Three Monkeys, Three Typewriters, Two Days

Okay: In 1948 and later, Israel took away some of the land the U.N. had decided was for the Palestinian state, leading to large numbers of refugees and our present situation.

For me it still looks wrong though :-/

What did you expect? That people could name the main iranian language and understand it is indo-european? Or the differences between shi'a and sunna? Or know the history of the country and how the US helped Pahlevi's regime?
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king...

Alan, let's step back from the pat phrases and actually look at what's going on here. In 1948 there were various events that led to the appearance of refugees. Some that come to mind include:

1) Attacks by radical Jewish groups (Irgun and Lehi) on some Arab settlements, including some massacres (the Deir Yassin incident got particularly wide press, but there may have been others; I've found it difficult to find actual documentary evidence covering this time period).
2) Attacks by more mainstream Jewish groups (eg the Haganah) on some Arab settlements. For the most part this involved things like trying to keep the road from the Jewish part of the coast to the Jewish part of Jerusalem free of things like sniper and machine gun fire. But I can't categorically state that there were not unpalatable incidents here either. Again, lack of information is a problem.
3) Exaggerations about these attacks by Arab leaders, which led to many more Arabs fleeing their homes (the reports of rape at Deir Yassin, announced to the world over the protests of the actual Arab eyewitnesses, are a good example). It's fairly significant that a lot of Palestinians only left after these false reports were widely disseminated.
4) Military operations in the area after the Arab states declared war on Israel. Wars do have a way of creating refugees.
5) Seizure of proposed-Palestinian land by the combatants involved (with, as I said, Israel not seizing nearly as much as Jordan, say).

So let's not try to pin sole blame for the existence of refugees on actions the state of Israel took in 1948, shall we?

Moving right along, once you have refugees, the obvious thing to do is to try to resolve the problem. Unfortunately, in this case there was limited interest in doing that:

1) The Arab states had absolutely 0 incentive to resolve the situation by, say, absorbing the refugees the way Israel absorbed all the refugee Jews who were expelled from Arab countries. It was to their political advantage to have these people living on their territory with no citizenship and in deep poverty, so they could be used as a political weapon against Israel.
2) The special UN agency set up to deal with the situation was set up to help meet the refugees' material needs, not to solve the problem. It thus didn't have a clear mandate to do anything about the situation, and had strong reasons to do nothing -- actually solving the problem would put it out of a job.
3) The rest of the world more or less didn't so much care, but couldn't do anything anyway, since the Arab states were opposed to any solution to the refugee problem short of the destruction of the State of Israel and repatriation of all the refugees into Palestine.
4) Israel was rather busy trying to absorb the above-mentioned Jewish refugees. Even so, it made several offers to help with the Arab refugee situation, which were rebuffed by the Arab states.

At the same time the number of refugees grew. In part this was due to births amongst the refugees, in part it was due to the fact that with the UNRWA aid life in some of the refugee camps was actually more pleasant (in terms of things like not starving) than the life of peasants outside those camps. Which says more about the life of said peasants than anything else...

Fast-forward twenty years, and by the time we get to 1967 we have lots of refugees whom no one really wants.... Then what do you think Israel should have done in 1967 that would have helped? Given the West Bank back to Jordan after the war?

Daniel, that would be nice. ;) But I had much more modest expectations, and even those were very much unreached. :(

Iran is announcing it's own downfall. If they try anything against Israel, they will be destroyed in a moment.

This all goes back to Islam though and the fact that they deny Isaac's existence. (Israel was a descendant of Isaac in case you were unaware)

This will never be resolved until the descendants of these two brothers (Jews and Arabs) come together and recognize their Father and the God of their Father.

To my knowledge the Jewish were willing to accept the original devision plan the U.N. created. The Arab countries however were not, so they invaded Israel. They didn't expect to lose Arab areas, but eventually they did - you could see they asked for a fight and got one and ultimately didn't win the fight.

@Alan Rone:
Altough I do think that the Palestinians should get some sort of own-governence, I do not agree that you can fully blame Isreal for the refugee problem.

The Arabs/Palestinians are partly to blame to, the can (and to my knowledge already could) solve the problem (partially) by dismantling the refugee camps and create proper cities and villages for the people that live there. The Arabs brothersw of the Palestinians have planty money to finance that even without Western support.

However this hasn't been done yet and the actual destination of the money given by the US and EU is vague at best...

Well...
Меньше знаешь, крепче спишь... ;-)

em: you're thinking like a westerner. Think in terms of diplomatic influence. What does it mean, what does it impact to act like him precisely now? Am I the only one trying to read between the lines???

em, I don't see what any of this has to do with Islam, except insofar as it has to do with power and politics in general.

Daniel, многие спят очень крепко. ;) And I'd be very much interested in trying to sort out the situation enough to figure out what the guy's actually thinking. I feel like I really just don't know enough about things, particularly his domestic political situation...

boris, ты говориш по русски?

Да, говорю.

re: sleepers

они имели бы хорошую пользу для крана

or петух, whatever, just make it noisy :]

What are you saying using those Eastern-European/Cyrillic(?) letters? Google Images doesn't exactly help much. :)

Translation
i5mast: Boris do you speak Russian ?
Boris: Yes, I do.

Iran is not an arab country, they are persian, different race and they talk Persian language. They only use arabic alphabet. Actually there are a large number of Azeri people living in Iran too.

Iran is NOT an Arab country. It's a Persian country with a complete different culture. They're very sensitive for that, remember the confusion about "Persian Gulf" vs "Arab Gulf", which both refer to the same sea.

jhermans, mdakin, why are you bothering restating what was already obvious?

Я говорю русского, слишком. Вы верите мне?

Wow, how many people do speak Russian around Mozilla. :)

I could believe Boris speaks a bit Russian, but Daniel...?

Не верю! :)

@em: I believe I've seen you bring this up in a comment for another post by Boris, IIRC. I don't know what you're talking about as the prophecy of Isaac is mentioned a number of times in the Quran.

That said you offer no argument or evidence supporting your claim that issues with Iran have to do with the supposed rejection of Isaac.

This is made even more silly by the fact that the Quran refers to the Jews as children of Israel, thereby also recognizing Israel (descendant of Isaac). So you seem to be standing on false accusations.

Just so you're aware, Islam gives full credibility to the Jewish prophets. They came from the same God as Jesus and Mohammad after them (peace be upon them all), all as messengers to the people.

I don't know where you're getting your information from, but you should try reading the Quran before attributing anything to Islam.

I apologize to the rest as this is, obviously, off-topic.

This topic clearly shows ignorance or could be lack education or research by bzbarsky. You can see that clearly in his 1st point. As stated by others we are not Arabs! Many lives have been lost trying to preserve our culture. We inherited Islam after the Arabs attack our land. Iran was multicultural nation which accommodated many religion. (I don’t need to go through them all)
Due to our proud culture and history we tried to make sure there was a difference between us and them. Language is one and religion is the other… although similar they are not quite the same. We have the same alphabet only thing is we have 4 more letters, we speak totally a different language, same as English and German.

Our religion to begin with was zartoshty.. arabs brough islam with force to iran and even that was changed! we shiea and they are sunni’s. I am willing to go on and one on any given subject to do with Iran.

Sorry for my grammar. as English is not my 1st language.

> You can see that clearly in his 1st point.

My first point is that most people ignorantly think that Iran is an Arab country.

Please do try to read what I actually wrote (including the sentence right _before_ that first point), not what you want to hear, ok?

> English is not my 1st language.

Which helps explain why you misunderstood what I wrote, but it seems to me you should try hard to account for this before flying off your handle in a public forum...