The Arab 'Right of Return' to Israel

Rachel Neuwirth writes an extremely accurate history of the Palestinian's plight from 1948 to the present in this short but precisely written article. For anybody looking at understanding the real issues between Palestinians and Israelis, this article is a great primer and is representative of the facts, not the myths, purpetuated over the last 60 years.

A media and propaganda campaign has been under way since the Annapolis "peace" conference to legitimate the longstanding demands made on behalf of the Palestinian "Arab refugees" -- meaning in practice the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of refugees -- from the 1948 Arab-Israel war of sixty years ago, for their return to their ancestral homes and the return of all their ancestors' former land and property in what is now Israel.

Ms. Neuwirth points out though,

Even so, the Israeli forces' counter-guerilla operations, unavoidable for self-defense as they were, were not even the immediate cause of the "exodus" of most Palestinian Arabs from the areas that became Israel in 1948. Many Arab leaders as well as ordinary Palestinian Arabs have confirmed the role of the Palestinian Arab leadership and the governments of the Arab states in causing the mass evacuation of much of the Arab population from what is now Israel.

The often used argument that Palestinians now live in squaller in tents in refugee camps is also a misnomer.

Claims of massive poverty, deprivation and suffering on the part of the Palestinian Arab refugees are largely false. For sixty years four generations of Palestinian refugees or alleged refugees have had all or most of their housing, food, education through college and graduate school, medical care and social services provided to them for free by UNWRA. No Americans or Europeans have benefited from such a generous and all-encompassing welfare state. (emphasis added)

This last sentence is the crux of the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For 60 years, the UNWRA has given billions and billions of dollars to Palestinian refugees and have effectively created a welfare state. Instead of Palestinians worrying about how to eke out a life thru work, to make something for themselves, they have been given everything. As such, they feel it is everybody's elses responsibility to provide for them as opposed to them providing for themselves. It is the Katrina problem times ten. This problem has again been re-instituted with the recent $7.4 billion pledge from donor nations to Abbas. Tents are by no means the standard affair in refugee camps.

On top of UNWRA assistance, the Palestinian Arabs also receive a total of over a billion dollars a year in aid from other United Nations agencies, the United States, the European Community, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, and Iran. There have been no tents in the "refugee camps" (actually towns or urban neighborhoods) since the 1950s; the "refugees" live in apartments or houses, many of them as large and with the same amenities as apartments and houses in the United States and Europe.

Palestine is a pepetual welfare state that has sapped billions and billions of dollars for continual fighting. It is precisely the welfare state that has caused this conflict to persist for 60 years. With most of everything given to Palestinian refugees, as everybody else's standard of living rises through the years, they want more and more money to raise their standard of living. They use violence to get raise their standard of living, instead of hard work, which the rest of us must do.