What’s the UN Doing?
The UN is trying to resolve the present crisis in Gaza by creating a new nation called Palestine.
The plight of the Palestinians is truly heartbreaking, trapped as they are today between the rock of an immovable Israel and the hard place of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants – social media’s images of dead, mutilated, and dying children batter our senses and scream out the cold-blooded reality of war. It has to be stopped but how? How did the Middle East get into this truly appalling, tragic mess, and how can we as New Zealanders help them get out of it? I welcome anyone checking my data and correcting any errors because I don’t want to add to the fog of this war.
(i) The Nakba
Firstly, where did it all go wrong and why are there now 5,900,000 Palestinian refugees today?
According to our woefully and seemingly wilfully ignorant media, academia both secular and theological, and the tens of thousands of marchers on our city streets, it all went wrong when the European nations tried to colonise the Middle East by creating Israel in 1948. This Nakba, Arabic for ‘catastrophe’, caused 750,000 Palestinians to become refugees when they fled what became the land of Israel in the First Arab-Israeli War.
So who caused the catastrophe?
(ii) Who began the war?
Today’s crafted and truncated narrative carefully ignores who began the war, so let’s not.
On 15th May 1948, the day after Israel was declared a sovereign nation according to international law and United Nations Resolution 181, five Arab nations broke that law and invaded the land. All five crossed their own internationally recognised borders – Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq from the north, Jordan from the east, and Egypt (with a Saudi Arabian contingent) from the south.
The Jews did not invade Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia – there are no Arab refugees from these countries – so if there had been no war in Israel in 1948, there would not have been 750,000 Arab refugees from that war. In fact, 160,000 Arabs actually stayed in the land of Israel and became Israeli citizens.
Of course, before the war, there had been armed clashes between Arabs and Jews as well as the 1936-1939 Arab revolt against the British but in 1948, the Arab nations undeniably began the war which led to the Palestinian refugees fleeing Israel.
But there’s more – the Arab nations created even more Jewish refugees.
(iii) Jewish refugees
The Arab nations also caused 850,000 Jewish refugees to flee from the Arab nations – not from Europe to colonise the Middle East, as we are bizarrely being told today, but from the Middle East and North Africa! Ironically, given that most of the world except the USA and France had refused to accept the Jewish refugees after World War II, 600,000 fled to Israel, thereby doubling the number of Jews in Israel! However, by 1958, Israel was able to close the last Jewish refugee camp because their refugees had been assimilated; Israel had addressed their larger Nakba in just 10 years with vastly less resources than the fabulously wealthy Arab petro-nations.
The Arab refugees, however, stayed in refugee camps – today, 77 years later, there are 68 – because the Arab nations refused to accept their share of the population transfer in 1948. Instead of 750,000 refugees, as in 1948, there are now almost 6 million! The problem has been steadily getting worse and still the Arab nations will not solve it.
(iv) Context of 1948
To put the Palestinian “Nakba” into its context, when India was partitioned in 1947, some 6,000,000 Hindu refugees had to leave what became Pakistan and Bangladesh to live in India and 6,000,000 Muslim refugees had to leave India and move to the newly created Muslim nations. In other words, in the same time period 12,000,000 Hindus and Muslim refugees had to be resettled, i.e. sixteen times as many as Palestinians.
Did the partition of India bring peace? Given human nature, not completely, and there are border clashes but at least the open slaughter (an estimated 2,000,000 died), mass abductions, and rapes by both sides decreased as Hindus and Muslims got to govern themselves as they wished, the Muslims under sharia law.
It seems obvious to me that any Palestinians who want sharia law should not live in Israel where no one else wants it and instead live in any Muslim nation where they do.
“But Wait, There’s More…”
The United Nations then created a special definition of refugee for the Palestinian Arabs to include those who had just arrived to work in the land in the previous two years:
Palestinian refugees are defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” UNRWA services are available to all those living in its area of operations who meet this definition, who are registered with the Agency and who need assistance.
These then are the 750,000. However, with the Arab nations still refusing to accept any of these refugees, UNRWA redefined the burgeoning numbers:
The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including adopted children, are also eligible for registration. When the Agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5.9 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.
This then is why there are almost 6 million and counting… And the Arab nations are still refusing to accept them.
Latest UN Plans
UN Resolution 194 created a ‘right of return’ for all the refugees of the 1948 War to return to their homes and property but it seems this only applies to Palestinian Arabs – no one at the UN seems to have considered that there were actually more Jews who lost vastly more land and property in the Arab lands than the Palestinian Arabs lost in the land of Israel.
And how can Israel, the only Jewish state in the world remain a democratic Jewish state with its present population of 7.7 million Jews and 2.1 million Arabs? These 5.9 million Arab returnees would make that 8 million and with the vast majority of Arabs being Muslim, the next democratic election could mean Israel becomes the 23rd Arab state and 58th Muslim state because right now the UN is trying to make a brand-new nation of Palestine the 22nd and 57th in the West Bank and Gaza.
However, it seems the UN isn’t trying to shoehorn the rest of the Palestinians who are not registered as refugees into Israel. If there are 14.6 million Palestinians worldwide and 9 million are supposed to live in Israel, is the UN hoping that the remaining 5.6 million will stay in, or return to populate, their new homeland of Palestine?
What Should Happen?
The Arab nations made 750,000 Palestinians refugees when they invaded the land of Israel in 1948, beginning the First Arab-Israeli War, as well as 850,000 Jewish refugees who fled the Arab nations. Accordingly, we New Zealanders should stop marching for their cause and argue in the United Nations that the Arab nations must:
(i) Accept reality
If the Arab nations would simply accept that Israel exists and stop attacking, that would solve 95% of the problem. As Benjamin Netanyahu has said:.
If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel
(ii) Accept their share of the refugees
If the Arab nations would simply accept that since Israel accepted the Jewish refugees, they should accept the Arab refugees – problem solved 100%. The UN could then stop annually pouring billions of dollars into maintaining perpetual Palestinian refugees and help the rest of the world’s refugees.
Of course, none of this is going to happen
As I see it, we’re well on the road to Har-Magedon, as described in the Book of Revelation (Rev 16:13-16). You can read about it in my Threshing Hour: Armageddon & Babylon the Great.