A Tangled Web

THE POINT OF NO RETURN..



A useful history lesson from Don Feder on the alleged Palestinian "right of return" which so concerns the leftist BBC.





The media, which cultivate historical amnesia, rarely tell us how Palestinian refugees became refugees.



The very hour that the Jews declared statehood in 1948, they were invaded by five neighboring Arab states. The stated goal was to drive the Jews into the sea. Their would-be liberators told local Arabs to evacuate so they wouldn’t be caught in the crossfire. Latter, they were assured, they could return to their homes, as well as those of the Jews – who by then would be floating in the Mediterranean.



Roughly 600,000 Arabs followed that advice. Another 200,000, responding to the entreaties of Ben Gurion and other Zionist leaders, stayed and became full citizens of the new state.



At the same time, 800,000 Jews were driven from Arab countries, some from homes their families had known for millennia. The choice: Stay and be killed by rampaging mobs or emigrate. No one – repeat no one – is suggesting that the Jews whose families fled Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, etc. be repatriated.



Nor, for that matter, is there a claimed right of return for any of the other political refugees (numbered in the tens of millions) who trudged or were shoved across national borders throughout the 20th century.



The Germans pushed out of Poland and Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II, the Hindus and Moslems who ended up in India or Pakistan respectively, the Greeks and Armenians ejected from Turkey, the Holocaust survivors who weren’t allowed to return to their homes in Eastern Europe, the pied noir (French settlers) forced out of Algeria at the time of its independence – are but a few examples of mass migrations caused by war, revolution or politics.



Don helpfully exposes the gross double standards that afflicts the global liberal media when it comes to the Palestinians and Israel.