A friend, reading my previous post, pointed out to me
something I didn’t know (or forgot), but that subsequent research has verified:
At the formation of the State of Israel, about 700,000 Arabs
within the new state’s territory fled or sold out to Israeli immigrants, many encouraged
by their leaders, who promised them that they would soon drive the Jews out and
give them their land back. The Arab
nations around them wouldn’t accept these dispossessed co-religionists, so they
became the now-dispossessed Palestinians, living permanently in camps.
At the same time about the same number of Jews were forced
to flee their homes in the surrounding Arab lands due to the violent
anti-Jewish sentiment being stoked by the Arab governments. These were all welcomed with open arms by
their co-religionists in Israel and helped to resettle in the new state, which
is why we don’t hear much about their dispossession.
The difference between the way these two dispossessed groups
were handled by governments nominally of their own religious persuasion says something
profound about why there is a Palestinian problem in the first place. If the
Arab governments around Israel had handled the dispossessed Palestinians the
way the Israelis handled the dispossessed Jews, there wouldn’t be a Palestinian
problem. But then if those Arab governments had been that humane they probably wouldn’t
have launched repeated wars to try to exterminate Israel either.
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