Groan.

Let me ask you something. Do you think the people living on that patch of land were always Arab going back in history? That is, that the Palestinian Arabs have an irrevocable right to that land because it has always been Arab throughout the ages, since ancient times?

If you do, then you don't know your history. For before the current Arabs were there, there were many others - Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Mamluks and Turks. There was Arab rule soon after the Muslim conquests of the 7th century, but before that there was Jewish rule.

That point is: the ancestors of the Palestinians conquered the land from someone else, just as the modern Israeli Jews conquered it from them.

In the history of virtually every country in the world, there are episodes of one people conquering the land from another and pushing them off that land. The only thing different about the Israeli conquests is that they happened relatively recently - and in the West Bank, you can reasonably argue, it is still happening. But other land conquests and expulsions have happened recently too: the Krajina Serbs from Croatia, Ethiopians from Eritrea. In Europe, around the same time that the Arabs were abandoning or being driven off their land in Palestine, whole populations were being shifted around: Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia, Hungarians from Romania etc.

And lest we forget, let's recall the history of the Arabs, one of the most ferocious conquerers in world history. In the 7th century, they swept out of the Arabian peninsula and conquered just about everything from the Middle East to the Atlantic. In the process they pushed off or killed the natives living there. How do you think it happened that Arabs are now present in places like Morocco? Their ancestors were vicious killers. And Arab conquests and expulsions aren't even limited to the distant past. How is it that more than half of Israel's population consists of Jews from Arab lands? Because many of them were expelled.

I await the howls of outrage about these injustices from the same people who are so quick to condemn Israel.

So until you can show me how the establishment of Israel differs morally from the establishment of virtually every country in the world whose history involves conquest of some kind, I really can't get too excited about a lost Palestinian village. It is but one small injustice is a world full of much larger ones. What's more, this particular injustice can't even be totally blamed on the conquerors. Had the Arabs accepted the UN partition plan of 1947, chances are that village would still be standing and populated with Arabs.

None of this is to say that might should make right. Or that the law of the jungle should be how we live. We like to think that we've evolved to the point where the rule of law is paramount and nations don't just grab land because they can. We condemn the ongoing expropriation of land from Palestinians - and rightly so, just as we would condemn any other blatant land grabs. We should be trying to rectify the injustices of the past, where practical. But rectifying injustice is not the only or even the most important imperative and dwelling excessively on past injustice, as the Arabs do (of course only when they're the victims, never when they're the perpetrators) delays the possibility of justice for future generations.