Amein, every coin has two sides. Prior to the Balfour declaration, the "Palestinians", the few that were there, had no national independence, it was "robbed" of them by a series of conquerors, which in 1917 turned out to be the British. There was no time in history were Arab Palestinians had a "state". You may be interested to look at demographic data from 1880 on (I chose 1880, because that was the "dawn of Zionism". You'll be surprised to find that the Arab population grew as the land was developed by the Jewish pioneers (land bought most often from Damascus based Ephendies). Now that that combination of desert and swamps land was developed, it was "robbed". You must recognize the fact that there are in the world shifts of populations, it is not just the "world" doing it to the Palestinians, it is at the same time (1949, believe) that 2 MM Sikhs (more than twice the Palestinians refugees created during the 1948 conflict) were expelled from their land in the Punjab by Muslim Pakistan. Do you hear anything about those refugees 50 years later? No, as part of the more than 100 MM refugees that the human race has created in the 20th century, that refugees problems was solved. Why was not the refugees problem of Palestinian displaced people solved by their host nations? After all, the same host nations expelled the same amount of Jews from within their countries (most emigrating to Israel, many, not by choice) and in the process confiscating all their belongings (which in totto were larger than the belongings left behind by the Palestinian refugees.
Unless you want to reverse the clock of history, and believe that the state of Israel is "wrong" and thus should be exterminated, you must find away to solve this refugees problems as all the other 100 MM refugees problems of the last 100 years was solved. Look at the current Afghan refugee problem (I hear between 5 too 6 MM), you think it will remain unsolved for another 50 years? Will that be right? That "problem" was created by Muslim extremism, not a tiny Jewish state that occupies less than 1% of the vast lands in the ME.
Mind you, Israel could use a very "Arab" like law and adopt for the Palestinians claiming "Palestinians rights" to citizenship in a future Palestinian state, the citizenship rules of Kuwait. I will turn out that barely 10% of the refugees have such rights (and most of those that have, already have Israeli citizenship, since they were truly attached to the land and refused to leave under the dictum of the Arab League in 1948)
Zeev |
