No way home: The tragedy of the Palestinian diaspora

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/195388-No-way-home-The-tragedy-of-the-Palestinian-diaspora ^ | Judith Miller and David Samuels

[ventanax5]

It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state.

Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel - and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian "Nakba", or catastrophe - this one at hands of the Arab governments. "Marginalised, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing atop multiple fault lines," a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Lebanon recently observed, "the refugee population constitutes a time bomb."

[dfwgator]

The land in Palestine is lacking in people to till its fertile soil”.

Not to condone Apartheid, but there is a parallel to this and South Africa. The Afrikaaners primarily built their farms where there were no blacks, they didn't steal any land from them. They simply made use of the land where nobody had lived before.

[umgud]

That’s not the theme of the article by any means.

Didn't intend it be taken that way, just grumbling in general.

[ml/nj]

Waaaah. This guys acts as if these goat-f'ers are the only refugees in human history. My father was a refugee. He didn't like having to leave his home. But he did and started over. He was hardly unique. The history of the world is the history of refugees.

ML/NJ

[Jewbacca]

Correct.

My grandfather was a refugee from France, circa 1940 (gee, I wonder why?!)

He took his skinny ass and the clothes onhis back to an empty desert and helped start a country.

[wbarmy]

Thank you for that post. I have used the Mark Twain quotes innumerable times in my discussions with coworkers.

So many people do not understand how barren the area was before the Jewish immigrants began arriving.

[Jewbacca]

What’s so notable (and what makes the arabs so mad), is Israel was built into a first world nation by “inferior” Jews with far less material resources than has been lavished on the Gaza-occupying arabs who still live in a cess pool, despite having money dumped on them from around the world.

Same land, almost the same genetic stock, different results.

Hmmm, wonder why?

[wbarmy]

The reason;

Inshallah.

[Jewbacca]

That’s actually a punch line in Israel.

[SJackson]

Middle East and terrorism, occasional political and Jewish issues Ping List. High Volume

If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.

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[SunkenCiv]

...in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel - and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian "Nakba", or catastrophe - this one at hands of the Arab governments. "Marginalised, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing atop multiple fault lines," a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Lebanon recently observed, "the refugee population constitutes a time bomb."

At least the bomb will go off in among the culpable for a change.

[Eleutheria5]

“Where’s the barf-alert?

And what is “Israei-occupied West Bank” about?

I only know of arab-occupied West-Bank and Gaza.”

There are Joooooos living in the West Bank, and they won’t let us kill them, even when we’re in a bad mood! Such oppression.

[dervish]

Thanks for posting.

Judith Miller is a hard one to figure. She is an independent thinker.

Here she correctly calls the Arabs on their hypocrisy and role in keeping the Palestinians as fourth generation refugees. She puts the blame where it belongs.