Mar
22
Palestinian Refugees and the Muslim Obsession with Israel
From Dennis Prager’s Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph
“Much of the Islamic world and nearly the entire Arab world have been obsessed with destroying the Jewish State of Israel since its founding in 1948. The hatred of Israel is such that the anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, and anti-Zionist speeches, writings, television programs, and films that permeate the Arab and Islamist worlds rival the worst anti-Semitic propaganda in history.
It is critical to understand that it was not the creation of 760,000 Arab-Palestinian refugees that has created this hatred. It was this hatred that created the refugees. Had six Arab armies not attacked Israel to destroy it in 1948, there would not have been any refugees.
The Palestinian refugee problem could have easily been solved in 1948, just as virtually every other refugee problem in the world has been; and just as the refugee problem of the 800,000 Jews who fled Arab countries during and after 1948 was solved. But, since 1948, Arab countries have deliberately mistreated the Palestinian refugees by refusing to integrate them into their countries and by keeping them in refugee camps — the only refugees in the world to be kept in camps for three generations. The Arab countries did this so as to keep the world’s attention focused on the plight of the Palestinian refugees and to use them as a way to defame and ultimately, they hope, delegitimize and de-Judaize Israel.
The dislocation of Palestinian refugees was among the least wrenching refugee crises in the world. Unlike virtually any of the other millions of refugees of the twentieth century, nearly all Palestinian refugees were dislocated within only a thirty-mile area, within the same culture and geography, among people in the same ethnic group, who spoke the same language and practiced the same religion.
Moreover, if the creation of refugees caused Palestinian terror or was the reason for the Palestinian/Muslim goal of destroying Israel, why didn’t any of the world’s other refugee problems create terror or the goal of destroying the refugee-producing state?
The Muslim country of Pakistan, for example, when it was created, just nine months before Israel was, produced approximately 14.5 million refugees: 7,276,000 Muslims fled to Pakistan from India and 7,249,000 Hindus and Sikhs fled to India from Pakistan. If creating refugees renders Israel illegitimate, Pakistan should be many times less legitimate than Israel. And unlike Israel, which existed twice before, there never had been a Pakistan — it was ripped out of India to make another Muslim state.
Then, in 1971, after years of neglect by the western half of Pakistan, the eastern half of Pakistan — what became Bangladesh — seceded, and a bloody war unleashed by West Pakistan created about seven million additional Muslim refugees who fled to India (they knew they would be treated better by Hindus than by their fellow Muslims in western Pakistan). Yet those seven million Muslim refugees have been entirely ignored by the world — because the Muslim world has ignored them. Unlike the 760,000 Palestinian refugees of 1948, they serve no larger Islamic purpose. But if 760,000 Palestinian refugees render Israel illegitimate, why don’t seven million Muslim refugees — or the seven million Hindu and Sikh refugees of 1947 — render Pakistan illegitimate?
The bottom line is that Muslim nations, the Arab ones and Iran in particular, do not hate Israel because of concern over 760,000 Muslim refugees. The Muslim world has produced twenty times that number of refugees, many of them Muslim. And if Israel had not produced a single Arab refugee, the Arab world would still have sought its destruction. The Muslims who hate Israel do so because they cannot abide the fact that Jews have an independent state in their midst.
Judea Pearl, the father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, devoted his life in 2002, when Islamists in Pakistan murdered his son, to building bridges between Jews and Muslims. A secular liberal professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA, Judea Pearl had great hopes for this idealistic mission. He told me on my radio show in 2010, however, that he had come to the sad realization that ‘99.99 percent’ of the Muslim world does not believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state.
The day the Arab and wider Muslim worlds accept the existence of a Jewish state — not merely sign a state of nonbelligerence treaty with Israel, as Egypt did — will mark the beginning of a moral and religious transformation within Islam that all people of goodwill yearn for.”
I’m not as optimistic as Prager is about Muslim acceptance of a Jewish state, let alone of an eventual, widespread moral and religious transformation within Islam. But, in regards to his analysis of the real reasons why there are still 760,000 Palestinian refugees and the part they play in Islamist propaganda, I think he’s right on target.
P.S. Here is a related video from PragerU:
