Nowhere, to my knowledge, has the moral impasse of claims and counterclaims in the Palestinian tragedy been summed up as concisely and poignantly as in the still valid report of the American Friends Service Committee, Search for Peace in the Middle East, of 1970.²⁰⁸ The elevent points in this confrontation of the two cases begin with the Israeli claim that their ancestors controlled Palestine more than two thousand years ago matched by the Arab counterclaim that they had held this land for more than 1300 years without interruption.