The main issues with regard to Israel continue to be the Arab refugees' claim that they have the "right of return" to the homes that they or their antecedents abandoned during the 1948-49 war and that Israel must relinquish the areas taken in the Six-Day War of 1967. In addition, hardliners, like the prime minister of the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh, insist that all of pre-1948 Palestine is an Arab and not a Jewish legacy. Haniyeh proposed that a "Jerusalem Army" be mobilized to liberate the holy city along with the rest of geographical Palestine in the name of Islam.
(Concurrently, the Arabs who live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip prefer to be called Palestinians and ignore the fact that the Jews of Palestine also were known as Palestinians until Israel's establishment in 1948).
The foreign correspondents, commentators and analysts who adopted the term "Arab Spring" consistently overlook the fact that there is no historical precedent for these demands.
No country ever permitted a wholesale repatriation of people who fled territory taken in war and no country ever ceded land seized during a war in toto and in advance of a treaty negotiated by the parties concerned.
If indeed there ever was or still is an "Arab Spring," how could the incumbent mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Hussein, have coincidentally cited the Koranic verse in which the Prophet Mohammed calls on Muslims to kill Jews wherever they may find them?
