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The War Isn't Over Yet

(Ha'aretz) Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz - In the huge population transfer between India and Pakistan in 1947, 15 million people became refugees. In post-World War II Europe, 12 million Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe and over a million Poles left Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese fled from China after the Communists came to power in 1949, and over a million fled from North Vietnam to South Vietnam in the early 1950s. None of these situations gave rise to a "refugee problem" that hasn't been solved to this day. None of the millions who became refugees in the 1940s are seriously asking to return to their previous homes, and certainly they don't receive international recognition and institutional support for such a demand. The refugees were rehabilitated in the countries where they found refuge and began their lives again. Palestinian Arabs carried out total ethnic cleansing against the Jews, and did not leave a single Jew in the territory remaining in their hands at the end of the war in 1949. That was also the fate of many Jews who had lived in Arab countries for hundreds and thousands of years. The Palestinians refuse to see their departure from the land as something that happens during wars (in their case, the side that started the war and lost was the side that left), but as part of a conspiracy by a population group that had no rights to the land, which forced itself on a country that didn't belong to it. The continuation of the Palestinian refugee problem is a result of an Arab and Palestinian decision to convey a clear message: The war they began 69 years ago in response to the UN Partition Plan - a war whose objective was to prevent the Jewish people from realizing its right of self-definition in its homeland - isn't over yet. Dr. Einat Wilf, a senior fellow with the Jewish People Policy Institute, is a former Knesset member. Adi Schwartz was a staff writer and senior editor at Ha'aretz (1999-2009).
2016-12-05 00:00:00
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