369. Chileno: Thanks for the succinct report on UNRWA, details of which I wrote about in post 239. When you say about this thread, “Curiously, the anti-Israel crowd kind of fizzled away… Couldn’t take the heat?” you are probably noticing the effect of confronting passion and prejudice with FACT. There’s not much of this old “you are occupying my grandfather’s house” argument that will stand up to hard facts. And in any case, for those who were driven out of what is now Israel, as I said in Post 239, if everyone in the world who was displaced between 1930 and 1948 refused to accept that it is impossible to “go home again,” the entire world would be in flames, like Gaza. Only the Arabs who lived in the former Palestinian mandate (which was not then and never was an independent country governed by a people called “Palestinians”) are still “permanent refugees” This tragic fact can be laid at the door of the Arab countries (there are 22 of them!) who refused to take them in and who also refused to aid them in their misery, and also to UNRWA, which fostered the belief that life can, indeed, go backwards instead of forwards. With the Arabs looking eternally backwards, they have achieved economic, political and personal chaos; with the Israelis looking forward, in spite of the incessant attacks by their neighbors who wish them dead, they have achieved a vibrant modern society, economically and politically strong, productive and inventive. I never thought I would be able to return to the Paris apartment, nor did my parents and grandparents think they could or even wanted to return to their lost homes in Hungary and Poland. They learned new languages, forged new lives. As I said before, how unimaginable to think that my grandchildren in California are “refugees” from somewhere they have never even seen!
Thanks to all who have posted so intelligently on this thread. . .
