By Ryan Jones
Dec 17, 2004
The issue has been expounded upon ad nauseum, but some people still don’t get it — there are no Palestinian Arab refugees!
I bring it up again because Jerusalem has reportedly launched a new initiative to try and settle the so-called “refugee crisis”, a move which brings Israel dangerously close to admitting responsibility for these allegedly displaced Arabs.
If there is a refugee issue, it is of the Arabs’ own making. And they admit it. Or at least they used to.
Habib Issa, former Secretary General of the Arab League, told the Lebanese daily Al-Hoda in 1951 that his predecessor, Azzam Pasha, had in 1948 “assured Arabs that the occupation of Palestine [sic], including Tel Aviv, would be as simple as a military parade… Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property, and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states.”
Many of the Arabs that lived in the land as the 1948 Israeli-Arab war got underway had at any rate not resided here long enough to be considered “locals.”
Joan Peters’ meticulous work, “From Time Immemorial” chronicles the influx of Arabs from neighboring lands starting in 1830 and lasting until 1945. They came, Peters points out, because of the financial opportunities created by the immigrating Jews.
She references travelers who during the first part of the last century recorded meeting more than 15 Arab nationalities while visiting the Holy Land.
But even for those who could rightfully claim indigenous status, the extent of their displacement in 1948 hardly qualifies them or their descendents as refugees.
Most moved less than 100 kilometers from their original homes, to areas where the local culture, language and religion were the same as from where they came.
When someone in the US thinks of refugees, the image is more often than not of European refugees during and following the World Wars, or perhaps Haitian refugees today, to give a more current perspective.
In both cases, the refugees were people who traveled great distances from their homelands to take up residence in a land not their own where the majority of the population could not understand their speech or their customs.
Not so the “Palestinians.” The Palestinian Arab differs little if at all in speech and culture, and not at all in religion from the Syrian, the Jordanian or the Lebanese Arab. In other words, culturally, the Palestinian Arab is just as much at home in Syria, Jordan or Lebanon as he is in “Palestine.”
Nevertheless, the PLO continues to insist Israel is responsible for some “refugee crisis,” and demands a “right of return” for the millions of “Palestinians” said to be living in exile.
Abbas and his cronies know this is a lie the world will buy and get involved in solving, being “humanitarian” in nature.
For the “Palestinians,” however, the real meaning of the refugee issue is far from humanitarian.
As senior Fatah Central Committee member Sakher Habash succinctly explained during a 1998 lecture at Shechem’s Al-Najah University:
“To us, the refugee issue is the winning card which means the end of the Israeli state.”