[reaganaut1]

To state the obvious (except to John Kerry), Israel cannot make peace with those who don't want its citizens to exist.

[Responsibility2nd]

What’s next?

Radical muslim fanatics take a trip to the Vatican?

[Calvin Locke]

Actually, I was expecting the rabid Jewish wing to be the ones complaining, like they did when the RCC nuns were there praying a couple of decades ago.

[faithhopecharity]

It may have been a decent gesture, to the man’s credit.
But given the response it generated, it is clear that Israel still needs to move the enemy within, OUT, and stop delaying what is quite apparently the inevitable ...

[JimRed]

Most likely celebrating the murder of Jews by their surrogates, the Nazis.

[justiceseeker93]

The Nakba, or catastrophe, refers to the events of 1948 when the Arabs and Israelis fought a war. The Arabs lost, the state of Israel was born, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes and became a people of a diaspora, living even today as refugees here and across the Middle East.

The WaPo writer of the posted article is engaging in some revisionist history here. Israel was born before "the Arabs and Israelis fought a war," being declared a new Jewish state by a UN resolution which partitioned the British mandate of Palestine into Israel and Transjordan. However, a group of Arab states, refusing to recognize the UN action, militarily attacked the newborn Israel, which resulted in the war referred to in the article (known as the War for Independence in Israeli history).

As for "hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes," those in that category were sworn enemies of the new state and could not have lived peacefully in coexistence. They should more properly be referred to as "Palestinian ARABS."

A Palestinian "diaspora"? I beg to differ. "Diaspora refers to a group of people of a particular ethnic grouping which has or had a natural homeland to which that people were once attached, now living outside that homeland for whatever reason. Since the Palestinian ARABS referred to never had a state nor a natural homeland throughout their relatively brief history, the term "diaspora" is inappropriate to their circumstances. (Historically, "Diaspora" has referred principally to Greeks, Jews, and perhaps Chinese.)

Now the million dollar question: What was the current German government possibly thinking when it paid for this Palestinian ARAB student trip to Auschwitz? There might be several possible ways to look at this from the German perspective.

[elhombrelibre]

The trip's intentions all seem reasonable. The fact that so many Palestinians reacted the way that they did shows how central the denial of the Holocaust and its outcome is to those Palestinians. We cannot force them to care about the truth, but we needn't pretend, as President Obama and his team do, that the chances of a real peace with between Israel and the Palestinians will only go up when the Palestinians change their outlook and accept Israel's right to exist.

[Eleutheria5]

Teach tolerance? Empathy? Good luck.