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Why Other Arabs Resent Palestinians

(BESA Center for Strategic Studies-Bar-Ilan University) Lt.-Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar - While many Arabs and Muslims hate Israel, a good many hate the Palestinians just as much. Many of the Palestinian Arabs are not originally Palestinians at all. They are immigrants who came to the Land of Israel from all over the Arab world during the British Mandate in order to find employment in the cities and on the farms the Jews had built. Why, ask the other Arabs, should they get preferential treatment over those who remained in their original countries? At the end of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, the politics in the Arab world began to center on Israel and the "Palestinian problem," the solution to which was to be achieved by eliminating Israel. In order to succeed in that mission, the Arab "refugees" were kept in camps and not absorbed into other Arab countries. They were provided with food, education, and medical care without charge, even as other Arabs had to work to provide food, education, and medical care for their own families. "Refugees" would often sell some of their free foodstuffs to their non-refugee neighbors and make a tidy profit. Over the years, the Palestinian Arabs were given many billions of dollars by the nations of the world, so that the yearly per capita income in the PA is several times greater than that of the Arabs in Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. Much of the Arab and Muslim world is convinced that the Palestinians do not in fact want a state of their own. After all, if that state were established, the world would cease its steady donations and Palestinian Arabs would have to work just like everyone else. The writer, a senior research associate at the BESA Center, served for 25 years in IDF military intelligence.
2020-09-24 00:00:00
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