The Treatment of Refugees in the Middle East:A Stark Dichotomy

Of all the blogs I read, there is only one blog for which I have subscribed to receive e-mail notices about new postings: Melanie Phillips Diary. It is hard-hitting and a necessary counter-balance to the Main Stream Media. In a recent entry, she links to this piece by David Meir-Levi about the history of the creation of modern Israel. Here is a very brief quotation from this 57-page document that is well-worth reading:

A Summary of The Salient Facts

... Sixty years ago there were nearly a million Jews in the Arab states
of the Middle East: honest hard-working citizenry contributing to the
culture and economy of their countries of domicile. Today, there are
almost no Jews in the Arab countries of the Middle East, and racist
apartheid laws prohibit even Jewish tourists from entering some Arab
countries.

In Israel, on the other hand, the Arabs who did not flee numbered
about 170,000 in 1949; and now number more than 1,400,000. They
have 12 representatives in the Israeli Parliament, judges sitting on the
Israeli courts and on the Israeli Supreme Court benches, and Ph.D’s
and tenured professors teaching in Israeli colleges and universities.
They are a population that enjoys more freedom, education, and
economic opportunity than do any comparable Arab populations anywhere
in the Arab world.

The Arab rulers caused the Arab refugee problem in 1948 by their
war of aggression against the infant state of Israel, a legal creation of
the United Nations; the Arab rulers have since maintained the Arab
refugee population and denied it any possibility of normal life in Arab
countries in order to use the suffering they themselves have caused, as
a weapon in their unending war against Israel.

As I said, the entire document is fairly long, but it is important reading if you don't have a good idea about the events of 50 - 60 years ago.