Unlike all other groups of refugees in the world, those who are called “Palestinian refugees” are able to pass on that status as an inheritable trait, so that the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren , and so on ad infinitum are also considered to be “Palestinian refugees.” And these “Palestinian refugees” have an entire agency, UNRWA, devoted to their wellbeing, while all other refugee groups in the world must make do with a single agency to provide for them.
“A suppressed voice for truth from within the United Nations,” by Ben Cohen, FDD, February 7, 2025:
These institutions are the concrete expression of a strategy that relies on maintaining the status of the Palestinians as victims by not integrating them into the Arab countries where most of them live—in marked contrast to Israel’s integration of thousands of Mizrachi Jews ethnically cleansed from the Islamic world—and by keeping alive the preposterous and morally reprehensible notion that they will one day “return home” and displace their “colonizers.”
A total of 850,00 Mizrahi Jews were forced to flee the Islamic countries in which Jews had lived for centuries because of Muslim fury over the “nakba” of 1948. Of that total, about 700,000 went to Israel, which made herculean efforts to integrate them into a small, poor, but advanced Western society. Most of those who came from Muslim lands knew no Hebrew; many of them, especially Jews from Yemen and Ethiopia, were illiterate. Yet within a generation, all had been successfully absorbed.
Meanwhile, 690,000 Arabs left what was then still Mandatory Palestine, from late 1947 to May 14, 1948, and then what had become the new state of Israel from May 15, 1948 on. The Arabs who left Mandatory Palestine before that date, and those who left Israel after it, were deliberately settled in camps in the surrounding Arab countries — chiefly Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq. With one exception, they were not allowed to become citizens of the countries they landed in, nor provided with government services, but instead had to rely on UNRWA. They were prohibited in some countries from practicing such high-paying professions as medicine and the law. Only in Jordan have those putative refugees been allowed to become full citizens. And no effort has been made, akin to that made by the Jewish state for its refugees, to integrate them into the larger society. The other Arabs want the Palestinians to remain in dismal camps, where they are encouraged to plan to exercise their “right of return,” and are presented to the world as worthy of its undiluted sympathies, for which they must remain the ill-housed victims of a terrible injustice, the “nakba” or “catastrophe” of 1948.
The Israel-Arab conflict over the Land of Israel — what non-Jews call “Palestine,” which was the name the Romans applied in 135 A.D., after the Maccabi Revolt had been suppressed, to what was then the Kingdom of Judah — continues to receive an exaggerated amount of the world’s attention. Alice Nderitu, the celebrated human rights investigator from Kenya who has just learned that her contract as Special Advisor For The Prevention of Genocide will not be renewed, was frustrated because with Gaza getting so much attention, she was unable to persuade others to give the attention that deserved to be paid to many other conflicts around the world, including at least one certifiable “genocide” in the Sudan.
So much of the world is now infused with an anti-Israel animus, which promotes, and is promoted by, “the longest hatred” — antisemitism. The army of anti-Israel members of the media have chosen to keep the world’s focus on everything that has to do with Israel and its putative mistreatment of the Palestinians, and in so doing, they give far too little attention to other conflicts around the world. Alice Nderitu did what she could to make those other conflicts, and their victims, better known. Now her successor will have to continue that effort. One hopes that her replacement will be strong enough to resist, as she did, the pressure to label the Palestinians in Gaza the victims of a “genocide.”
Lady of the Lake says
Very good article. Outstanding.
David says
“Most of those who came from Muslim lands knew no Hebrew; many of them, especially Jews from Yemen and Ethiopia, were illiterate.”
To the author:
Sorry to disappoint you, my Yemenite grandparents who arrived in Israel in the second decade of the 20th Century, (my grandfather at around 1917, aged 12 and my grandmother at around 1919, aged 4. Even though they traveled to Israel on their own by donkey cart and ship, not through the help of any organization, they left Yemen not by their own free will. Their lives were made miserable there. Their families were also constantly pestered by the question from the local Arabs there, “When will you be going back to your homeland in Jerusalem?” Since the majority of Yemenite Jews who left Yemen were very strictly religious, these strictly religious Jews were all literate in Hebrew because they learned to read their Torah since very early ages (my grandfather since age 5). Since my grandmother was only 4 years old when she arrived in Israel, she had to learn to read and write Hebrew in Israel. Most of the Arab Jewish refugees who arrived in Israel in the first and second wave were also strictly religious, so one could surmise that they were also to a very high degree literate in Hebrew. It’s a misconception that the Arab Jews were mostly illiterate and didn’t know Hebrew.
I can not speak for the Ethiopian community. The Ethiopians arrived in the third wave, so things could have been a little bit different by then. Maybe a commentator with an Ethiopian background could enlighten us.
Kepha says
I met a young man of Yemenite Jewish heritage who, at a very young age, was already self-employed as a Hebrew tutor.