Palestinian Refugees Get A Chile Reception

The Occupied Territories were among the top ten fastest growing economies in the world during the 1970's
The World Bank

The reception in Chile is the kind theses refugees appreciate and deserve:

Chile on Sunday greeted 39 Palestinians from a refugee camp in Syria for permanent resettlement, and local residents turned out to give them a rousing welcome.

"Leave your suffering in the past and let Chile be the fountain of your newfound happiness," deputy Interior Secretary Felipe Harboe told the tired newcomers, who spent 40 hours traveling to this farming community north of Santiago.

The Palestinians, 23 of them children, were greeted by an official welcoming committee and many cheering locals who waved Palestinian flags and signs recalling their own Middle Eastern descent from immigrants who arrived when La Calera was founded in the late 19th century.

"Through you we relive the adventure of being an immigrant," La Calera Mayor Roberto Chahuan, the grandchild of Palestinians, told the exhausted refugees who were to be settled in apartment buildings in the town.

After the ceremony, the Palestinian families were escorted to their apartments. Local authorities will provide education, health care and Spanish classes.

The 39 Palestinians are the first of a group of 117 Chile has accepted to resettle under a 2007 program it agreed to with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

What is not immediately clear from the article is that these refugees are from Iraq, as initially reported when the agreement was first made last year in September:

Chile accepts 100 Palestinian refugees displaced from Iraq

Several Chilean cities have offered to take in as many as 100 Palestinian refugees that are currently living in refugee camps along the Iraqi border. These include the cities of La Calera and San Felipe in Region V, and Ñuñoa in the Metropolitan Region.

There are currently 1.100 refugees in Chile
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) will provide housing and food for the next two years, while the cities guarantee access to education and health care.

What is most interesting is the history and success of Palestinian Arabs in Chile, especially in La Calera. According to Wikipedia:

Due to its central location and the pioneer commercial work of the Palestinian immigrants, La Calera is nowadays the main commercial centre in the interior of the Fifth Region, even though it is not the capital city in the province, and also the industrial source to work for the rural population around it. Taking into account the fact that La Calera is a very small town with an infrastructure and economy not noteworthy at all in the zone, the city has developed commerce in a very advanced way. The inhabitants surrounding it in a circle of 15 km radio overpass the 150,000, which allows the development of downtown La Calera as a commercial centre. José Joaquín Perez and Arturo Prat Streets are full of Stores and Shops owned originally by Palestinians.

...Among the important immigrant communities set in La Calera before 1950, Palestinians and Italians stand out, which makes it the town with the largest proportion of Palestine people out of the Mid-Eastern World.

The success of the Palestinian Arab community in Chile is not surprising. Efraim Karsh has written about the success of Palestinian Arabs before the Intifada:

The larger part, still untold in all its detail, is of the astounding social and economic progress made by the Palestinian Arabs under Israeli "oppression." At the inception of the occupation, conditions in the territories were quite dire. Life expectancy was low; malnutrition, infectious diseases, and child mortality were rife; and the level of education was very poor. Prior to the 1967 war, fewer than 60 percent of all male adults had been employed, with unemployment among refugees running as high as 83 percent. Within a brief period after the war, Israeli occupation had led to dramatic improvements in general well-being, placing the population of the territories ahead of most of their Arab neighbors.

...During the 1970's, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world-ahead of such "wonders" as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, and substantially ahead of Israel itself. [emphasis added]

CAMERA also notes that:

the Palestinian territories had one of the ten fastest growing economies during the 1970's, just behind Saudi Arabia (which benefitted from the oil shock of 1973), and ahead of Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. (World Bank, ratio of real per capita GNP in 1980 to real per capita GNP in 1970)

This is based on the publication by The World Bank: Developing the Occupied Territories: An Investment in Peace

And during the 1990's, things were looking up again. Check out this article from March 1995, Soon The Gaza Strip Will Be Competing With Singapore, all about

the industrial parks which the leadership of the [Israeli] Foreign, Industry and Finance Ministries is planning at this very moment, under total secrecy. The goal: to establish between 8 to 11 such parks on the cease-fire line between Israel and the autonomous areas, which the Palestinian Authority will control within the next few months.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres is the one who envisioned all this, and those close to him say with pride: We are getting closer to Singapore, Taiwan and Hong-Kong, in huge steps.

And then, after the vision arrives to develop the cities Gaza, Dir Al- Balah, Ofakim and Sderot it will be copied in the cease-fire line between Afula and Jenin, to Mt. Hebron and Tul-Karm, and will reach the entrance of Kochav Yair.

Each industrial park will be established for about 10,000 employees, and will sit on 2,000 dunam of land, with considerable financial assistance from foreign investors and also governmental subsidies. The Palestinians will run them, and be its workers, for the most part.

The fact that the progress has disappeared and the dreams are in ashes is the responsibility of the corrupt and murderous Palestinian leadership. La Calera, Chile gives a hint at what could have been.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad

Technorati Tag: Palestinians.