He's more right than you give him credit for...
And the problem started in '48, when the Arab leaders told many of these folks to clear out until they killed all the Jews, which of course didn't happen. Israel, at the time, were trying to get them to stay. It's all very complicated.
This is enuf to get the flavor of refugee treatment by their fellow Arabs. But there are even wheels within wheels within conflicts in these. A big can of worms.
en.wikipedia.org
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Way long article, may go into the greatest depth.....
Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews tell two very different stories about the events of 1948. The Israeli version is that the Palestinians attacked the Jews and then fled voluntarily because they believed Arab armies would soon liberate Palestine. The Palestinian version is that they were innocently minding their own business, when suddenly the Zionists attacked them and evicted them by force, as part of a preconceived plan of ethnic cleansing....
Encouragement by Arab Leaders and Rumors - A study by Childers, which examined British monitoring of Arab broadcasts during that period, did not find any evidence that Arab leaders called on Palestinians to leave their homes. However, considerable evidence and testimony exists that at different times, Arab leaders encouraged refugees to flee. This issue has been inflated beyond its actual importance. It has no real significance in international law, except to counter or support the Palestinian claims of expulsion by force.
During a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo and no friend to Israel or the Jews, found that while the refugees "express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. "We know who our enemies are," they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their home. . . ."
The Economist, reported on October 2, 1948: "Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit....It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."
Times Magazine (May 3, 1948) reported: "The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by orders of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city....By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa."
Edward Atiyah, the secretary of the Arab League Office in London, wrote in his book, The Arabs: "This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to reenter and retake possession of their country."
According to Near East Arabic Radio, April 3, 1948: "It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees to flee from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, and that certain leaders . . . make political capital out of their miserable situation . . ."
Nimr el Hawari, the Commander of the Palestine Arab Youth Organization, in his book Sir Am Nakbah (The Secret Behind the Disaster, published in Nazareth in 1955), quoted the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said as saying "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."
Habib Issa wrote in the New York Lebanese daily newspaper Al Hoda on June 8, 1951, " The Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade... He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean. -- Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes, and property and to stay temporarily in neighbouring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down."...
mideastweb.org
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Between 1948 and 1953, Israel integrated and absorbed close to 500,000 Jewish refugees – half from the destruction wrought by the Holocaust and the remainder expelled from Arab countries. A similar number poured in over the next three years. As a result, the new State’s population doubled by 1953 and tripled by 1956. No one has ever suggested that these Jewish refugees have a “right of return” to their former homes in their Arab countries of origin. In fact, none of these Jewish refugees were even granted monetary compensation – another “inalienable right” claimed for the Palestinians.
Nor are these isolated events in human history for, objectively speaking, refugees are the inevitable and unfortunate by-product of human conflict. So why then, are the Palestinians demanding a “right” for their refugees that is enjoyed by virtually no other refugees in history? The answer lies in a circumstance that is also virtually unique to the Palestinians. Unlike most of history’s refugees, the countries to which the Palestinians fled refused to absorb them – preferring to leave them for half a century in squalid refugee camps for the sake of encouraging anti-Israel and anti-Western sentiment.
The Moslems who fled India became full-fledged citizens of a Pakistani homeland. The Sudeten Germans were fully absorbed into German society. The Vietnamese boat people are now productive citizens of the United States. Jewish refugees from the Arab world have now been fully integrated into Israel. Yet the Palestinians – whose Arab hosts bear direct responsibility for their plight as a result of their decision to declare war on Israel rather than accepting the UN Partition Plan in 1947 – still languish in refugee camps after 55 years.
Jordan, at least, granted its Palestinian refugees citizenship, but has made no effort to get them out of those camps. That’s why refugee camps were still flourishing when Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967, after 19 years of Jordanian rule. Nevertheless, the Palestinian refugees who fled to Jordanian-controlled territory were lucky by comparison. Those who went to Lebanon not only were not made citizens, but were also deprived of their basic civil rights such as the right to work in over 70 different professions.
Ironically, the only country that did try to improve the plight of the Palestinian refugees was Israel. In Gaza, some 36,000 refugees had been moved into better housing facilities by 1973 before international pressure and PLO threats against the refugees themselves put an end to the project. Incredible, but true!
The most astonishing element in this tale of neglect, however, is the role of the Palestinians themselves. Most of the refugees have been under autonomous Palestinian rule for the past five years, yet, the Palestinian Authority has not spent one cent of the millions of dollars that it received in foreign aid to improve their living conditions. It does, however, have sufficient funds to purchase a sea of weapons from Iran……..but that’s another ‘dog that don’t hunt’. The short of it is that these refugees have been living in misery for the last 55 years and there is absolutely no excuse for it.
The only just and rational solution to the Palestinian refugee problem is for the Arab world, and particularly the Palestinian State-to-be, to integrate and absorb them – just as Israel has integrated and absorbed Jewish refugees throughout the world ever since 1948.….which leads to the central issue…….that an end to the Palestinians’ circle of misery will come only when Palestinian leadership ceases to focus its attention on returning Palestinian refugees to their former homes in Israel proper (which Israel interprets as the first step in its eventual destruction) and begins to focus on returning, integrating and absorbing Palestinian refugees into a democratic, stable and economically viable Palestinian homeland (Palestine) adjacent to, and living in peace with (rather than in substitution for) Israel.
jfednepa.org |
