Why are Palestinian refugees different from all other refugees?

Why indeed?

Tragically, there have been countless refugees in the annals of history.

Many have fled political persecution, religious harassment, racial or ethnic targeting, or gender or sexual discrimination.

It's happened in just about every era.

In the twentieth century alone, tens of millions of refugees, if not more, were compelled to find new homes - victims of world wars, border adjustments, population transfers, political demagoguery, and social pathologies.

The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne codified the population exchange of Greeks and Turks, totaling more than 1.5 million people. Ancestral homes were wiped out on both sides.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (47)

Durban Redux?

The names of certain cities take on special meaning.

Munich was the site of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's third and final meeting with Adolf Hitler, in a two-week span, in September 1938. On his return, the British leader, speaking from 10 Downing Street, promised "peace with honour" and "peace for our time," only to be faced with a full-fledged war less than a year later.

In other words, Munich became synonymous with appeasement.

Or take Yalta, the location of the 1945 summit involving US President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Though much else was discussed, including the Soviet Union's entry into the war against Japan, Yalta will long be remembered as the venue where Poland's future in the Soviet sphere of influence was essentially decided.

In other words, Yalta became synonymous with sellout.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (17)

Israel at 60: reasons to celebrate

Israel is about to mark its sixtieth anniversary.

Some friends say they're in no mood to celebrate. The timing isn't right, they complain. The country's political circuitry is overloaded. Danger lurks on the Gaza and Lebanon borders. Iran's nuclear ambitions - and annihilationist threats - loom large. Disputes over the current peace talks with the Palestinian Authority are daily fare. Israel continues to take a beating in UN forums. The drumbeat of anti-Zionism grows louder. A fractious social climate creates long-term and seemingly insoluble fissures between Arab and Jew, not to mention Jew and Jew. And global market volatility spells trouble for the Israeli economy.

All true, perhaps. But the story mustn't end there. Milestone anniversaries offer the chance to step back, however briefly, from the news of the moment and take stock of the larger picture.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (14)

Hamas: words and deeds

There's the story of the mother determined that her five-year-old wunderkind should be well-educated and one day headed for a top university. She decided to pump him with new vocabulary words each day. When little Charlie came home from school, his mother promptly said, "Charlie, what's the difference between ignorance and indifference?" To which he, totally uninterested in the exercise, shrugged his shoulders and muttered, "I don't know and I don't care."

At times, that's the sense I get from the world about Hamas.

It's as if there is an ignorance, perhaps a willful ignorance, about what Hamas, which rules Gaza, really means.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (8)