It happened. Bombings of buses and streets derailed the deal. Pay attention.
As I posted previously, there was in fact a deal that the Palestinian Authority (essentially the PLO) jointly negotiated at Camp David with the Israelis and the US. Ehud Barak led the Israeli delegation, Bill Clinton the US, and Yasser Arafat the Palestinians. There were major issues of contention, but a deal was finally hammered out that made no one entirely happy, but would have created a Palestinian State with the Arab quarter of Jerusalem as its capital. Israel's capital at the time was Tel Aviv. At the last minute, Arafat walked away from it. Palestinian revisionist history claims it was because it did not address fully issues like right of return. The reality is that the deal was done, but Arafat could not bring himself to be a great man like Anwar Sadat choosing instead to remain "relevant" as the leader of a group of terrorist thugs.
Other than vocal sympathy, one can trace the political abandonment of the Palestinians by most of the remainder of the Arab world to their frustration with those failed negotiations. Iran stepped in to fill the void for its own hegemonic purposes, using both the Palestinians and northern Shia minorities to sow regional conflict. It is why regional Arab sympathy for the Palestinians remains at a historically low point even following the Gaza campaign.
The Palestinian refugee problem is real, but it is also one in which they played a significant role in their own creation. That somehow the Zionists woke up one morning and drove the Palestinians out is the sort of revisionist history that the ignorant demonstrating millennials and boomers embrace because they have no real education on the subject and are subject to the breathless propagandists on X, Tic Toc, and too many college campuses.
The refugees are a direct result of the 1947-49 war which resulted from the end of the British Mandate and planned implementation of the UN Partition Plan of 1947 which would have created a Jewish and an Arab State with Jerusalem maintained under international administration. Regional Arab leadership rejected this plan leading to the first war of attempted Arab extermination of Israel. Initially a viscous guerrilla war conducted by both sides, that changed dramatically when conventional Arab armies invaded in 1948.
That conventional warfare changed the nature of the conflict dramatically as mechanized military formations from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon attempted and ultimately failed to eradicate the fledgling state of Israel. That of course puts a lie to now pandered "facts" embraced by the chattering class, that a then almost non-existent but somehow all powerful Israeli military machine was used to drive the civilian population out of Israel. A drive along Israeli highway Route 1 (a particularly beautiful forested mountain road) would be informative to those who believe this nonsense. There one can see the destroyed locally armored trucks maintained as memorials that the Israelis were forced to use against Jordanian and Egyptian armor (primarily British) as they fought to keep the supply route open from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
So, what happened and why did roughly 700,000 refugees flee what would have been their homes had they and their regional Arab sponsors simply accepted the UN plan? As I mentioned, the guerilla warfare phase was a particularly dirty war which the Israelis were both willing and able to prosecute as effectively as the Palestinians. Villages and Kubutzes occupied by Palestinians and Israelis were regularly attacked. Unfortunately for the Arabs, the Israelis tended to fight tenaciously and most kubutzes, which became small fortresses, survived. In a precursor to the series of wars to come, the Arab settlers did not, opting to run.
As the war became conventional. major portions of the landscape became true battlefields. Villages were used as strongpoints by both sides leading to their destruction. The Jews stayed and fought because they were fighting for the survival of their fledgling country and the survival of their families, while the Palestinians fled to the shelter of the Arab Armies and Arab States attempting to destroy the Israelis. Their expectations were to return over the bodies of the Zionists to seize all of Palestine however much of it may have been legally acquired in the preceding fifty years by Jews.
To the astonishment of most of the world. and none more so than the Palestinians, the Israelis prevailed. In Israel, the period is called the War of Independence. The Arab world refers to it as the "Nakba" which translates as the Catastrophe. Not surprisingly, Israel has had little appetite to repatriate a segment of the former population that was dedicated to Israel's destruction. Having gone through the Crucible of the Holocaust and War of Independence followed by every action since 49 whether by the PLO in Munich or Entebbe, the rocket barrages from Lebanon and Gaza, or the butchery of October 7th, the Arabs have reinforced that conclusion.
Interestingly a segment of the Palestinians did remain. Today they make up nearly 20% of the Israeli population (almost 2 million people). They are full citizens with all political and civil rights enjoying every level of Israeli society, including serving as politicians, judges, and in other government positions. The one exception is the military where, like Christians, they do not face compulsory military service like Jewish citizens. However, many voluntarily serve in the IDF. These too are facts diligently ignored by the revisionists.
www.bbc.com
