Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict | Page 17

A Brief Guide for the Perplexed 11
sharing a common language , religion , and ethnic roots with the Palestinians , have largely refused to do so . Sadly , they appear to have little interest in alleviating the plight of those living , from generation to generation , in sometimes squalid camps . Rather , they want to breed hatred of Israel and thus use the refugees as a lethal weapon in the ongoing struggle against Israel .
Parenthetically — just to give a sense of how Palestinians have at times been treated in the Arab world — Kuwait summarily expelled over 300,000 Palestinians working in the country ( but never given Kuwaiti passports ) when Yasir Arafat supported Saddam Hussein ’ s Iraq in the 1990-91 Gulf War . The Palestinians were seen as a potential fifth column . There was hardly a peep of protest from other Arab countries , or pro-Palestinian voices in the West , about what amounted to the expulsion of an entire Palestinian community . And , difficult as it is to believe , Lebanon , for decades home to several hundred thousand Palestinian refugees , has legally prevented them from working in many designated professional sectors and restricts their right to own property .
More recently , thousands of Palestinians were killed in the Syrian civil war , while many others were imprisoned and tortured by the Syrian regime . Yet , the international community remained largely silent about these egregious human rights violations .
Unfortunately , the story of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries is not often told .
When the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries is raised , Arab spokesmen often feign ignorance or strenuously assert that Jews lived well under Muslim rule ( unlike Jews in Christian Europe ). Sometimes , they disingenuously argue that Arabs , by definition , cannot be antisemitic because , like Jews , they are Semites .
It is true there was no equivalent of the Holocaust in the Jewish experience in Muslim lands , and it is also true that there were periods of cooperation and harmony , but the story does not end there . Jews never enjoyed full and equal rights with Muslims in