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from Aish.com Staff
In the 1948 war, 600,000 Jewish refugees were expelled from Arab lands including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco -- leaving behind an estimated $30 billion in assets. These Jewish refugees were welcomed by Israel, and with their 2 million descendants, they now comprise a majority population of the State of Israel.
In the same war, an equal number of Palestinians refugees fled to Arab countries, primarily Jordan and Egypt. From 1948-67, these refugees were left in squalid camps by their host society, Jordan and Egypt. The United Nations estimates that they and their descendents now number about 3.7 million -- living in the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, and throughout the Western World.
Yasser Arafat demands the "right of return" for all 3.7 million Palestinians to within the borders of the State of Israel.
Israel maintains that these refugees primarily left of their own accord, and that Palestinian demands that these refugees be absorbed into the State of Israel is just a political move to destroy the Jewish state through demographics.
In the Gaza Strip today, 420,000 Palestinians still live in squalid refugee camps, under full jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority.
Who is responsible for these refugees?
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
Did Israel forcibly evict these 600,000 Arabs from their homes in 1948? Or did they leave voluntarily? This is the salient question.
Here is a collection of historical quotations from Arab leaders, relating to these Palestinian refugees:
On April 23, 1948 Jamal Husseini, acting chairman of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee (AHC), told the UN Security Council:
"The Arabs did not want to submit to a truce... They preferred to abandon their homes, belongings and everything they possessed."
On September 6, 1948, the Beirut Daily Telegraph quoted Emil Ghory, secretary of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee, as saying:
"The fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously..."
On October 2, 1948, the London Economist reported, in an eyewitness account of the flight of Haifa's Arabs:
"There is little doubt that the most potent of the factors [in the flight] were the announcements made over the air by the Arab Higher Executive urging all Arabs in Haifa to quit... And it was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."
The Jordanian daily Falastin wrote on February 19, 1949:
"The Arab states... encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies."
On June 8, 1951, Habib Issa, secretary-general of the Arab League, wrote in the New York Lebanese daily al-Hoda that in 1948, Azzam Pasha, then League secretary, had...
"...assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade... Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property, and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states."
On April 9, 1953, the Jordanian daily al-Urdun quoted a refugee, Yunes Ahmed Assad, formerly of Deir Yassin, as saying:
"For the flight and fall of the other villages, it is our leaders who are responsible, because of the dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs... they instilled fear and terror into the hearts of the Arabs of Palestine until they fled, leaving their homes and property to the enemy."
Another refugee told the Jordanian daily a-Difaa on September 6, 1954: "The Arab governments told us, 'Get out so that we can get in.' So we got out, but they did not get in."
Former Prime Minister of Syria, Khaled al-Azem, in his memoirs, published in 1973, listed what he thought were the reasons for the Arab failure in 1948:
"The fifth factor was the call by the Arab governments to the inhabitants of Palestine to evacuate it and leave for the bordering Arab countries... We brought destruction upon a million Arab refugees by calling on them and pleading with them to leave their land."
In the March 1976 issue of "Falastin a-Thaura," then the official PLO journal, PLO spokesman Mahmud Abbas ("Abu Mazen") wrote:
"The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live."
British Foreign Office Document #371/75342/XC/A/4991 records:
"Following a visit to refugees in Gaza, a British diplomat reported the following: 'But while they express no bitterness against the Jews... they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states: 'We know who our enemies are,' they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes."
WHAT ARAFAT DEMANDS
Despite all this, Yasser Arafat is demanding an unlimited right of return of 3.7 million Palestinian refugees to within the borders of the State of Israel. In Arafat's January 1, 2001, letter to President Clinton, he declares:
"Recognizing the Right of Return and allowing the refugees' freedom of choice are a prerequisite for ending the conflict."
Recently, Arafat's economic adviser, Dr. Mahar Al-Kurd declared that, in addition to compensation for the refugees, the Palestinians would demand "compensation for damage incurred by the [Israeli] occupation since 1967." This separate "bill" includes compensation for the "exploitation" of Palestinian beachfront on the Dead Sea, as well as the return of direct and indirect taxes, including those related to tourist activity, that Israel has collected from Palestinians.
Palestinian negotiators submitted an official document at Camp David, which included these demands:
Israel will also compensate states (such as Syria and Jordan) that have provided the refugees with asylum.
The Palestine Liberation Organization will receive compensation for public Palestinian property that has remained in Israel.
The refugees who will return to Israel must not be settled in areas that could endanger their lives or well-being, or that lack a suitable infrastructure.
The refugees returning to Israel will automatically be granted Israeli citizenship.
The right of return will have no time limit.
An international committee will carry out monitoring work in Israel to ensure that the refugees are integrated and protected.
The total "bill for compensation" amounts to over half a trillion dollars. Yes, trillion.
Abu Mazen, deputy to PA Chairman Yasser Arafat, said after the last Camp David summit, that the compensation payments to Palestinians should be made by Israel alone, and should not come from any international compensation funds.
(Arafat demands published in Al-Ayyam (PA), January 2, 2000, translation courtesy of MEMRI. Camp David details courtesy of Ze'ev Schiff in Ha'Aretz. Refugee quotes courtesy of Moshe Kohn and Prof. Shlomo Slonim.)
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