to demand full civil rights and how dependent on non-Jewish labour state of Israel is.

Most work that has no military significance is dominated by them not just construction but health, supermarkets, transport and other services (including even the prisons though these are run by Druze, a special minority, who also serve in the armed forces). And it’s not just cleaners but top managers; most doctors and hospital management are not Jews.

Farjoun’s argument is that this puts the non-Jews in a strong position not just in Israel but in the “Greater Israel” that already exists de facto as a state. He sees the way forward as the 50% non-Jewish subjects of the state of “Greater Israel” bringing pressure to get equal civil rights with its Jewish subjects, and that this will have some success because their of economic importance.

He is in effect saying that the non-Jews of Palestine (which includes Lesser Israel) should go for this rather than for an independent state; and this is what he expects will eventually happen however slowly as it’s what economic trends favour.

He also pointed out that half the Jewish population are in a sense themselves Arabs in that they came from Arab countries where they were Arabs — and Arab-speakers — whose religion happened to be Judaism just as for others it happened to be Christianity. Farjoun points out that in Israel you can’t tell the difference between a Jew and an Arab as they both look and dress the same.

The vital caveat is, however, it would amount to the Zionists having to abandon their ideology of Judaisizing Palestine. But the Boers in South Africa thought they could rule for ever but in the end were undermined by the capitalist economy. Farjoun expects the Zionists to be too.

 In 2004, Hamas leaders, Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz_al-Rantissi, offered to end armed resistance against Israel for a 10-year hudna (a truce) which could be re-newed indefinitely in exchange for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem leaving all other issue such as the important right for refugees to return for future generations to negotiate. Israel’s response was to assassinate Yassin and al-Rantisi. 

In his article Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and  professor of Journalism and Political Science, looks at the principles and practicalities for the return of the Palestinian diaspora.

 The American Jewish Committee (AJC) not only endorsed the Dayton agreement but urged that it be enforced by US troops. The 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended years of warfare between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, stated that “All refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin” and “to have restored to them property of which they were deprived in the course of hostilities.” 

Yet its  CEO, David Harris, has demanded that Palestinian refugees begin “anew” in “adopted lands.”  

In 2019, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – the US’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group – applauded Congress for imposing sanctions aimed at forcing the Syrian government to, among other things, permit “the safe, voluntary, and dignified return of Syrians displaced by the conflict”.

That same year, the Union for Reform Judaism, in justifying its support for reparations for Black Americans, approvingly cited a UN resolution that defines reparations as including the right to “return to one’s place of residence”.

Jewish leaders also endorse the rights of return and compensation for Jews expelled from Arab lands.

 In 2013, Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, claimed: “The world has long recognised the Palestinian refugee problem, but without recognising the other side of the story – the 850,000 Jewish refugees of Arab countries.” Arab Jews, he argued, deserve “equal rights and treatment under international law”. What they want is for the world to recognise Arab Jewish refugees’ rights to repatriation and compensation so Israel can trade away those rights in return for Palestinian refugees relinquishing theirs. 

Jewish leaders to cloak their opposition in the language of universal principle – “refugee status should not be handed down” – while in reality, they don’t adhere to this principle universally. Across the globe, refugee designations are frequently handed down from one generation to the next, yet Jewish organisations do not object. Jewish leaders who decry multigenerational refugee status when it applies to Palestinians celebrate it when it applies to Jews. In 2016, after Spain and Portugal offered citizenship to roughly 10,000 descendants of Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula more than 500 years ago, the AJC’s associate executive director declared: “We stand in awe at the commitment and efforts undertaken both by Portugal and Spain to come to terms with their past.”

Israel and its allies insist that it has no legal or historical obligation to repatriate or compensate Palestinians; they also claim that doing so is impossible. Israel, the ADL notes, believes that “‘return’ is not viable for such a small state”. Veteran US Republican foreign policy official Elliott Abrams has called compensating all Palestinian refugees a “fantasy”. Too much time has passed, too many Palestinian homes have been destroyed, there are too many refugees. It is not possible to remedy the past. The irony is that when it comes to compensation for historical crimes, Jewish organisations have shown just how possible it is to overcome these logistical hurdles. And when it comes to effectively resettling large numbers of people in a short time in a small space, Israel leads the world.

 More than 50 years after the Holocaust, Jewish organisations negotiated an agreement in which Swiss banks paid more than $1bn to reimburse Jews whose accounts they had expropriated during the second world war. In 2018, the World Jewish Restitution Organization welcomed new US legislation to help Holocaust survivors and their descendants reclaim property in Poland. While the Holocaust, unlike the Nakba, saw millions murdered, the Jewish groups in these cases were not seeking compensation for murder. They were seeking compensation for theft. If Jews robbed en masse in the 40s deserve reparations, surely Palestinians do, too.

When Jewish organisations deem it morally necessary, they find ways to determine the value of lost property. So does the Israeli government, which estimated the value of property lost by Jewish settlers withdrawn from the Gaza Strip in order to compensate them. Such calculations can be made for property lost in the Nakba as well. UN resolution 194, which declared that Palestinian refugees were entitled to compensation “for loss of, or damage to, property”, created the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) to tally the losses. Using land registers, tax records and other documents from the British mandate, the UNCCP between 1953 and 1964 assembled what Randolph-Macon College historian Michael Fischbach has called “one of the most complete sets of records documenting the landholdings of any group of refugees in the 20th century”. In recent decades, those records have been turned into a searchable database and cross-referenced with information from the Israeli Land Registry. The primary barrier to compensating Palestinian refugees is not technical complexity. It’s political will.

On the  face of it, the notion that hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of Palestinians might return to what is now Israel seems absurd.  At the height of the Soviet exodus in the early 90s, when the Jewish state took in another 500,000 immigrants over four years. The number of returning Palestinian refugees could be substantially higher than that, or not. When Jews imagine Palestinian refugee return, most probably don’t imagine a modified version of Israel’s absorption of Soviet Jews. More likely, they imagine Palestinians expelling Jews from their homes. Given Jewish history, and the trauma that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has inflicted on both sides, these fears are understandable. But there is little evidence that they reflect reality. For starters, not many Israeli Jews live in former Palestinian homes, since, tragically, only a few thousand remain intact. More importantly, the Palestinian intellectuals and activists who envision return generally insist that significant forced expulsion of Jews is neither necessary nor desirable. Abu Sitta argues that “it is possible to implement the return of the refugees without major displacement to the occupants of their houses”. 

Palestinians  have begun imagining what might be required to absorb Palestinian refugees who want to return. One option would be to build where former Palestinian villages once stood since, according to Lubnah Shomali of the Badil Resource Center, which promotes Palestinian refugee rights, roughly 70% of those depopulated and destroyed in 1948 remain vacant. In many cases, the rural land on which they sat now constitutes nature reserves or military zones. The Palestinian geographer Salman Abu Sitta imagines a Palestinian Lands Authority, which could dole out plots in former villages to the families of those who lived there. He envisions many returnees “resuming their traditional occupation in agriculture, with more investment and advanced technology”. He’s even convened contests in which Palestinian architecture students build models of restored villages.

Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi thought it unlikely that many refugees – most of whom now live in or near cities – would return to farming. Most would probably prefer to live in urban areas.

Badil Resource Center and Zochrot, an Israeli organisation that raises awareness about the Nakba, suggest two other options, both of which bear some resemblance to Israel’s strategy for settling Soviet immigrants in the 1990s. In that case, the government gave newcomers money for rent while also offering developers subsidies to rapidly build affordable homes. Now, Badil and Zochrot are suggesting a “fast track” in which refugees would be granted citizenship and a sum of money and then left to find housing on their own, or a slower track that would require refugees to wait as the government oversaw the construction of housing and other infrastructure designated for them near urban areas with available jobs. If a Jewish family owns a home once owned by a Palestinian, first the original Palestinian owner (or their heirs) and then the current Jewish owner would be offered the cash value of the home in return for relinquishing their claim. If neither accepted the payment, Zochrot activists Noa Levy and Eitan Bronstein Aparicio have suggested a further compromise: ownership of the property would revert to the original Palestinian owners, but the Jewish occupants would continue living there. The Palestinian owners would receive compensation until the Jewish occupants moved or died, at which point they would regain possession. In cases where Jewish institutions sit where Palestinian homes once stood – for instance, Tel Aviv University, which was built on the site of the destroyed village of al-Shaykh Muwannis – Zochrot has proposed that the Jewish inhabitants pay the former owners for the use of the land.

This all sounds daunting,  because it is. As fraught and imperfect as efforts at historical justice can be, it is worth considering what happens when they do not occur.

 Israel did not stop expelling Palestinians when its war for independence ended. It displaced close to 400,000 more Palestinians when it conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 – roughly a quarter of whom only lived in the West Bank or Gaza because their families had fled there, as refugees, in 1948. Between 1967 and 1994, Israel rid itself of another 250,000 Palestinians through a policy that revoked the residencies of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who left the territories for an extended period of time. Since 2006, according to Badil, almost 10,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have watched the Israeli government demolish their homes. By refusing to acknowledge the Nakba, the Israeli government and its diaspora Jewish allies prepared the ground for its perpetuation. And by refusing to forget the Nakba, Palestinians – and some dissident Israeli Jews – prepared the ground for the resistance that is now convulsing Jerusalem, and Israel-Palestine as a whole.

 Teshuvah, which is generally translated as “repentance”. Ironically enough, its literal definition is “return”. In Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical and spiritual. Which means that the return of Palestinian refugees – far from necessitating Jewish exile – could be a kind of return for us as well, a return to traditions of memory and justice that the Nakba has evicted from organised Jewish life. 

The full article unedited and unabridged can be read here

A Jewish case for Palestinian refugee return | Palestinian territories | The Guardian