Justice for Palestine
Had Israel lost the 1948 war, its territory would have been divided among the invading Arab forces. The name Palestine would have vanished into the dustbin of history. By surviving the pan-Arab assault, Israel has paradoxically saved the Palestinian national movement from complete oblivion.
During the decades following the war, the Arab states manipulated the Palestinian national cause to their own ends:
• Neither Egypt nor Jordan allowed Palestinian self-determination in the parts of Palestine they had occupied during the 1948 war (respectively, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip).
• The Palestinian refugees were kept for decades in squalid, harshly supervised camps throughout the Middle East, where they could serve as a rallying point for anti-Israel sentiment.
• Lebanon may offer the starkest example of this abuse, having deprived its 400,000-strong Palestinian population of the most basic human rights - property ownership, employment in numerous professions, free movement, etc. - but nowhere in the Arab world, with the partial exception of Jordan, have the Palestinians been treated like decent human beings, let alone “brothers.”
• In 2004 Saudi Arabia revised its naturalization law, allowing foreigners who had resided in the kingdom for 10 years to apply for citizenship. Only one group was excluded: the estimated 500,000 Palestinians living and working in Saudi Arabia.
h/t Elder of Lobby