The Palestinian refugees were intentionally kept as such to act as a thorn in Israel’s side.

People who are nominally familiar with the Arab-Israeli conflict are most certainly familiar with the issue of Palestinian refugees. When Palestine was partitioned into Jewish and Arab states, the Jews accepted the plan, but the Arabs utterly rejected it. Shortly thereafter, the surrounding Arab countries — Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq — invaded Israel in the hope of wiping it off the map before it could even breathe. In the ensuing battle, some 600,000 Arabs either fled their homes or were driven out. Israel had survived its bloody birth.

In the decade following Israel’s creation, however, Jews who had been residing in Islamic lands found themselves surrounded by an increasingly hostile population. Some 900,000 Jews were coerced or frightened into fleeing their homelands following lethal riots and discriminatory legislation. Most ended up in Israel where they started new lives. To this day, slightly over half of Israel’s Jewish population is compromised of those Jewish refugees and their descendents.

The largest group of Jews that came to Israel was the Moroccans. In 1948 the Moroccan Jewish population was 265,000; now it is about 5,500. The leader of Israel’s Labor party, Amir Peretz, was born in Morocco.

One of the oldest Jewish populations outside of the land of Israel is the Persian Jews. Jews have lived in Iran since the 6th century B.C. Currently Iran is home to the largest population of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel, although many fled in 1979 when the Islamic fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. Israel’s minister of defense, Shaul Mofaz, was born in Iran. He speaks fluent Farsi.

Another ancient population is the Jews of Iraq. At the time of World War I, Jews constituted one-third of the population of Baghdad. However, after World War II Iraq’s 2,700-year-old Jewish population suffered violent persecution. Today about 38 Jews live in Baghdad.

Another group of Jews whose population currently resides in Israel are the Yemenites. In 1948 the Jewish population of Yemen was about 55,000. Today it is a few hundred.

And the list goes on and on. Other countries that virtually forced their entire Jewish populations to flee are Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya. Indeed, the only “eastern” country that does not have a history of anti-Jewish persecution is India.

The Palestinian refugees were intentionally kept as such to act as a thorn in Israel’s side. So long as there are Palestinian refugees who demand a right of return to their exact homes that are now in Israel, the conflict is not settled. Curiously, every descendent of the original 600,000 Palestinian refugees are also considered refugees, so that the number is now in the millions.

But recent history proves that the Arab-Israeli conflict produced more Jewish refugees than Arab refugees. Further, many of the Jewish populations were prosperous and well off. The amount of land and property lost easily exceeds that of the Palestinian refugees.

Some Arab leaders have been politically astute enough to realize the inherent hypocrisy in demanding Palestinian refugees should have a “right” to return but not Jewish Middle Eastern refugees. Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Mu’amar Khaddafi even suggested that Jews from the two aforementioned states could return “home.” Curiously, no Libyan or Iraqi Jews took up the offer.

In many wars there have been exchanges of populations. It happened between Greece and Turkey, India and Pakistan, and many others in many times and places. The only conflict in the world, however, where one side insists that every single refugee and their grandchildren have the right to return to their homes that they fled over half a century is the Arab-Israeli conflict. Makes you sort of go, “hmmmm … ”

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