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Abu Mazen Charges that the Arab States Are the Cause of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
(Wall Street Journal; June 5, 2003) Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) penned an article in March 1976 in Falastin al-Thawra, the official journal of the PLO in Beirut: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe" (emphasis added). As Abu Mazen alluded, it was in large part due to threats and fear-mongering from Arab leaders that some 700,000 Arabs fled Israel in 1948 when the new state was invaded by Arab armies. Ever since, the growing refugee population, now around 4 million by UN estimates, has been corralled into squalid camps scattered across the Middle East - in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank. In 1950, the UN set up the United Nations Relief and Works Agency as a "temporary" relief effort for Palestinian refugees. Former UNRWA director Ralph Galloway stated eight years later that, "the Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die." The only thing that has changed since then is the number of Palestinians cooped up in these prisons. Sending three to five million Palestinians into Israel, a country of 6.5 million (which is already host to 1.2 million Arabs) could change Israel into a predominantly Palestinian state and the PA knows it. Today the UN spends more than a quarter billion dollars a year to keep Palestinian refugees in their camps, which are often the factories of desperation that produce suicide bombers. Israel has repeatedly offered to help smooth the settlement of the refugees elsewhere, but Arab states refuse, preferring to use the refugees as political pawns to perpetuate the conflict with Israel and divert public consciousness away from festering domestic problems.