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and solution. Reparations here exist in a spectrum of possibilities to allow the victims and the victimizers to build a new life. These possibilities include the physical return of those who survived ethnic cleansing or financial compensation to those survivors who wish to build a new life elsewhere. It also includes mechanisms for reintroducing the victims in the country’s historical accounts and retrieving their cultural assets. The major point of all these mechanisms is that it is up to the victims of the ethnic cleansing to decide individually which reparation they would prefer.
    But there is more at stake here than just defining and properly conceptualizing the reparation paradigm as part of the new recommended dictionary. The idea of reparations, and in particular the right of the refugees to return, is rarely questioned in any other conflict in the world, apart from Palestine. The European Union and the US State Department have a principled position on refugees that accepts without any hesitations or qualifications the right of people to return to their homes after fighting has subsided. The United Nations has a similar universal position and made a concrete decision on the right of the Palestinian refugees to return unconditionally to their homes when it adopted Resolution 194 in December 1948 (it was adopted by the same UN General Assembly that decided on the partition plan and the creation of the Jewish state).
    So putting the right of return at the very heart of any future solution is not a revolutionary idea that asks the Western world to betray its principles or adopt a unique exceptional attitude. On the contrary, it requires the Western world to be loyal to its principles and not exclude the Palestinians from the application of those principles. Yet the old peace orthodoxy abandoned these basic human principles and did not even think of fighting for them. Well, the new movement does and will put them at the center of its struggle as long as the last refugee wishes to return. The Al Jazeera “Palestine Papers” leak exposed how far the Palestine Authority was willing to go in order to appease the Israelis. It showed the PA’s readiness to give up this right of return. The new realities described at the end of this section reveal the emergence of a new political elite in Palestine that may have a different view on the issue.
    Finally, this ideology of ethnic cleansing also explains the dehumanization of the Palestinians—a dehumanization that can bring about the kind of atrocities we witnessed in Gaza in January 2009. This dehumanization is the bitter fruit of the moral corruption that the militarization of the Jewish society bore in Israel. The Palestinians are a military target, a security risk, and a demographic bomb. This is one of the main reasons why ethnic cleansing is an ideology that is regarded by the international community, in the aftermath of the Second World War, as a hideous crime and moreover one that can lead to genocide—since with both crimes you have to dehumanize your victim in order to implement your vision of ethnic purity. Whether you expel or massacre people, including children, they have to be objectified as military targets, not as human beings.
    Anyone who has been in Israel long enough, as I have, knows that the worst corruption of young Israelis is the indoctrination they receive that totally dehumanizes the Palestinians. When an Israeli soldier sees a Palestinian baby he does not see an infant—he sees the enemy. This is why all the military documents, whether those ordering the occupation of villages in 1948, those instructing the air force in 2009 to resort to the Dahiyah Doctrine (the strategy that was meant to defeat Hezbollah in the 2006 assault on Lebanon with the carpet bombing of the eponymous southern suburb of Beirut, which is the Shiites’ stronghold), or when bombarding Gaza, depict the civilian areas as military bases. In Israel, since