Curiously, the "Palestinian Refugees" are people exiled from Jordan and other middle eastern countries who were forced by those nations, imto the refugee camps. They could have absorbed these Arab brothers into the Muslim countries which are 500 times the land area as Israel..but they refused. This is the cause of much of the friction, mostly supported by Islamic fanaticism.
IRONGLOW. All true. The other godless nations put them out like cur dogs cause they didn'y want them. I may be wrong but I believe Syria actually offered them their own land but they refused. They wouldn't be able to kill innocent Isrealis if they did that, and the killing of innocents is what they live for. POWDERMAN.
I see that we have neglected to mention the hundreds of thousands of Jews forced at bayonet point out of the Muslim Arab states around Israel at the time of Partition. Why is their no outcry about their plight? Oh...wait....the new Jewish state took them in! Treated them like people rather than political pawns to destroy the Arab states.
Some Arab thought on the Arab Palestinian refugees:
Egyptian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Muhammad Saleh ed-Din, in.a leading Egyptian daily, demanded the return of the refugees:
Let it therefore be known and appreciated that, in demanding the restoration of the refugees to Palestine, the Arabs intend that they shall return as the masters of the homeland, and not as slaves. More explicitly: they intend to annihilate the state of Israel.
The Lebanese paper AI-Ziyyad suggested the recognition of Israel as a strategy that would accomplish the following results (from April, 1950):
The return of all the refugees to their homes would be secured, thereby we should, on the one hand, eliminate the refugee problem, and on the other, create a large Arab majority that would serve as the most effective means of reviving the Arab character of Palestine, while forming a powerful fifth column for the day of revenge and reckoning.
In 1958, former director of UNRWA Ralph Galloway declared angrily while in Jordan that
The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations, and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die.
King Hussein, the sole Arab leader who directed integration of the Arabs, in 1960 stated,
Since 1948 Arab leaders have approached the Palestine problem in an irresponsible manner.... They have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes. This is ridiculous and, I could say, even criminal
In 1951, Syria was anxious for additional workers who would settle on the land. An Egyptian paper reported,
The Syrian government has officially requested that half a million Egyptian agricultural workers ... be permitted to emigrate to Syria in order to help develop Syrian land which would be transferred to them as their property. The responsible Egyptian authorities have rejected this request on the grounds that Egyptian agriculture is in need of labor.
At that time 200,000 Arab "refugees" were languishing in Gaza, along with "80,000 original residents who barely made a living before the refugees arrived," according to the UNRWA report in 1951-52, yet a project with "hope" to accommodate "10,000 families" in the "Sinai area" was "suspended."
So we see from the words of the Muslim Arab leaders of that period that they didn't want the "refugee problem" solved, but to use the refugees as a weapon against Israel. We see the UN noting that the Arab states would greatly benefit from welcoming the refugees. Kind of hard to refute their own words.