Although now forgotten by the media and general public, the number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries was substantially greater. The New York Times, on May 16, 1948, the day following Israel's declaration of independence, headlined an article: "Jews in Grave Danger in All Moslem Lands: Nine Hundred Thousand in Africa and Asia Face Wrath of Their Foes." And indeed within fifteen years (the last great wave was from Algeria, after it gained independence from France in 1962), Jews had fled the Arab world en masse (until the Shah's ouster, in 1979, there remained one viable Jewish community in the Moslem world, in non-Arab Iran). Today there are barely 5,000, chiefly elderly Jews in the entire Arab world.

Hundreds of thousands of other Arabs from the Arab countries of refuge signed up as refugees in order to get the handouts. It was as if a new TV show were invented with generous prizes, called "Who Wants to be a Palestinian Refugee?"

One reason the expulsion and flight of these Jews even then attracted little attention was that Israel never referred to them as refugees -- they were welcomed as an "ingathering of the exiles," given citizenship on the spot. Yet these Jews had lived in the countries from which they were forced to flee far longer than the vast majority of those who left the small territory that became Israel. In Iraq, for example, the Jewish community dated back to the Babylonian exile. In contrast, most of the Arabs leaving Israel in 1948 were recent arrivals, attracted to what had been an empty and desolate territory by the economic opportunities opened up by Zionist colonization of Palestine in the twentieth century.

What happened in Israel was a replay, on a far smaller scale, of the vast population exchange that took place on the Indian subcontinent when England gave up rule of its last great colony. In that case, 8,500,000 Hindus fled Pakistan to India and 6,500,000 Moslems fled to Pakistan. The Jewish refugees from Arab lands, the Pakistani and Indian refugees, and the other refugees in that phenomenal number of 36 million have all been forgotten, because they were soon integrated into the lands in which they sought refuge. No one today seeks the "right to return" of the ethnic Germans, probably 12 million in all, expelled after WWII from nations of Eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia, or the Japanese expelled from Manchuria and Korea or the 3 million North Koreans who fled to South Korea. More recently, 1.6 million refugees from Vietnam, including the "boat people" who escaped so perilously to freedom, have been settled in new countries. And this is what the official website of the boat people says today: "Yes, we suffered in the past and we lost everything. But we've managed to overcome the difficult times, settle, rebuild our lives and bring up our children. And that's something to celebrate."

Only the Arab refugees, at the insistence of Arab host countries, and by now with full UN support, have been denied integration, their plight perpetuated as an Arab "ultimate" weapon, armed force failing, to destroy Israel by demographic means. It should be noted that originally UNRWA saw its role quite differently. In a report he submitted in November 1951, UNRWA director John Blandford Jr. said he expected the Arab governments to assume responsibility for relief operations by July 1952. The international community assumed the refugees should be resettled as soon as possible, said Blandford, because, as he put it, "Sustained relief operations inevitably contain the germ of human deterioration." By the late 1950s, the early UNRWA leaders were disillusioned and voiced their disgust. Ralph Garroway, who also served as an UNRWA director, said in August 1958: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an 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." Elfan Rees, an expert on refugee resettlement who worked closely with UNRWA, noted in 1959 that the Arab refugee problem should be the easiest in the world to solve, for there was, in countries like Syria and Iraq, "a developing demand for the manpower they represent and their new settlements would be distinct economic assets." Unfortunately, said Dr. Rees, "the organized intransigence of the refugees and the calculated indifference of the Arabs states concerned have brought all its [UNRWA's] plans to nought."

Over time, the situation in regard to both UNRWA and the camps it administers has grown steadily worse, to the point where it can only be described as intolerable. The number of registered refugees with UNRWA has multiplied by a factor of eight, so that there are now 4,082,300 of which 1,301,689, roughly a third, are in the campsthis although, with the passage of 55 years, most of the actual refugees have died. UNRWA's budget to care for these 4 million people is over one-third that of the UN High Commission for Refugees which, as of Jan. 1, 2002, was caring for 20 million refugees (from Afghanistan, Rwanda etc.) worldwide on a budget of $881 million. Even in 1959, Dr. Rees noted that UNRWA, because of Arab "chicanery" was "feeding the dead" and "by political pressure it is feeding non-refugees." (Interview in New York Post, June 11, 1959) As WorldnetDaily's Joseph

Outpost               - 4 -               September 2003