Not content to merely write a love-letter to terrorists or advocate for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish State in his “news” articles, AsAJew Ben Ehrenreich recently wrote a “Cliff’s Notes” to the Arab-Israel conflict that, unsurprisingly is wrong on almost every level. Rather than let him get away with yet more lies that place all the blame on Israel, I decided to examine his “10 Points” and took them apart one by one.
For previous installments, see here.
3 Refugees, Infiltrators, Emigrés
There isn’t enough room here to fully explain the rise and perpetuation of the Palestinian “refugee” situation. Luckily, we’ve already done that here. But we can discuss the half-truths told by Ehrenreich to mislead his readers.
He is right that more than 700,000 Arabs “had fled or been expelled from their homes” during the war. But it wasn’t just “some” Arabs who “ended up in refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,” it was over two-thirds of them! That means that nearly half a million people who were classified as “refugees” never even left the borders of the territory they were living in. There is no other situation in the world when such people are considered refugees, not to mention their descendants.
Next in his sights was the “free fire” policy adopted by the IDF in 1949. This was not a policy “allowing soldiers to shoot returning refugees on sight,” as he claims, but was a reaction to a threat posed by Fedayeen, armed and trained by Egypt and Jordan, who were conducting cross-border raids. Ehrenreich quickly lists the number of Arabs who died after being shot while trying to illegally sneak across the border, but he of course ignores the 340 Jews that were murdered by Fedayeen during those same years.
No discussion of the Palestinian “refugees” would be complete without reminding the world that there are now more than seven million of them around the world – a tenfold increase despite the genocide Israel is so often accused of carrying out. Absent from this conversation is the fact that no other group of people has ever been classified as refugees when coming from similar situations and certainly not their descendants. Of course, there is also no mention of the fact that had the Arabs simply accepted peace in 1947, there would have been no refugees to begin with.
The final bit of hypocrisy is when Ehrenreich condemns the Israeli Law of Return. Not only does he ignore the fact that over 35 other countries has similar laws, but the Palestinians themselves are calling for their own version of this as well as laid out in Article 13 of the draft Palestinian Constitution!
