Unveiling The Arab Mideast

Most Westerners possess precious little insight into the Arab world. There is little substantive understanding of the Palestinians. For that matter, few are those outside the Middle East who can discourse knowledgeably on Islam. Even fewer are those who are able to differentiate between Jihadists, Islamists, Moslems, Sunnis and Shiites. How many can even define what an Arab is or explain what makes someone a Palestinian refugee. The confusion is understandable.

That lack of clarity is further aggravated by long-standing disputes that repeatedly replay themselves in the Middle East . For starters, it is well to consider that the status of Gaza remains unstable, that there is a continuing bitter division between Islamist-oriented Hamas and secularist-oriented Fatah, and, most especially, that the sixty (60) year old Palestinian refugee problem still draws rapt media coverage from Britain to Bahrein to Brunei. As such, a crash course into the Palestinian/Arab issue may be illuminating.

Let’s begin with Gaza . The conventional wisdom is that Gaza ’s desperate state of affairs is the product of Israel ’s military incursions and oppressive economic sanctions. That understanding is unusually myopic. It is equally uninformed.

Gaza cannot be addressed in a geopolitical vacuum. Quite the contrary is true. The plight of the Palestinians in Gaza can only be understood as part of the Arab vortex whirling throughout the Mideast .

Permit me to be crystal clear. The problems in Gaza began six decades ago when the Arabs made a calculated decision to reject the U.N.’s partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab (there was no mention of a Palestinian state!). Having taken that position and then lost their ensuing war with Israel , the Arab states fixed upon a most remarkable policy. The Arab world adopted a strategy that has since crippled the Palestinians and emasculated their aspirations.

The Arab approach was bizarre. They manufactured a Palestinian refugee problem. Arab tactics to create this issue were as insidious as they have been effective. The Arab plan for the Palestinians after 1948 was simple. Henceforth, Arab nations would respectively initiate legislation that would preclude any and all Palestinians –and their progeny- from ever becoming citizens in any Arab nation.

By refusing to integrate Palestinians into their respective societies, the Arab nations opined -with unusual perspicacity- that the Palestinians would always remain identifiable to the world as presumably pitiful refugees. By so doing, the Palestinian plight as a stateless people could also be used as a weapon to denounce Israel . The Arabs succeeded in this endeavor.

But more importantly, the Arab plan extended far beyond those Palestinians who actually fled Israel during the 1948 war. In actual practice, the descendants of Palestinian refugees –expressly including an unending line of their progeny- can never become citizens of their adopted Arab states. Saudi Arabia is the prime example of how this policy was –and still does- operate.

Saudi law mandates that no Palestinian refugee may become a Saudi subject. No Palestinian may acquire Saudi citizenship. No Palestinian may carry a Saudi passport. Indeed, the child of a bona fide Palestinian refugee born in Saudi Arabia is also deemed to be a Palestinian refugee. That child’s children and their children’s children remain classified as Palestinian refugees for eternity. As a result, multiple generations of Arabs who were born in Saudi Arabia and who have never seen the sands of Gaza nor trod the hills of the West Bank are still denominated as Palestinian refugees. On the other hand, non-Palestinian immigrants to Saudi Arabia from other Moslem countries may become Saudi citizens. In short, the Saudis –their rationalizations notwithstanding- intentionally discriminate against their 250,000 Palestinian brothers living on sacred Saudi soil.

Sad as this may be, hundreds of thousands of Arabs in the Gaza strip still live in squalid refugee camps. This situation -created, conceived and controlled by Arabs- serves to perpetuate the artfully described plight of the Palestinians. But there is more.

With insidious premeditation, the Arab world has also encouraged Palestinian refugees in Gaza to have a high birth rate (The birth rate in Gaza is 5.9 children per woman versus 2.4 children for Israeli women). This, the Arabs also accurately understand, breeds an abundant pool of Palestinian refugees who can produce a human tsunami designed to flood Israel out of existence. Indeed, it was that notorious, non-Palestinian Yassir Arafat who cynically proclaimed: “The Palestinian woman’s womb is my best weapon!”

One erudite Palestinian woman (who grew up in Gaza and whose fedayeen (self-sacrificing terrorist) father was assassinated by the Israelis) recently articulated the issue much better that I. With abundant bitterness and copious sarcasm dripping from her pen, she wrote: “Arabs claim they love the Palestinian people, but they seem more interested in sacrificing them…The Arab world must end the Palestinians’ refugee status and thereby their desire to harm Israel…It is time for the Arab world to truly help the Palestinians, not use them.”