disagree. And please, no comments about "right wing"-dom. This is a story that transcends political orientation. The victimization of Middle Eastern Jewry was not some myth but a reality and the fact that anyone could casually write it off is amazing.
http://www.jimena.org/No wonder people can't figure this situation out, if people are in complete denial about the other half of the equation.
Complaining that Israel successfully survived and therefore the plight of the Mizrachi and Sephardim wasn't as real as that of the Palestinians is a reprehensible error in historic judgement.
I'd also like to know how allowing a hostile population back into a region that had barely survived the war of 1948, would have been possible without risking another all-out war? Once the armies attacked on the day of Israel's Declaration of Independence, intentions for its future were all too clear. Your comment completely ignores this fact.
Had people elected to stay and become citizens, along with the Arabs who did stay and who are citizens of Israel to this day, had the Palestinians and the other Arab nations accepted the UN partition, which in fact left Israel only a tiny strip along the coast plus the Negev, it would have been another story. Quite probably we would now enjoy a cosmopolitan region in which inclusiveness and sharing were the common dream. Instead, rejectionism and threats of annihilation backed up by actual warfare and terror have been the means of dealing with Israel and this has left her citizens as well as the Palestinians in a constant state of war.*
As it is, we are left with the descendents of the original refugees, who need homes, lives, compensation, a fresh start in life and they need some alternative idea to waiting for Israel to die. By the same token compensation for the Sephardic and Mizrachi Jewish communities needs to be arranged, though hundreds of thousands of them are now thousands of miles away from the Middle East and managed somehow to create lives for themselves already. The fact of Israel's existence and/or their successful resettlement in the New World shouldn't deprive them of their rights to compensation for the losses of their property, livelihoods, communities and identities.
And importantly - nor does the existence of Israel and her absorbtion of Middle Eastern Jewry get the rest of the Middle East off the hook for their refusal to constructively assist the Arab refugees from the War of 1948. The fact that Israel has managed to survive in spite of their best efforts does NOT absolve them of responsibility for having created the war(s) in the first place, for having helped fund and arm terrorists, and for refusing to offer true and permanent hospitality to the refugees. After 60 years, they are still regarded as "temporary guests", often victimized, in Lebanon for example, not allowed to own property or hold jobs. They've been attacked by Lebanese, by Syrians, in Jordan. Discrimination in immigration law is the rule rather than the exception.
Why? To take the Jewish community as only one example, we have suffered expulsion after expulsion and have NEVER kept our brethren in cages.
For a start I do not understand why Syria and Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and the others of the 22 Arab League states haven't been more amenable to making citizenship and opportunity available to Arab refugees, who are all are from a few short miles away, aren't a different ethnic or language group, and may have originated from there in the first place.
Immigration into the Mandate was common, as people were attracted to the improved economic conditions created by the Jewish settlers; Churchill himself commented that he found it totally unfair that the Jews should be victimized by the very immigration that they had helped create. Status as a Palestinian refugee, unlike other refugee situations, only demanded 2 years of residency in the Mandate whereas most similar situations demand 20 years; therefore claiming that all the refugees are "indigenous people" is absurd.
Those who WERE actual refugees from 1948 should have the right to return to the West Bank when that region attains some sort of stability and peace, hopefully statehood. In the cases of families that are split perhaps they can be reunified within Israel. This has already occured in many cases. Concerning the 1948 refugees, they would be returning to a completely different world. So I think they should be given a choice, and I think other countries outside the M.E. should make citizenship options available as well, not just for the original refugees but for their descendants.
What is breathtaking in its lack of both compassion and a sense of reality, is the claim that tiny Israel should somehow be forced to absorb 4.5 million hostile Arabs, when its own population now exceeds 6 million in a region smaller than New Jersey, which is mostly desert and devoid of natural resources.
This of course doesn't even mention the fact that Israel is the JEWISH national home, the only one on the planet, and such a move would completely devastate the essential nature of the place. Moreover such an event would undoubtably occur over the dead bodies of the current residents - in the most literal sense - so the fact that the Green Party and other "progressive" organizations are advocating such a solution is reprehensible as well as incomprehensible.
It is no longer 1948. There HAS been a huge transfer of people - as is not uncommon in human history and particularly, after WWII. I do not believe that other refugees from this era are still living in camps, and nor are they declaring war on their former homelands. It is time THIS conflict was resolved in a commonsensical and humane manner.
It is time people recognized that this the year C.E. 2005, not 1948, not even 1967, and in order for even greater tragedies and wrongdoings to be perpetrated, the reality of Israel as she exists today, with her 6 million citizens and what THEY have created, must be accepted. Destroying that would simply compound what has already been a difficult and frequently tragic series of events.
The mindset that somehow we can return to 1948 is reactionary, it is anything BUT progressive, and it is reflective of both ignorance and a lack of creativity, as well as a lack of ability to deal with reality. And, it would create a whole new set of victims.
Is THAT the right way to go?
***
*Of course, violence and civil war and chaos are too common throughout the modern Middle East; Israel and the Palestinians are part of a larger equation that hasn't featured tolerance and acceptance of minorities and "the other" and which HAS featured increasing religious extremism. So one should neither see, nor judge, the I/P situation in a vacuum but rather in context with the rest of the region.
There is fear of increasing terror, fundamentalism and chaos but also hope: the recent Islamic meeting in Saudi Arabia, the conference earlier this year in Jordan; the enterprise zones; the elections in Iraq and Lebanon and Egypt, the moderating of former hardline Israeli leaders like Sharon, now committed to helping create a Palestinian state. Hope lies in open government, in moderate leaders like Abdullah, in the endorsement of women's and minority and civil rights, in the desire for peace rather than for war.
The fate of Israel and the Palestinians is connected to this larger, regional paradigm. It is another error to see it as an isolated conflict between two polar opposites. Rather, we have two groups of people victimized by the same larger tragedy. Let us help to work on the situation in the context of the region, rather than locking two groups of people into an endless dance of death over a tiny scrap of desert.