Why are Palestinians still refugees?

Bataween
Point of No Return
23 August '10

Lebanon took a very small step last week permitting Palestinians to work, except in certain professions. But they are still a long way from being granted full civil rights. By contrast, Jewish refugees are now fully integrated in Israel and the West, says Gina Waldman, herself a Jewish refugee from Libya, in The Propagandist:

Lebanon's parliament recently passed a law allowing Palestinian refugees to work legally in Lebanon. As a refugee myself, this news makes me reflect on my own experience.

I am also a refugee from the Arab countries. But I am not a Palestinian. I am a Jewish refugee forced out of the land of my birth in Libya.

I know that Jewish refugees from the Arab countries were larger in numbers than the Palestinian refugees. Yet, we have been successfully integrated. So I ask the question: "Why do the Palestinians still remain in squalid refugee camps?"

My thoughts turn to those savage days when my family fled Libya in 1967. We narrowly escaped death at the hands of a bus driver who, instead of taking us to the airport, tried to burn us alive inside the bus.

I am one of nearly one million Jews indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa who were forced to flee their ancestral homes in the last 60 years. I am now the voice of an Arab minority culture that has been ethnically cleansed.

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