The Palestine Arab Refugee Problem

Abstract

In the tangled Middle East situation, one of the most sensitive issues has been the situation of the Palestine Arab refugees.1 A broad humanitarian but also highly political problem with deep emotional underpinnings, the more than a million Arab refugees remain a major factor in the tension between the Arab states and Israel. This has been the case since, with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent war between Israel and her Arab neighbours, thousands of Arabs fled their former homeland. The problem was intensified by the conflict of 1956. It reached still more threatening dimensions with Israel's lightning victory in June 1967, which brought under her control large new areas including the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, the Jordanian West Bank, and the Ali Qunaytirah section in Syria, and thus caused a further flight of refugees from these territories. At the root of the Arab refugee problem is the continuing state of war, actual or tacit, between Israel and the United Arab Republic, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, which have never accepted Israel's existence. The refugees have thus been kept in a continual state of expectation that at some future date there will be a return to the territory that was once called Palestine. From the point of view of the Arab states, to accept the refugees as integrated members of their communities, even when the refugees have secured jobs and have produced second and even third generations within Arab territories, would be a denial of this objective. For Israel, which already has a settled Arab population of more than a quarter of a million, and which has welcomed Jewish refugees from many of the Arab countries into its own community, the continued insistence that the refugees