When Israel Is Not Involved, Both Arabs And UN Are Content To Let Palestinians Suffer

For all of the talk about the centrality of the issue of the Palestinian Arabs for prospects of peace and stability in the Middle East, it is surprising how apathetic and at times even antagonistic other Arabs in the Middle East feel about the Palestinian Arabs.

Thus, Khaled Abu Toameh explains Why Arabs Hate And Kill Palestinians:

The Palestinians have a long history of involving themselves in the internal affairs of Arab countries and later complaining when they fall victim to violence. They complain they are being killed but not saying why they keep getting into trouble.

Toameh brings a number of examples from over the decades to illustrate his point:

• In Syria, a Palestinian terrorist group called Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command reportedly kidnapped, tortured and murdered hundreds of anti-regime Syrians over the past two years.
  
  
• In 2007, the Lebanese army destroyed most of the Nahr al-Bared camp after another terrorist group, Fatah al-Islam set up bases there and attacked army checkpoints, killing several soldiers.
  
  
• In the 70s and 80s, Palestinians played a major role in the Lebanon civil war, which claimed the lives of more than 150,000 people.
  
  
• After the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, thousands of Palestinians were forced out of Iraq for helping the dictator oppress his people for many years.
  
  
• After the liberation of Kuwait more than 20 years ago, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from the tiny emirate and other Gulf countries because of their support for Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait -- despite the fact that for many years Kuwait had provided the PLO with billions of dollars in aid.
  
  
• In 1970, the late King Hussein crushed the armed Palestinian organizations that had undermined his monarchy, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Palestinians and the expulsion of the PLO to Lebanon.

Toameh sums it up:

Palestinians are not always innocent victims. They bring tragedy on themselves and then want to blame everyone else but themselves.

However it is not only the Arabs themselves who torment the Palestinians Arabs. The UN itself, which on the one hand has acted to promote their sudden claim to being a people with rights to a state and has done so much to promote the Palestinian Arabs at the expense of Israel, has done little to ameliorate the suffering of those same Arabs at the hands of their brothers.

Steven J. Rosen notes a blatant example of the UN's failure to help Palestinian Arabs when Israel is not involved:

But the largest forced displacement of Palestinians from an Arab state took place in 1991 when Kuwait expelled most of its Palestinian residents in retaliation for the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) endorsement of Iraq's brutal occupation of the emirate (August 1990-February 1991). It mattered little that this population, most of which had resided in Kuwait for decades, was not supportive of the PLO's reckless move: From March to September 1991, about 200,000 Palestinians were expelled from the emirate in a systematic campaign of terror, violence, and economic pressure while another 200,000 who fled during the Iraqi occupation were denied return. By September 1991, Kuwait's Palestinian community had dwindled to some 20,000.

Yet while this expulsion was near the order of magnitude of the Palestinian 1948 flight (estimated by the Israeli government at 550,000-600,000 and by the Arab League at 700,000),[2] driving PLO chairman Yasser Arafat to declare that "what Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories,"[3] it was largely ignored by the international community with neither the U.N. Security Council nor the General Assembly doing anything to assist the newly displaced refugees and punish their ethnic cleanser.

One might be excused for being cynical about the motives of both the Arab world and the UN who both seem to be selective about when they choose to be sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian Arabs -- and seem to regulate those sympathies based on whether or not the status and security of Israel can be denigrated.


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