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9. There have been roughly as many Jews displaced from Arab Nations as Arabs displaced from Israeli territory. Israel has absorbed the Jewish refugees, yet the Arab world refuses to accept the Palestinian Arabs into their countries.
There have been two refugee populations created by the Arab-Israeli conflict, not one. There were an estimated 754,000 Jews in Arab countries in 1948, the year of Israel's establishment; today, by contrast, there are fewer than 8,000, the bulk of whom live in Morocco and Tunisia.
While world attention has been focused on the Palestinian refugees, the plight of Jews from Arab countries, hundreds of thousands of whom became refugees as well, has been largely ignored. Indeed, many experts believe that the size of the two groups was roughly comparable. But there was one profound difference - Israel immediately absorbed the Jewish refugees, while the Palestinian refugees were placed in camps and deliberately kept there as a matter of calculated Arab policy and with the complicity of the UN.
There is no comparable situation in the world today where a refugee population has been cynically exploited in this way. Until now, only one Arab country - Jordan - has offered citizenship to the Palestinian refugees.
The other 21 Arab countries, with their vast territory and common language, religion, and ethnic roots with the Palestinians, have refused to do so. Sadly, they appear to have little interest in alleviating the plight of refugees living in often squalid camps for two and three generations. Rather, they want to breed hatred of Israel and thus use the refugees as a key weapon in the ongoing struggle against Israel.
Throughout history, refugees have been settled by their allies and kinfolk in neighboring lands. But for Arab leaders to allow Palestinians to settle in neighboring countries would be to admit that the wars of 1948 and 1967 really ended as they did. Thus, Arab leaders pushed Palestinians into squalid, "temporary" camps to provide the world with a pathetic, swarming testament to - as they see it - the barbarity of "the Zionist entity." Meanwhile, the number of Palestinian refugees has ballooned from 800,000 to 3.5 million.
What happened to the Arab refugees from Israel?
http://palestinefacts.org/pf_independence_refugees_arabs_what.php
What happened to the Jewish refugees from Middle Eastern countries?
http://palestinefacts.org/pf_independence_refugees_jews_what.php
Why did Jews go to Israel from other Middle Eastern countries?
http://palestinefacts.org/pf_independence_refugees_jews_why.php
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