Brief Notes: The Eternal Refugee

Mike L.

In a recent comment Dan Bielak quoted a piece from 1968 by Eric Hoffer, author of, among other works, The True Believer, entitled "Israel’s Peculiar Position."

Hoffer wrote:

The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab

The Palestinians are the Eternal Refugees.

They are the only people on the entire planet to remain refugees since World War II. This, of course, is the fault of Arab countries surrounding the Jewish state. Israel integrated between 600 and 700 thousand Jewish refugees into itself following the '48 war, but the Palestinians were held in camps by their own.

One of the things that progressive-left haters of Israel refuse to acknowledge is that it is the Arab states that are holding the Palestinians in refugee camps. Even the Palestinian Authority has claimed that Palestinian refugees will remain refugees in any future state of Palestine.

And yet progressive-left anti-Zionists and Israel Haters tell us that it is the Jews of Israel who are guilty for the plight of Palestinian Arab refugees.

It is a lie and it is a lie that is promoted, wittingly or not, by Jewish progressives who hold conservative Jews guilty for the ongoing conflict, who spread hatred toward Jews who do not believe as they do, who sometimes declare a moral equivalency between Likud and Hamas, and who justify malice toward Jews who choose to live in Judea.

It's a disgrace.