Palestinian Refugees: Championed by Arab World Yet Treated Like Outcasts

The Daily Camera [Boulder CO] ^ | January 4, 2004 | Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael [Associated Press]

[quidnunc]

Cairo, Egypt – As the foreign minister of Egypt, the largest Arab country, Ahmed Maher might have expected a warmer welcome from Palestinians when he joined their worshippers in Jerusalem.

But the scuffles that erupted at Al Aqsa Mosque last month, with Islamic extremists yelling "You are collaborating with the killers of Muslims," underscored a strong current of discontent among many Palestinians toward Arab states.

The anger is focused chiefly on Egypt and Jordan for having signed peace treaties with Israel, but it goes further, to the frustration of having lived as second-class citizens in neighboring Middle Eastern states for 55 years since fleeing their homes when Israel became a state.

Arab states, which have fought four wars against Israel in the name of Palestine, maintain that to grant them citizenship would be to give up on their dream of returning to the homes they lost when the Jewish state was created.

But to the Palestinians, the wars were fought as much out of self-interest as concern for the Palestinians, that the verbal championing of their cause is rhetoric to rally the Arab states' own masses, and that it isn't matched by decent treatment of the refugees.

"There is always a political motive behind the Arab states' positions toward the refugees in their countries," says Tayseer Nasrallah, who heads the Palestinian Refugee Rights Committee in the West Bank, home to 650,000 refugees. "They consider us an unstable element, so they always oppress the refugees and try to get rid of them."

Hundreds of thousands of 1948 refugees and their descendants are crammed into impoverished and often violent camps, some of which have grown into urban slums.

UNRWA, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency set up in 1948, has 4 million refugees on its books in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and many more are scattered farther afield in the Arab world — 70,000 in Egypt, for instance.

Palestinians in Egypt suffer restrictions on employment, education and owning property. When Egypt announced in September it would grant nationality to children of Egyptian mothers married to foreigners, it did not include Palestinians.

In Lebanon, nearly 400,000 Palestinians live in 12 refugee camps, where crime is rife and clashes between rival Palestinian factions are common. Palestinians cannot own property or get state health care.

According to Nasrallah, Lebanon bans refugees from 72 areas of employment, including medicine and engineering.

-snip-

[tiamat]

Could they be getting a clue?

NO ONE wants the Palis... and most especially other Arabs!

Tia

[dennisw]

Mon Dec 22,12:18 PM ET
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, center, is helped out of the al Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City by bodyguards Monday Dec. 22, 2003. According to witnesses, Muslim extremists shouted at him and tried to assault him as he tried to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third-holiest site. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

[God luvs America]

It's been like that for fifty years yet all the libs want to do is blame America for the plight of people scorned by their "neighbors" and "allies". what a joke!

[tiamat]

You are not wrong.....

Tia

[dennisw]

"They consider us an unstable element, so they always oppress the refugees and try to get rid of them."

_____


Well Kuwait got rid of y' all for stabbing them in the back when invaded by Saddam. The Saudis don't want you as guest workers either. They rather employ Thai, Koreans and Fillipinos. They are not resentful and crazed.

[AmericanVictory]

The truth is that the Arab-Israeli conflict is a distraction that serves to keep the bulk of the muslim masses from focusing on the inadequacy of their life in the modern world and the failure of themselves and their leadership. All of this is masked by their delusion that they have an economy because of our foolish failure to correct our wrongheaded course of growing dependence upon their oil. This, in turn, is the failure of our leadership. There is no necessity for the dependence and it could have been avoided, but not by the impractical notions of the renewable energy fringe groups. The truth is that the envirnomentalists, so-called, and the well paid "yes your bigness" crowd have been in a sort of dance to avoid solutions in a parallel manner to the use of the Arab-Israeli situation by our "leaders" and those of the Muslim world.

[God luvs America]

Sadly, in a half-decade, the Palis can't see through this. The Muslims are not fighting for Palestine, they're using their people as a vehicle to kill Jews. Palis are very ignorant to this.

[edger]

The UN agency, UNRWA, largely supported financially by the US has also made the problem worse. There were 400,000 or so refugees in 1948 but UNRWA defines the number as 1948 refugees PLUS THEIR OFFSPRING, so the current number is 4 million. No way is Israel going to accept 4 million returing "refugees"---nor should they.