Gil Ronen had a great piece recently on Arutz 7′s site, exposing Saeb Erekat’s brazen attempt to rewrite history when it came to partition plans and peace efforts prior to the establishment of the State of Israel.

Gil Ronen writes:

Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat penned an opinion piece for the British Guardian last Friday in which he defended the PA’s insistence on the “Right of Return” – the demand that Israel allow into its borders Arabs who fled Israel in 1948,  as well as their descendants, numbered in the millions.. However, Erekat did some rewriting of history in the process.

Erekat opened his article by mentioning Count Folke Bernadotte, the first UN mediator to the Arab-Israeli conflict, who stated: “It would be an offense against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent [Arab] victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine.”

Israel’s recognition of the Arabs’ “refugee rights,” Erekat argued, “will lead to a lasting peace – the kind of peace envisaged by Lord Bernadotte and hoped for by Palestinians and Israelis alike.”

What Erekat failed to note was that the Arab world bluntly rejected Bernadotte’s plan for peace between Jews and Arabs and opted for war against the nascent state of Israel instead. As Syrian officer Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib said at the time, “Most of these mediators are spies for the Jews anyway.”

Bernadotte was appointed mediator by the UN General Assembly on May 20, 1948, and on June 11, succeeded in arranging a 30-day cease-fire. After visiting Cairo, Beirut, Amman and Tel Aviv, he proposed that the UN partition plan for the Land of Israel be scrapped, and proposed instead a plan to unite Arabs and Jews in one state consisting of a very small Jewish entity on the coast and in the Galilee, and an enlarged Transjordan. Jerusalem would be under Arab sovereignty, as would the entire Negev.

The Arabs refused to accept even this plan, however, and the Jews rejected the plan after the Arabs did.

Bernadotte noted in his journal that the “Palestinian” Arabs had little desire for independence.

The Palestinian Arabs had at present no will of their own. Neither have they ever developed any specifically Palestinian nationalism. The demand for a separate Arab state in Palestine is consequently relatively weak. It would seem as though in existing circumstances most of the Palestinian Arabs would be quite content to be incorporated in Transjordan.

Bernadotte was later assassinated by Jewish nationalists from the Lechi group – hated by the British, who named them the “Stern Gang” after their founding leader, Avraham ‘Yair’ Stern, who was killed by the British occupying forces.

Erekat is presumably aware of British sensitivities and probably chose Bernadotte for a reason. However, as noted – it was the Arab side that was first to reject Bernadotte’s generous plan. The Arabs then launched a genocidal war against Israel – and lost it. The result included many more refugees, whom the Arabs now wish to put back into Israeli territory, along with their descendants.

How about this story for irony!  Queen Rania of Jordan, a country supposedly at peace with Israel, has recently written a book on tolerance—specifically about bridging the cultural gap between the Arab world and the Western world—but, somehow that tolerance doesn’t extend to the Jews living next door!

Tom Gross reports on this:

Jordan’s Queen Rania says she is on a mission to bridge the religious and cultural divides between the Muslim and Western worlds. To help advance this worthy goal, she has written a children’s book (for kids aged 4-8) called “The Sandwich Swap”.

The book uses lunch sandwiches (the Western girl, Lily, has a peanut butter and jelly one, the Muslim girl, Salma, has one with pita and hummus) as a metaphor for the differences between two friends from different cultures.

The book’s aim is to promote openness, tolerance and multiculturalism, and in the U.S. it has been published by a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.

Following high-profile TV interviews between Queen Rania and Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters, and a reading at the United Nations, the book has entered The New York Times’ bestseller list.

And yet Queen Rania, who since 2007 has been working with UNICEF on child welfare issues and is honorary chairwoman of the UN’s effort to promote the education of girls, has (according to press reports) now refused offers to have her book published in Hebrew for distribution in Israel, a country with which Jordan has signed a peace treaty.

So much for the UN and Queen Rania promoting tolerance.

When it comes to Palestinians there is a monumental double standard in the world, such that Israel gets condemned right and left for their supposed “treatment” of the Palestinians, while Arab countries get a complete free pass for doing the exact same things (and often worse).

Squalid Palestinian refugee camps are not only found in Israel’s disputed territories. They are also found in the neighboring Arab countries, but you’d never know that from most of the mainstream media. And you’d also never know that they are often in even worse conditions there than in Israel, that they contain even more Palestinian refugees than those in Israel, and that they are often treated to persecution even worse than the supposed “persecution” in Israel.

Every once in a long while, a newspaper decides to do the rare report on this, and this time the honor goes to Britain’s The Independent. In a special report by Judith Miller and David Samuels, the Palestinians’ treatment by their brethren is laid bare for all to see. It’s a great article to read in full, but here are some excerpts (emphasis mine):

It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state.

In other words, these people are used as pawns by their own brethren just to make Israel look bad. The more these Arab countries persecute their Palestinians brethren and keep them in the dirt, the more they could spotlight it and bizarrely blame Israel for their conditions!

Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel – and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian “Nakba”, or catastrophe – this one at hands of the Arab governments. “Marginalised, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing atop multiple fault lines,” a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Lebanon recently observed, “the refugee population constitutes a time bomb.”

The fact that the divided Palestinian political leadership is silent about the mistreatment of the refugees by Arab states does not make such behaviour any less reprehensible – or less dangerous.

Just as bizarre, you have the Palestinian leadership themselves, based in Israel, not defending their own across the border and not calling attention to their plight, only because it would detract from the world’s hate that they are too busy directing at Israel. So, you have hundreds of thousands of Palestinians getting kicked around Iraq, Kuwait, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, etc… and the Palestinian leaders apparently care only about the fewer numbers living in Israel. Again, because it’s not the plight of their own people that they primarily are concerned with, but rather the inverse: the vilification of Israel is all they really care about, their brethren be damned.

The report then provides some examples:

Some 250,000 Palestinians were chased out of Kuwait and other Gulf States to punish the Palestinian political leadership for supporting Saddam Hussein. Tens of thousands of Palestinian residents of Iraq were similarly dispossessed after the second Gulf war.

In 2001, Palestinians in Lebanon were stripped of the right to own property, or to pass on the property that they already owned to their children – and banned from working as doctors, lawyers, pharmacists or in 20 other professions. Even the Palestinian refugee community in Jordan, historically the most welcoming Arab state, has reason to feel insecure in the face of official threats to revoke their citizenship. The systematic refusal of Arab governments to grant basic human rights to Palestinians who are born and die in their countries – combined with periodic mass expulsions of entire Palestinian communities – recalls the treatment of Jews in medieval Europe.

The only difference is that Jews were bounced around Europe by the Christians. Here, it’s Palestinians getting bounced around the Middle East by their own Arab brethren.

The report then highlights the ridiculous new definition of a “refugee”, the redefinition coming about especially for the Palestinians:

The only governing authority that Palestinians living in the camps have ever known is UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Established by the UN on 8 December 1949 to assist 650,000 impoverished Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, UNRWA has been battling budget cuts and strikes among its employees as it struggles to provide subsidies and services to Palestinian refugees, who are defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948″.

The inclusion of the descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees in UNRWA’s mandate has no parallel in international humanitarian law and is responsible for the growth of the official numbers of Palestinian refugees in foreign countries from 711,000 to 4.6 million during decades when the number of ageing refugees from the 1948 Israeli war of independence in was in fact declining. UNRWA’s grant of refugee status to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original Palestinian refugees according to the principle of patrilineal descent, with no limit on the generations that can obtain refugee status, has made it easy for host countries to flout their obligations under international law. According to Article 34 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, “The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalisation of refugees,” and must “make every effort to expedite naturalisation proceedings” – the opposite of what happened to the Palestinians in every Arab country in which they settled, save Jordan.

So, what to do with all of these so-called “refugees” (most of whom actually never personally left any place to seek actual refuge someplace else)?

Daniel Kurtzer agrees no one is likely to make a deal that includes a substantial return of the Palestinian diaspora. “Most Palestinian refugees know it, as do the settlers,” he says. So rather than wait for American mediators or Arab states to impose solutions on them, the Palestinians themselves should begin to tackle the diabolically difficult issues inherent in the resolution of their political and economic future. “What we need is a refugee summit,” he says. “I’m looking for a real conversation that must start internally and soon.”

After 60 years of failed wars, and failed peace, it is time to put politics aside and to insist that the basic rights of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries be respected – whether or not their children’s children return to Haifa anytime soon. While Saudi Arabia may not wish to host Israeli tourists, it can easily afford to integrate the estimated 240,000 Palestinian refugees who already live in the kingdom – just as Egypt, which has received close to $60bn in US aid, and has a population of 81 million, can grant legal rights to an estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. One can only imagine the outrage that the world community would rightly visit upon Israel if Israeli Arabs were subject to the vile discriminatory laws applied to Palestinians living in Arab countries. Surely, Palestinian Arabs can keep their own national dream alive in the countries where they were born, while also enjoying the freedom to work, vote and own property?

A practical solution to the crisis of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries will focus on Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, which together play host to approximately 3 million of the estimated 4.6 million Palestinian refugees living outside the West Bank and Gaza. While each of these countries has chosen different legal and political approaches to the 1948 refugees and their descendants, they share a political desire to sublimate the rights of Palestinian residents, treating them as unwanted guests or as tools to be used in pursuing wider political interests – but rarely as fully-fledged members of society. Lebanon, where Palestinians led by Yasser Arafat are widely blamed for having sparked the 1975 civil war, is the worst offender against international norms. Yet even in Jordan, which is in many ways a model for the humane treatment of a large refugee population, Palestinians today feel markedly less secure than they did two decades ago, or even five years ago.

The report then provides some more examples of their treatment by their Arab brethren:

Outside of Iraq, whose Palestinian population fled en masse after the fall of Saddam, nowhere has the situation of the Palestinian refugees worsened so dramatically as in Lebanon. Since the early Sixties, Palestinians there have been barred from working in medicine, dentistry and the law. In 2001, the Lebanese parliament adopted an amendment to the country’s property laws that prohibited the acquisition of real estate by “any person not a citizen of a recognised state” – meaning the estimated 250,000 to 400,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon. Palestinians who had acquired real estate prior to 2001 were barred from bequeathing property to their children.

Right-wing Christians and Shi’ite radicals alike support discriminatory legislation that further impoverishes Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, with the stated goal of preventing them from beginning the process of naturalisation, known as tawtin. In his inaugural speech in May, 2008, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, a Christian and former head of the country’s armed forces, reaffirmed “Lebanon’s categorical refusal of naturalisation”, a statement echoed by the former Lebanese ambassador to the US, Nassib Lahoud, who told us recently in Beirut: “The confessional balance does not allow these things to happen … at the moment the Palestinians are citizens of a state that does not exist.” His sentiments were echoed by Hizbollah’s spokesman on the Palestinian question, Hassan Hodroj. “The threat of tawtin is genuine,” Hodroj explained. “It is one of the ways in which Israel, backed by the US, is endangering the region.”

The fact that the living standard of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has been deemed “catastrophic” by both UNRWA and by the Lebanese government can therefore be understood as a deliberate result of official state policy that is supported by all parties across Lebanon’s divided confessional spectrum. As a member of the Lebanese parliament, Ghassan Moukheiber, explained in an interview with the ICG, “our official policy is to maintain Palestinians in a vulnerable, precarious situation to diminish prospects for their naturalisation or permanent settlement“.

…While Palestinian refugees and their descendants inside Syria are not allowed to vote or hold Syrian passports, they are free from the overt discrimination that has turned Lebanon into a recruiting ground for al-Qa’ida. The legal status of Palestinians inside Syria is defined by a 1956 law that states that grants them “the right to employment, commerce, and national service, while preserving their original nationality”. More than 100,000 of the estimated 450,000 Palestinians in Syria live in or around the Yarmouk refugee camp, which long ago became a neighbourhood of Damascus.

While Palestinians are reasonably well integrated into the Syrian socio-economic structure, according to the scholar Laurie Brand they do not have the right to vote, nor can they stand for parliament or other political offices. Palestinians are barred from buying farmland and prohibited from owning more than one house. The female descendant of a Palestinian refugee can become a Syrian citizen by marrying a Syrian man. The male descendants of Palestinian men and their children are barred from acquiring Syrian citizenship, even if they marry Syrian women.

These are all things you’d never know just from listening to most news reports. The double-standard applied to Israel and the hypocrisy and false piety of the world when it comes the the “plight” of the Palestinians is just sickening, and more people need to be aware of the truth.

Yesterday, MEMRI put out a special dispatch to highlight several articles published by the Daoud al-Shiryan, the Deputy Secretary-General of al-Arabiya TV, on the plight of the Palestinian “refugees”—those perpetual refugees still living in perpetual refugee camps due to the restrictive policies of their host countries. Al-Shiryan criticizes the way these countries have treated them and calls on them to integrate the refugees into their societies and to resettle them, essentially before the world catches on to what is being done under the guise of their supposed “zealous devotion to the Right of Return.”

Some excerpts from his articles:

Objecting to [refugee] resettlement is no different than objecting to peace. It is nothing but an unrealistic slogan. The Arabs have agreed to peace, although they realize that there cannot be peace without [refugee] resettlement. But they disregard this fact, viewing the refugee issue as a point of controversy, when it is [actually] a central and key issue in the peace process. The fear [of being accused of renouncing the nationalist] slogans [calling for] struggle, resistance, and casting Israel into the sea – slogans which emerged at the outset of the peace process with Israel – and the link that has been established between the issue [of resettlement] and ethnic and political problems in some [Arab] countries – have [all] become an obstacle to a realistic and honest approach to the issue.

Arabs who object to the [refugee] resettlement plan contend that they are motivated by their zealous devotion to the Right of Return. But they have not lifted a finger to keep this right alive in the consciousness of the Palestinian ‘detainees’ in the camps of abasement. As a result, this spurious devotion has evoked the opposite reaction: a Palestinian [refugee] now hopes to emigrate to America, Europe, Canada, or Australia in order to escape the hell of the Palestinian refugee camps, which have played a part in killing his will to live.

These countries must stop treating the Palestinians like a plague, using slogans which, as we all know, have become nothing but empty utterances in a loathsome struggle. We must break the isolation of the Palestinians in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. A Palestinian should be made to feel like a welcome and dear guest – before some external intervention comes along and grants him the right to live in dignity, to everyone’s consternation.

[My] passion for [refugee] resettlement is not a rejection of the Right of Return, but rather of the inhuman treatment of the Palestinians in the ‘countries of the refugee camps.’ Foremost among these countries is Lebanon, which bars the Palestinians from 72 professions, so as to prevent them from living in dignity – despite the fact that you wouldn’t find such a long list of professions even on Mars.

Can you just imagine the global uproar that would ensue if the title of this post was referring to a new Israeli policy? It would be the top breaking news on every news wire.

Yet, this is exactly what’s happening in Jordan… and you don’t even hear anything about it at all. The Jerusalem Post reports that “Jordanian authorities have started revoking the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians living in Jordan to avoid a situation in which they would be ‘resettled’ permanently in the kingdom.”

I’ve said many times that the Arab world treats the Palestinians like dogs and keeps them in refugee camps in perpetuity for the sole purpose of using them as pawn in villifying Israel and keeping the eternal spotlight on Israel’s supposed “human rights violations”, so as to distract the world from their human rights violations—and real human rights violations at that.

Well, in the case of the Jordanians latest policy, they don’t even try to hide that fact! The report states that “the Jordanians have justified the latest measure by arguing that it’s aimed at avoiding a situation in which the Palestinians would ever be prevented from returning to their original homes inside Israel.”

As an interesting secondary side note, the report states that:

that decision, said Jordan’s Interior Minister Nayef al-Kadi, was taken at the request of the PLO and the Arab world to consolidate the status of the PLO as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.

“Our goal is to prevent Israel from emptying the Palestinian territories of their original inhabitants,” the minister explained, confirming that the kingdom had begun revoking the citizenship of Palestinians.

“We should be thanked for taking this measure,” he said. “We are fulfilling our national duty because Israel wants to expel the Palestinians from their homeland.”

This has got to be one of the most amazing spins ever put on any controversial policy—and the Arab world has put quite a lot of spin on just about everything they do. But, come on, this has got to take the cake!

Despite al-Kadi’s contentions, the Palestinian Authority doesn’t seem to admit to this supposed collaboration:

A PA official in Ramallah expressed deep concern over Jordan’s latest move and said that it would only worsen the conditions of Palestinians living in the kingdom. The official said that PA President Mahmoud Abbas raised the issue with King Abdullah II on a number of occasions, but the Jordanians have refused to retract.