ARAB REFUGEES VERSUS JEWISH REFUGEES FROM ARAB COUNTRIES

ARAB REFUGEES VERSUS JEWISH REFUGEES FROM ARAB COUNTRIES


The following is well-known : One will not be able to change a warped mind... and, one cannot straighten a bent tree... The Arabs by nature, are an incited/deluded lots from womb to maturity! Apart from the words of their Qur'an who orders them to kill the non believers, myths, chimeras and exaggerations are most of the information they get from their respective elders who in turn, have received it from their elders... This continuous hate generated at the crib will never end towards the Jews until THE TWO PEOPLES ARE SEPARATED FOREVER! Now as far as the refugees is concerned… One has to understand that the existence of these refugees is a direct result of the Arab States' opposition to the partition plan of 1947 and the reconstitution of the State of Israel. The Arab states adopted this policy unanimously, and the responsibility of its results, therefore is theirs. There is no more apt expression than this on the origin of the Palestinian Arab refugee problem in 1948.

These are the words of Emil Ghory, secretary of the Arab High Council, in an interview published on 6 September 1948 in the Lebanese daily Al-Telegraph, soon after the events occurred and before this topic became an important theme of Arab propaganda…

The flight of Arabs from the territory allotted by the UN for the Jewish State began immediately after the General Assembly decision at the end of November 1947. This wave of emigration, which lasted several weeks, comprised some thirty thousand people, chiefly well-to-do-families.

They knew that a war was imminent; they didn't doubt that the Arab armies would quickly win a sweeping victory, and they wanted to be as far as possible from the battlefield. The second wave of emigration came in the spring of 1948, after fighting had erupted between Arab irregulars and Jewish defense forces. This time the urban population was involved, and in far greater numbers - for example, some seventy thousand from Jaffa and sixty thousand from Haifa. An estimated total of over two hundred thousand Arabs emigrated in this wave, despite strenuous efforts of the Jews in various parts of the country to dissuade them from leaving. The Haifa Workers' Council, for example, published, on 28 April 1948, the following plea: "...our city flourished and developed for the good of both Jewish and Arab residents ... Do not destroy your homes with your own hands; do not bring tragedy upon yourselves by unnecessary evacuation and self-imposed burdens. By moving out you will be overtaken by poverty and humiliation. But in this city, yours and ours, Haifa, the gates are open for work, for life, and for peace, for you and your families." This appeal, however, and many similar ones, were of no avail. Most of the local Arab leaders had already managed to take flight, and directly or indirectly, they encouraged the Palestinian population from across the border to "temporarily" leave their homes.

But the largest wave of Arab refugees, three hundred thousand or more, followed the massive Arab invasion of 15 May 1948, the day after Israel's declaration of independence. The large majority of these emigrants were of the poorer strata of the Arab population, both urban and rural, the former group including day laborers such as the thousands of port workers who had come to Palestine from Syria. John Bern Castle, chief assessor in the mandatory government, in a report to the Conciliation Commission (comprising representatives of the United States, France, and Turkey) appointed by the UN in the fall of 1948, assessed the property abandoned by the refugees at 200 million pounds sterling -considerably less than the value of the property the nine hundred and fifty thousand Jewish refugees from Arab countries had left behind.

In a discussion of the Arab refugee problem in the UN Security Council on 4 March 1949, the Soviet delegate virtually confirmed the words of the secretary of the Arab High Council previously cited. He said: "Statements have been made on the Arab refugee question, but why should the State of Israel be blamed for the existence of that problem? When seeking to determine responsibility for the existence of the problem of the Arab refugees, we cannot fail to mention the outside forces ... They pursue their own selfish interests which have nothing in common either with the cause of peace and international security or with the interests of the Arab and Jewish peoples, and which only correspond to the aggressive designs of the leading circles of some states." The fact is that the Arab attack on Israel created two parallel refugee problems - one Arab and the other Jewish.

Analogous to the approximately four hundred and fifty to six hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs who fled in 1948 and found refuge in parts of Arab-controlled Palestine and in various Arab countries was a somewhat larger number of Jews who emigrated from Arab countries to the Jewish State in the first years of its existence.

Thus the Middle East saw, at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, what amounted to a population exchange between the Arabs who left Israel and the Jews who emigrated there from the various Arab countries. These two phenomena are bound together historically, politically, and ethically, and we cannot deal with one problem (and its solution) without the other, although one of the problems has virtually been solved.

The Jewish refugees never received any compensation from the Arab countries they were forced to leave and which confiscated all their property when they fled. Nevertheless, their social and economic absorption in Israel is a fait accompli, since this absorption was the clear desire and goal of the Jews of Israel and their government. In theory and in practice, these immigrants were never treated as refugees but rather as fellow members of the same people. With a sense of common national fate, rescue and assistance were extended to the immigrants, and the Jews of Israel granted the newcomers the same rights they themselves enjoyed. Such was not the attitude toward the Arab refugees from Israel in most of the Arab world.

Jordanian King Hussein described this attitude in an interview with an Associated Press correspondent in January 1960: "Since 1948 Arab leaders have approached the Palestine problem in an irresponsible manner. They have not looked into the future. They have no plan or approach. They have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes. This is ridiculous and, I could say, criminal."

Hussein is perhaps the only Arab leader who had the right to express such judgment. His artificial country, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan which is in reality 77% of the "Mandate for Palestine", is the only one of the Arab states which not only granted the Palestinian refugees citizenship, but also absorbed them socially, economically, and politically, allowing them to work and become integrated into all aspects of the national life. The attitude of the other Arab states toward the Palestinian Arab refugees was, as noted, completely different. This attitude was succinctly described by Ralph Galloway, a former head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), in Amman, capital of Jordan, in August 1958: quote:-

"The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die." Unquote...

In a study of the refugee problems by the British writers Terrence Prittie and Bernard Dineen (The Double Exodus: A Study of Arab and Jewish Refugees in the Middle East), this aspect of the problem was summarized as follows: "In general, one can say that Arab governments regarded the destruction of the State of Israel as a more pressing matter than the welfare of the Palestinian refugees. Palestinian bitterness and anger had to be kept alive. It was clear that this could ensuring that a great many Palestinians Arabs continued to live under sub-normal conditions, the victims of hunger and poverty, do best. No Arab Government preached this as a defined policy; most Arab Governments tacitly put it into practice."