Refugees forever

national | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis

Thursday July 10, 2003 17:02

by Paul Poulakis

The Palestinians are unique among the world's nation wannabes in several ways. First, they have the backing of most of the world's oil wealth and thus the industrial nations that kowtow in lust of it. The Gulf Caliphs caught on long ago that in order to preserve their own corrupt, profligate, illegal regimes they needed some perennial distraction for their ignorant masses--why not the Jews?

Nobody has ever been so calculatingly cruel before, mind you. My grandfather, for example, a Greek Christian, fought in a war with Turkey in the early Twenties. The Greeks lost the war and Turkey expelled 3,000,000 ethnic Greeks (whose ancestors had lived there since the Bronze Age). Greece, an impoverished country, did not torture their compatriots by keeping them in refugee camps: they absorbed them, the only humanitarian option possible for a humane people.

Likewise, ethnic Germans illegally expelled from Poland and the eastern territories at the end of World War II were taken in by West Germany as brothers and citizens. The iron curtain was not lined with fetid camps.

Maybe the world just cannot shake of its anti Jewish feelings. Or is it a 50 year phenomeman, turn of 1900s was the Dreyfus Affair,the 1940s was the holcaust and now 2000+ it is the shamful behaviour of the Jews over the "ancient Palestinians" who have only existed as a nation since 1974.

I am no avid Zionist but sometimes when the truth hits me in the face and when people choose to ignore the truth, I somewhat think anti Semitism is the only answer to the denial of that truth.

Comments (1 of 1)

The concept of Mass tranfer

by Salah

Thu Jul 10, 2003 18:36

‘The main forced transfer between the two World Wars was effected between Turkey and Greece. Sanctioned by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) and approved and supervised by the League of Nations, this brutal displacement of more than 1.5 million people eventually came to be seen by much of official Europe as an auspicious precedent. The British cited it in the late 1930’s as a model for resolving the conflict in Palestine. The right-wing Zionist leader, Vladimir Jobotinsky, taking heart from Nazi demographic experiments in conquered territories (about 1.5 million Poles and Jews were expelled and hundreds of thousands of Germans resettled in their place), exclaimed: ‘The world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has almost become fond of them.‘

Quoted from
Norman G. Finkelstein