Of refugees and Kassam missiles...

What do Arab refugees and Kassam missiles have in common? Gerald A Honigman, one of the few writing on the Middle East with a sense of context, explains in The American Daily that the Kassam was named after a Syrian-born 'Palestinian' leader, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. Many of the 'Palestinian' refugees now in Lebanon are also of Syrian or Arab immigrant stock. But what is not often mentioned is that Jews from Syria were forced to flee in the opposite direction.

"Izz ad-Din made his name by butchering "Zionist invaders" during the early mandatory period after World War I.

"What else do we know about this legendary leader of the "Palestinians?"

"Well, for starters, Hamas' hero--like most other allegedly "native Palestinians"--was born elsewhere. In his case, this killer of Zionist invaders was himself an invader from Ladeqiya--Latakia--Syria.

"In just one three month period alone, the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commissions documented scores of thousands of other Syrian Arabs pouring into the British Mandate of Palestine.

"Like numerous other Arabs moving in from elsewhere, they came to the Palestine Mandate to take advantage of the economic boom going on because of the influx of Jewish capital. And for every Arab newcomer--i.e. settler--that was documented, many more slipped in under cover of darkness and were never recorded. Add to this the fact that, for a number of reasons, the Brits were more concerned about entering Jews than entering Arabs.

"So lots of evidence exists which shows that--like the murderous Sheikh--most "Palestinian" Arabs were no more native than most of the returning, forcibly exiled, Diaspora Jews.

"Recall that so many Arabs were recent arrivals into the Mandate that when UNRWA was created to deal with the Arab refugee situation--again, created as a result of the invasion by a half dozen Arab states of a reborn Israel in 1948--it had to adjust the definition of "refugee" from the prior meaning of persons normally and traditionally resident to those who lived in the Mandate for a minimum of only two years prior to 1948. Keep this in mind regarding current discussions about those refugee camps in Lebanon.

"Also consider that for every Arab who was forced to flee the fighting that Arabs started themselves in their attempt to nip a nascent Israel in the bud, a Jewish refugee was forced to flee Arab/Muslim lands...but with no UNRWA set up to help them.

"Indeed, scores of thousands of Jews fled the same Syria that Sheikh al-Qassam migrated to Palestine from. Greater New York City alone now has some tens of thousands of these Syrian Jewish refugees. And hundreds of thousands of other Jews fled Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, and so forth.

"Now bring this all together…

"An Israel not even the size of New Jersey absorbed more Jewish refugees fleeing Arab lands than Arabs moving in the other direction."

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