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Arab States' Crimes Against Palestinians
[New York Daily News] Judith Miller and David Samuels - For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a way of pressuring Israel. "Marginalized, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing atop multiple fault lines, the refugee population constitutes a time bomb," said a recent report by the International Crisis Group in Lebanon. In 2001, the estimated 250,000 Palestinians then in Lebanon were stripped by parliament of the right to own property or pass on property to their children - even as they are banned from working as doctors, lawyers, pharmacists or in 20 other major professions. Dozens of Palestinian fighters from camps in Lebanon joined Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The refusal of most Arab governments to grant basic legal rights to Palestinian residents who are born in and die in their countries contradicts the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which says that states "shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of refugees."