Displaced, Removed = Refugees
Geographic instability caused by environmental events such as crop failures, or social events such as political instability, or political events such as war, have always resulted in great swaths of populations removing themselves from the immediate proximity of starvation or homelessness or the prospect of violent death. There has always existed movements of large groups of people who for one reason or another have had their lives disrupted, occasioning geographic dispersal.At the present time, a million or more Iraqis have left their embattled country, while many Afghans have been returning to their country in hope for the future. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Sudanese have entered Chad and live in squalid refugee camps there, hoping for an eventual return. Refugees from war-torn countries like Somalia and Sierra Leone. And the famous tragedy that visited Palestinian Arabs dispersing them to neighbouring Arab countries as refugees.
Fact is, there are an estimated thirty-three million refugees world wide. That represents one big whack of homeless people living in refugee camps awaiting repatriation or trying desperately to emigrate to countries that will accept them as refugee-status prospects for future citizenship. There are 21 million displaced within their own countries of origin, and another 12 million who have fled to neighbouring countries.
So that puts things in a kind of miserable perspective as far as displaced persons and numbers go; from Europe, to Central America, from Africa to the Middle East. And then there is that signal group of whom the world hears most frequently; the Palestinians. Of whom there were originally 600,000, 60 years ago. Ample time, one would think, to have been absorbed into the mainstream of the neighbouring countries to which they fled after the creation of the State of Israel.
But no, the Palestinian refugees remain a living canker on the consciousness of the world. They fled the portion of the Middle East they considered their own, although it never had the distinction of legal statehood, and was always the purview of neighbourly aspirational attachment. The Palestinians spurned the offer of the United Nations to accept a portion of the Palestinian Territories, while the other portion was designated as a nascent Jewish state.
That was in 1948. It is instructive to consider that a bare two decades earlier, during the Great Depression, the leaders of the United States of America looked around trying to solve their great problem of unemployment. A decision was made that all American jobs should be held by "white" Americans. Accordingly it became government policy to track down all Americans of Mexican descent and to disinvest them of the assurances ingrained in their American citizenship.
Mexican-Americans were rounded up in a truly summary fashion, and shipped by train in their hundreds of thousands to northern Mexico where they were dumped and left to fend for themselves. Their properties were confiscated, their possessions held back, although there had been some promises to the reluctantly departing Mexican-Americans that assured their belongings would follow. Which they never did.
Their properties were slapped with liens which they could not pay, and thus sold off, the funds received righteously utilized to pay back the government for their train passage to Mexico. This citizen-dismissal, the abrogation of all human rights, the lack of accountability, was visited on legitimate citizens of the United States as a method by which remaining citizens could have employment to counter the effects of the depression.
The Mexican-Americans lived in great poverty. The government of Mexico was not in a position to offer much help to what were essentially hordes of unwanted Americans, albeit of Mexican descent. There is no record of these Americans, many of whom since returned to the United States, of ever having sought recompense. There is ample record of, decades after having been sent into effective exile, young Mexican American men receiving call-up summonses to serve in their country's military - and that none of the young men failed to respond.
What, exactly, is it about the Palestinian Arabs that sets them so apart and above the plight of the world's homeless? In fact, it is the world at large, stimulated and encouraged by the very neighbouring Arab states many of which encouraged them to flee to begin with - and thereafter when the planned destruction of Israel failed to execute as planned - determined to retain the refugees as restive, plaintive, pitiful victims.
Why, now, to ensure the long-sought establishment of a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians (and their mentors) must it be seen to be Israel's responsibility to offer the laurel and the dove - both - in agreeing to terms clearly inimical to her survival as a Jewish state?
Labels: Israel, Justice, Political Realities
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, November 07, 2007
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