Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Give the Palestinian Arabs the Rights They Deserve

A Reuters article, which may be read at in.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-49694220100627, reports on thousands of Palestinian Arabs demanding well-deserved rights.

They have a good point.

One of the protesters, Imtithal Abu Samra, complained that the Palestinian Arabs had no rights. He insisted "we just want to live with dignity." The protesters rightly complained they had been forced to live in refugee camps and denied citizenship for 62 years.

The protest was held in the capital of Lebanon, a country which, like all other countries in the Middle East except for Jordan and Israel, refuses to grant citizenship to Palestinian Arabs. Only one country, Israel, has never forced Palestinian Arabs to live in refugee camps.

Even the Palestinian Authority, both in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"), run by Fatah, and in Gaza, run by Hamas since its bloody coup in 2007, continues to force its own people to stay in refugee camps even though the PA been in control for more than a decade and a half.

Their plight is a disgrace. It's long past time for the United Nations to actually do something to help the Palestinian Arabs rather than continue its complicity in using and abusing them to perpetuate the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The United Nations Security Council and General Assembly must adopt their legitimate cause. They must demand that the millions of descendants of refugees finally be granted citizenship in the countries of their birth. They must direct UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) to finally do for the few remaining actual Palestinian refugees and their millions of descendants what has been done for virtually all other refugees in the world: move them out of squalid refugee camps and into permanent homes so they can live normal lives.

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