NEW YORK — “Why don’t the other Arabs take them in?” – ask many in the West about the Palestinians. After all, even the poorer Arab countries aren’t stingy accepting refugees. Egypt hosts millions, mainly from Sudan and Lebanon’s entire population currently comprises 20% Syrian refugees.
So why won’t any of the Arab states give shelter to Palestinians?
There are reasons for Palestinians being so unwanted, some historical. In 1967, after yet another Arab initiated war to destroy Israel, the “West Bank” fell under Israeli control. Palestinian fedayeen – fighters – left with their families.
Admitted into the Kingdom of Jordan next door they immediately instituted the Black September terrorist campaign of bombings and spectacular hijackings in their host’s country. Their almost monthly plane hijackings were mainly bloodless as this was before 9/11’s religiously motivated suicide terrorism killed all the fun of a good hijack (religion ruins everything).
But the mayhem they brought to Jordan wasn’t bloodless. The PM was assassinated and a near civil war ensued, almost toppling the state until the 100,000 Palestinian fighters and their families were thrown out, to Lebanon.
Then came the wider Lebanese horror. Lebanon was pretty evenly split between Christians and Muslims until the Palestinians arrived around 1968 and got busy destabilizing that country. There was already great disharmony, class-wise and religion-wise but the arrival of the Palestinians ultimately tipped it into a hideous civil war lasting from 1975 to 1990. The Palestinians tried to establish “Fatahstan”, the entire southern part of Lebanon – somebody else’s country – and continued to rocket cities in northern Israel from there.
Trying to assassinate the Israeli ambassador to the UK in 1981 was the final straw so Israel invaded Lebanon, ultimately up to Beirut. In 2006, again, more rockets into northern Israel and another war ensued. These rockets were from Hezbollah, one of the (Shia’) parties to the earlier civil war in part started by the Palestinians and their allies today.
About a third of Lebanon is Christian now and the Palestinians are far from popular with them. Lebanese frequently complain about the chaos the Palestinians have brought to their country however it is always easier to… blame the Jews.
Bad houseguest evidence exhibit three occurred in 1991 and it was terrible. Kuwait expelled a large contingent of Palestinians tens of thousands strong. Why? Well when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait both the PLO and Kuwait-resident Palestinians took the side of the invading Iraqis!
So imagine, like Kuwait, you take in a “refugee” to couch surf in your home. Out of kindness. One day there’s a home invasion and your houseguest unites with the home invaders and helps them beat you up and steal your home!
Gaza has a large border with Egypt and in the last decade 3,000 Egyptians have been killed by an Islamic insurrection in Sinai which is in direct co-operation with Hamas.
Egypt’s hatred of the Palestinians goes back nearly a century even though many Palestinians have family roots there. Ask any random Palestinian his full name and Egyptian, Syrian or Jordanian place-names almost always are mentioned because the “Palestinian people” mainly arrived from surrounding states to work on British and Zionist infrastructure projects in the 1930s and 1940s. Many after Jewish arrivals.
Very few Palestinians today have local family roots in Israel before the 1930s. In fact, the very notion of a “Palestinian State” dates back only to the foundation of the PLO in the mid-1960s. Egypt will shoot Palestinians were they to mass into their country via the Gaza border: they hate them that much.
Even calling Palestinians “refugees” is a total misnomer. “Refugee” – in all other contexts everywhere – is a status, a legal fiction that one loses on arrival at safety/sanctuary. It certainly isn’t inherited like a title or a piano. Only in the UN, the Arab world and on idiot Western campuses are Palestinian descendants “refugees”.
While we’re on definitions, these “refugees” don’t live in “camps”, despite the howls. I’ve visited these “camps” where people of Palestinian descent (almost nobody except the most doddering born anywhere but Lebanon) live. The neighborhoods are a little shabbier but otherwise they’re indistinguishable from the perennially rundown low rent Lebanese cities around them.
Lebanon forces these people, nearly all born in Lebanon, into the half-life of the barely tolerated, with no citizenship, almost no rights, so kudos to their “Arab brothers in arms.” This pattern is uniform throughout the Arab world to prevent the Palestinians from prospering. Except over the graves of the Jews. So to review: not refugees, not camps.
The people of Gaza, and exiles in Lebanon and Syria are the descendants, often great grandchildren of people who left the area, mainly after Arab initiated wars in 1948 and 1967.
Their real life “connection” with Palestine is pure magical thinking, encouraged by the socialist left in the west, criminal psychopaths like Hamas, the UN and nearly all the other Arab governments to have a rallying point.
That rallying point – thinly disguised Jew hatred (“Anti-Zionism”) – is their only unity and a convenient subject changer whenever their own failed economics, grotesque human rights records or international hooliganism are at issue. Saddam Hussein can kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims, as can Assad of Syria and be lionized.
Millions of Muslims died over the past half century at the hands of other Muslims and untold hundreds of thousands are currently being buggered by the communists in western China (infidel on Muslim violence, note) and Myanmar (ditto)… and there’s not a peep from the Arab governments. Or from the socialist left in Pyongyang, Havana or Berkley.
The more you study biology, particularly genetics and race, the less racist you will be: IQ is distributed very equally across humanity. What is not: culture, values, grand narratives. Palestinian Arabs are not incapable of flourishing, they’re no stupider, smarter or better drivers than Jews, but those in the “Liberate Palestine” camp are working under a really bad set of assumptions and motivations. …
Palestinians within Israel, 21% (!) of the population of Israeli citizens flourish. They have more rights than the entire Islamosphere and more money than anyone in the Islamosphere excepting hydrocarbon lottery winners like the Qataris and Emiratis. Who have more money than almost anybody but very, very few political or social rights: so no pride parades in Dubai.
Palestinian Arabs have done better than the average in South America, Central America, Australia and the US as immigrants. Of course, then they’re immigrants motivated by success and freedom, not self professed “refugees” whose grand narrative consists entirely of resentment, vengeance and jihad.
Arab elites, despite their public pronouncements, their “Arab solidarity” when outsiders are watching despise the Palestinian nationalists deeply. None gave them citizenship in their “exile” while waiting for the Jews to be “thrown into the sea” (as promised in 1948) or after, or now. Oh they hate the Jews reflexively, literally religiously as anti-Semitism is a cornerstone of the Koran, but they really hate Hamas, the PLO before it and the Palestinian masses.
Arab elites and rulers see the culture of rage, poison and violence that the Palestinian population in the Middle East is capable of and recoil: they want no part of it destabilizing their own countries.
Remember, even in the self-inflicted ruins of their own broken city 80-90% of Gazans still support Oct. 7th and wish to repeat it. What (Arab) ruler would welcome this suicidal psychopathy?
Finally, Israel does what it does not for greed, empire, meanness or colonialist cis-heteronormativity. Israel does what it does for one reason: self-defense: to stay alive while surrounded by a death cult whose members’ lives, at scale, are built around the project of destroying it.
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David Anderson is an Australian-American lawyer in NYC with post-graduate level education in Middle East politics and psychology and a career background in finance and law. He studied Arabic to an insufficient but passable level and has travelled extensively in the Islamosphere. This article is republished from The Moderate Voice, which trades stories with San Diego Jewish World under the auspices of the San Diego Online News Association.