A blog called Elder of Ziyon reports:
The US envoy to the Middle East just doomed any remote chance there might have ever been for a peaceful two-state solution.
Palestine Press Agency quotes Mitchell as having told his Lebanese hosts that the US “does not support the resettlement of the Palestinians” in Lebanon. The US Embassy website in Lebanon said “As the Special Envoy, Mitchell confirmed to Prime Minister Hariri in their meeting last evening the U.S. will not support the forced naturalization of Palestinians in Lebanon.”
Then follows a clear summary of the Palestinian problem, with emphasis on something we haven’t talked about much. Some highlights:
. . . the definition of “Palestinian refugee” is unique among all world refugees. The UNRWA created an entirely news class of refugees where the descendants of Palestinian Arab refugees are considered refugees themselves. Using this bizarre definition, the number of Palestinian Arab “refugees” is fated to grow, forever. It is simply impossible to imagine that they will all ever “return” to “Palestine.” They are now at about 10,000,000 and counting.
As far back as the 1950s, the world realized that there was no solution for the (then) hundreds of thousands of refugees that did not include their eventual resettlement in Arab countries. Yet the Arab League, in an astonishing display of bigotry against their fellow Arabs that persists to this day, ruled that no Palestinian Arabs can become naturalized citizens of Arab countries – while all other Arabs can.
This is, in sum, the major reason why millions of Arabs are stateless today. Even if you want to blame Israel for expelling every one of the 600,000 Arabs in 1948 (which is clearly not true,) the only people responsible for their continued suffering over the past 61 years are the Arab leaders who pretend to support them while refusing to take in their “brethren” and give them full rights.
The UN’s agency, UNRWA has been complicit in this dereliction of duty by the Arab leaders, never even suggesting that the Palestinians could settle anywhere but Israel, as far as I know. The blogger goes on to point out that any time Palestinians have had the opportunity to settle in an Arab country, they have jumped at the chance.
So today we have millions of people, falsely labeled as “refugees,” who never stepped foot in British Mandate Palestine and who, if they were any other group of people, would have become citizens of the nations they were born in. The reason is purely because of Arab bigotry and intransigence.
There is no realistic solution to the “Palestinian” problem as long as this naked bigotry is allowed to continue. Millions of Palestinian Arabs are not going to stream into a nation of “Palestine.” The only solution must include treating this population exactly the same way as other refugee populations are treated.
The US should be in the forefront of insisting that the “moderate” Arab nations and allies step up and take their share of responsibility for decades of Palestinian Arab suffering.
Instead, George Mitchell (who has Lebanese ancestry) has now officially stated that the US supports this institutionalized discrimination by Arab leaders. A golden opportunity to point out embedded Arab bigotry and to publicize and shame Arabs into taking responsibility for their treatment of Palestinian Arabs is now lost.
He points out:
The losers, as always, are the actual Arabs of Palestinian Arab ancestry who are kept in limbo by the very people who are claiming to care the most about them.
Right you are, Elder. But there are other losers. Those are the Jews, both in Israel and worldwide. Thanks to a propaganda blitz that’s gone on for decades, this pitiful state of the Palestinians is blamed on Israel in the most hateful, disgusting and dishonest way. So successful has this been that the worldwide hatred for Israel is now moving into hatred for Jews in general, and in some ostensibly civilized countries in Europe Jews are not safe.
Coincidentally, just before I read Elder of Ziyon’s post a friend sent me this video from Just Journalism, a new British website devoted to fighting the new anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli press coverage that dominates the UK media and helps spread the virus in Britain.