RE: Gaza's Ordeal Continues

Egypt invaded territory that was not hers in 1948 and took over the Gaza Strip for 19 years until 1967. Egypt then kept the Arab refugees in camps with a curfew until the time when Israel freed them from the curfew restrictions. Jordan also illegally took over the area that the 1947 United Nations reports had previously called  Judea and Samaria (and now calls the West Bank). Jordan's regime in this invaded area was not recognized except by Britain and Pakistan. It destroyed Jewish property including scores of synagogues there. Neither of these examples gives one much ground for expecting future peaceful behavior. One country, Egypt, did not solve the Palestinian Arab problem when it could, the other showed that it was not fit to deal with a mixed population.

  What can be done? The Europeans had a really massive refugee problem after WW2. Some 10 million refugees were re-settled peacefully. They number from the Finns pushed out by the Soviet Union in its land-grab and the millions of Poles and Germans uprooted from homes they had lived in for generations untold. Others fled the closing of the Iron Curtain.

    In contrast many of the refugee Arabs had only been in Mandate Palestine just over two years -- that is how UNRWA defines them. Two years does not make anyone a refugee anywhere else. Europe pays for more than half the costs today. Europe should begin to have a full dialogue about the resettlement of the refugees. It is unheard of that there should be a refugee problem lasting 3 or 4 generations. Even India and Pakistan resettled their 14 million Moslem and Hindu refugees of 1947 in a short period.

     Palestinian Arabs are an educated and flexible people and they should not continue to be pawns in international politics by other powers. Is it a refugee problem or ideological blackmail? UN High Commission for Refugees has done a commendable job in other areas but what has UNRWA done in its nearly 60 years of existence to find places for the dispossessed in other Arab lands? A large number of these Gaza refugees voluntarily fled before the 1948 war began following the calls and requests of the foreign invading armies.  In the years after WW1 the Gaza was practically empty, according to British statistics of the time. The five invading States should shoulder a proportion of the solution of resettlement of the people they were responsible for becoming refugees.