Posted on 05/27/2003 3:20:48 AM PDT by freedom9
The most publicized afterevent of the war of liberation has been the Palestine Arab refugee problem. It has become the most potent political weapon in the Arab arsenal.
The Arabs have gone to great lengths to describe the plight of these war victims and to keep the refugee camps as working models to demonstrate to the world Jewish cruelty. Indeed, those who visit these wretched souls are certain to be touched by their plight.
The Arabs would have the world believe that the Palestine Arab refugee is unique. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every war man has waged has created refugees, homeless and displaced people. Today in Europe and Asia, five years after the end of World War II, displaced people number in the tens of millions. This is the very nature of war.
Had the Arab leaders obeyed the decision of the highest international tribunal and adhered to the law, there would be no Arab refugee problem. The refugees came as a direct result of a war of aggression waged by the Arabs to destroy the people of Israel.
The Arabs created the Palestine refugee problem themselves. After the 1947 partition vote, the Yishuv of Palestine begged the Palestine Arabs to remain calm, friendly, and to respect the unassailably legal rights of the Jewish people.
Despite wanton aggression the State of Israel, in its Declaration of Independence, held out a hand in friendship to its Arab neighbors, even at the moment her borders were being violated.
The avowed intention of murdering the Jewish people and destroying the State of Israel was the Arab answer to law and friendship.
Strangely, most of the Palestine Arabs fled even before the invasion. Jaffa, Haifa, and the Galilee created most of the refugees while the fighting was comparatively light.
The first reason for this was that the Palestine Arabs were filled with fear. For decades racist leaders had implanted the idea of mass murder in their minds. These leaders played on the illiteracy, superstition, and fanatical religious devotion of the fellaheen. These leaders never cared for the fellaheen but only for their own personal ambitions. They completely betrayed the people. Blind fear and ignorance caused the first flight of the Arabs. Was this fear founded upon fact? No! At one place, Neve Sadij, there was an unforgivable massacre of innocent people. Otherwise, the Arabs who remained in Palestine were completely unmolested. No Arab village which remained at peace was harmed in any way by the Israelis.
In regard to Neve Sadji we might add that this one example of Jewish excess – in the heat of war, one must remember – pales beside the record of scores of Arab-led massacres in over a three-decade period of nominal peace.
The second major cause of the refugee situation comes from the absolutely documented fact that the Arab leaders wanted the civilian population to leave Palestine as a political issue and a military weapon.
The Arab generals planned an annihilation of the Jewish people. They did not want a large Arab civilian population present to clutter their operational freedom.
The politicians wanted to prove Jewish inhumanity by pointing to the Arab refugees “forced” from their homes. Lastly, the actual fighting helped create part of the refugee situation. Those few villages that fought against the State of Israel were attacked and the Arabs driven from them. No apologies have been made for this.
Documented proof exists that the Arabs were promised that they could return to their homes on the heels of Arab victories to loot the destroyed State of Israel. No one can question Arab hostility toward Israel since the war. They have blockaded the Suez Canal in violation of international agreement, they have boycotted business, blackmailed foreign firms, raided border settlements, and constantly threatened to come back for a second attempt to destroy Israel.
In the light of this, it is inconceivable that Israel could even consider resettlement of a hostile minority, pledged to destroy the state.
We now come to the most horrible of all the facts concerning the Arab refugees. The Arab nations do not want these people.
They are kept caged like animals in suffering as a deliberate political weapon. In Gaza, to cite one example, the roads are mined and patrolled so the refugees cannot reach Egypt.
The United Nations has established a fund of two hundred million dollars for resettlement of the Palestine refugees.
There is much lush, fertile, and empty land in the seven million square miles of the Arab world. The Tigrus-Euphrates Valley for one example, has some of the richest unused land in the world.
It is populated by a handful of Bedouins. This section alone could take not only the half million, but ten million others as well.
Not one penny of the resettlement money has been used.
On the other hand, Israel, an unfertile land whose seven thousand square miles are half desert, has taken in more than half a million Jewish refugees from Arab countries and stands ready to take in that number again.
The Arabs argue that the Palestine refugees themselves do not want to be resettled but want their farms in Palestine back. This is sheer nonsense. The Arabs have cried crocodile tears over the great love these poor fellaheen have for their lost homes.
The fact is, Palestine fellaheen were victimized by men who used them as a tool, deserted them, and are victimizing them again. Kept penned up, fed with hatred, they are being used to keep Arab hatred of Israel at the boiling point.
If the Arabs of Palestine loved their land, they could not have been forced from it – much less run from it without a real cause.
The Arabs had little to live for, much less fight for. A man who loves his land, as the Arabs profess, will stand and die for it.
The Arabs tell the world that the State of Israel has expansionist ideas. Exactly how a nation of less than a million people can expand against fifty million is an interesting question.
The Arab people need a century of peace.
The Arab people need leadership, not desert sheiks who own thousands of slaves, not hate filled religious fanatics, not military cliques, not men whose entire thinking is in the Dark Ages.
The Arab people need leaders who will bring them civil liberties, education, medicine, lands reforms, equality.
They need leaders with the courage to face the real problems of ignorance, illiteracy, and disease instead of waving a ranting banner of ultranationalism and promoting the idea that the destruction of Israel will be the cure for all their problems.
Unfortunately, whenever an enlightened Arab leader arises he is generally murdered. The Arabs want neither resettlement of the refugees, alleviation of their plight, nor do they want peace.
Israel today stands as the greatest single instrument for bringing the the Arab people out of the Dark Ages.
Only when the Arab people get leadership willing to grasp the hand extended in friendship will they begin to solve the problems which have kept them in moral and physical destitution.
Three wars and fifty-five years later, not much has changed.
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