Right now, in the Middle East, Palestinian Arabs are being driven from their homes at gunpoint and forced into refugee camps. Only it is not the Israeli Army doing the driving, nor is this happening in Judea, Samaria or Gaza.
Actually, it is happening in Iraq:
The gardens of Baghdad’s Haifa Club have been turned into Middle East’s newest refugee camp as hundreds of Palestinians are driven out of their homes at gunpoint by their Iraqi neighbours.
The Haifa Club, where Palestinians came to meet, drink coffee and play table tennis, is now packed with more than 250 tents, housing 2,000 people forced to flee.
In the climate of fear and reprisals that persists in the Iraqi capital, however, Palestinians’ association with Saddam Hussein has made them easy targets.
While the Palestinian cause may stir the passions of Arabs across the Middle East, Palestinians themselves are often regarded with suspicion.
What a curious and disturbing example of the duality of the Middle Eastern mind. We are constantly assured that the plight of the Palestinians is the ‘root cause’ of the rage and anger evident in the Arab (and wider Muslim) world. Yet, as in Kuwait and now Iraq, it is a plight which their fellow Arabs appear only to eager to exacerbate.
While I don’t know why, as all of them that I’ve known (admittedly, immigrants to the US) have been highly decent and industrious people, it’s my understanding that Palestinians are generally reviled as the lowest of Arab social classes.
Maybe the reason so may arabs support the palestinian cause is because they just want them all to go home.
I’ll never get over how the Kuwaitis gave the Palestinians just 30 days to leave after the first Gulf War — no exceptions, no qualms, just an order to get out. And all because of the stupidity of Arafat siding with Saddam Hussein.
But in this particular case, you really can’t blame Iraqis. It turns out that Saddam may have “paid” the Palestinians’ rent, but he set it way below market price — or gave them free government housing.
In other words, he took the credit for accepting the refugees, but he made the Iraqi people pay the real cost of his “charity.” The following story from Sunday’s Baltimore Sun includes lots of details about the situation:
“Every time there was a war in the Middle East, Iraq’s government expanded its housing program to accommodate its growing population of refugees. Some Palestinians, like Salwah Ziyadah, rented homes or apartments directly from the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs. In other cases, the government signed leases with private landlords, setting rents as low as little as a few cents a month.”
,,,
” … Palestinians aren’t the only ones being pushed into the street. Rent control was the rule rather than the exception in Baghdad. And property owners swiftly took advantage of the collapse of authority to renegotiate leases, with the help of men with automatic weapons.”
news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.palestinians08jun08,0,6100974.story?coll=bal-home-headlines
When ever a country is liberated there is always someone who will whinge on about how bad it has all become. Don’t these Palestinians know that they have never had it so good. And their future is now open to endless possibilites that never existed before.
And anyway this cannot be happening (or is vastly exargerated) as the temporary American administration would never allow this sort of thing happen in a country that is being encouraged to become democratic.
(On the other hand, imagine if “they” started forcing Jewish people from their homes and crowding them together in camps. Luckily for us these guys are only Palestinians…)
Is it just me, or have the Palestinians become the modern Arab world’s equivalent of the medieval Jews? An “outsider group” with a higher average level of education, dependant on the protection of the local government, and often the first assaulted, purged, or lynched in times of crisis or upheaval?
Interesting, Mitch. I have always wondered how anti-Semitism can sustain itself in the absence of Jews. Maybe, having successfully purged the Jews from their midst, the Arab and other Middle Eastern countries created a void that the Palestinians are filling.
Don’t you get worked up about the Palestinians. This is a zone where tribal rivalries are the rule, have allways been – Kurds against Turks, Shia against Sunis, Kuwaities against Iraqis, Persians against Arabs, Egyptians agains Lybians and Sudanese. Allways at war, everybody against everybody else. Within Palestine – those from Gaza fight against those from the West Bank. (Not to mention Jews, which everybody is happy to kill).
And Lebanon – Shias against Druze, against Sunis, against Christians.
Let’s wish luck to GWB in his quest for peace in the region.
Interesting, talking about the Middle East with a North African student of mine, he said that the perception back home was that “Palestinians are basically Arab Jews.” I asked if gettting rid of the Israelis meant the death of all everyone in the West Bank and Gaza, he said “Most people would just shrug it off. After all, everyone is willing to fight to the last Palestinian. But you’ll never see an Algerian or Tunisian or even Egyptian invasion of Israel. The government attitude is to bleed the Israelis slowly and if it means the Pals get it, too bad.”
I’m sure that the local mosques are doing their best to convine the youth among these palestinians that it’s the fault of the Jews, so here’s a vest and a bus ticket to Tel Aviv.
Similar to reports in the (official) English-language Egyptian newspaper. The Palestinians are truly the wretched of the earth, but since they’ve done most of it to themselves, I can’t be sympathetic. Wouldn’t it be nice if they got up and said “Not in my name”?
I am ready to leap up in support of a responsible Palestinian movement, but it hasn’t shown its face yet. I note in this connection that the new “prime minister” has said he will not use force in trying to shut down the terrorist organizations, so he is basically saying he is willing to tolerate them indefinitely. I do wish the Palestinians would quit confirming my worst suspicions of them.
I knew a Palestinian T.A. at university. We had numerous discussions about the difficulties of solving the Palestinian/Israeli imbroglio. In one of those talks I told him that it was obvious that the Jews had treated the Palestinians not one whit worse, and, in some cases better, than the Pals “Arab brethren.” He, rather shamefacedly, admitted this to be the case. It reminded me quite strongly of Jesse Jackson’s admission that seeing a black face close behind him on the nighttime D.C. streets made him much more concerned than seeing a white one. Jackson commented that the moment when he realized that truth was one of the saddest of his life. I suspect my Palestinian acquaintance had much the same reaction to his unpleasant truth. For both groups, the answer to their problems is to be found by coming to grips with the people looking back at them from the mirror.
Dan was doing so well until he lapsed into moral equivalence in the last sentence. I am afraid that the solution to the conflict in Israel will not be found to any degree by Israelis looking at themselves in the mirror and changing who they are. Fundamental change in Palestinian, not Israeli, society, is both the necessary and the sufficient condition for peace.
T Hartin:
I think the two groups Dan was referring to were Palestinians and Black Americans.
One reason Pals get dumped on by other Arabs is that they are seen as the bearers of Arab shame because they gave up their land in 1948. Of course, one of the reasons they fled their land so promptly was that Arab governments convinced them that this would facilitate the invasion by Arab armies who would soon be victorious. They were not, which became another source of Arab shame Pals got saddled with. Every refugee is a bitter reminder to his host country of how their army failed in 1948 and in every war since then, including this most recent one in Iraq.