Saturday, May 10, 2008

The Palestinians- will remain stateless for next 10 years


Jews for Justice of Palestinians




The wandering Palestinian;
In other words, little has changed since 1948, when street sentiment prompted five reluctant Arab governments to send troops on a vain mission to block the creation of Israel. During the ensuing war, the Palestinians' initial nakba, more than half the native population of Palestine, some 750,000 people, fled or were driven from the territory that became the Jewish state, whose troops then barred their return and systematically razed 531 of their ancestral villages. The six-day war in June 1967 brought the remaining 22% of historic Palestine under Israeli rule, and pushed out 250,000 more refugees.

In exile, Palestinians have been harassed, attacked or chased away. PLO fighters were forced to flee Jordan after an uprising in 1970. Lebanese Christians destroyed the camps of Tel Zaatar and Qarantina in the 1970s, and massacred Palestinians at Sabra and Chatila in 1982. Israelis besieged the PLO in Beirut the same year, sending PLO leaders to secondary exile in Tunis, and the Syrians did the same in Tripoli in 1984. In 1991 300,000 Palestinians, many of them wealthy and long-settled, were hounded from Kuwait after their leaders foolishly praised Saddam Hussein's invasion of the Gulf emirate. Libya's erratic ruler, Muammar Qaddafi, deported thousands more in the 1990s, saying that since they had signed the Oslo peace accords with Israel, Palestinians should “go home”. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, nearly all its 20,000 Palestinians have been forced to the borders, where some still languish in dusty desert camps.

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