Joe: Well if your house was summarily demolished by an order of the state then your ancestral olive grove? Where would you and your family go? Impoverished cousins?

And given the above scenario, of course folks can be refugees in their own land! As was the case during various Jewish pogroms, the highland clearances, and the attempted anglicization of Ireland?
Rhrosty.

Hi Rhosty,

Presumably, to " .... be resettled and fully integrated among their fellow Palestinian Arabs" means being adequately housed among fellow Palestinian Arabs ?

If it's needed, I'd chip in for the housing of a few thousand Palestinian refugees.

Then we could get back to serious issues.

Joe

What you are suggesting Joe, is hardly any different than the exercise of brute force power/highland clearances, and where dirt poor folks were forced to leave with what they had on their backs and carry bags, as their homes were burnt to the ground and family feeding substance cropping was trampled to destruction before their very eyes! To be resettled on impossible to plough much much poorer rocky coastal ground.

While it was doable, there was a huge cost in wasted human life, and the forced removal of folks from generational homes and farms or crofts. Those who rebelled, eventually killed or caught and transported!

Because sheep/wool and financial gains for the dispossessing Lairds, were more important than human beings!

Those that survived, and accepted the forced removal, were able to use old irish/celtic land improvement techniques, using recovered kelp laid layer upon layer on the rocky ground, to eventually compost as the copious rain desalinated the seaweed, to make their new gifted holdings and subsistence fishing and edible seaweed support them!

A couple of Pig rooting pigs and a half dozen ever scratching chickens the rest of the land preperation story. Stone walls and gates keeping the animals out of the areas already planted, until after harvest.

Even so, there are bitter folks with generational memories and ancestors who died well before their time from virtual starvation! Is that the definition of a gravy train?

Time alone can never make injustice palatable!
Rhrosty.

Hi Rhosty,

I'm certainly not suggesting that expulsions are ever justified, in Palestine or in the Celtic Fringe countries. Nor should refugees be forever kept in camps. For no particular fault of their own, Palestinians have been caught up over the past seventy years in the politics of the Middle East.

But what can be done within the current constraints ? Until the Muslim countries around Israel could come to terms with its existence in their midst, the best that Palestinians can hope for is to be adequately re-housed and educated in West Bank towns.

Many problems have no easy solutions, Rhosty.

Cheers,

Joe

#Loudmouth

It is not boundaries that matter in international law but territory controlled that is relevant.

The PLO exercises full administrative and security control in Area
"A" and full administrative control/joint security control with Israel in Area "B" in the West Bank.

Abbas unilaterally disbanded the Palestinian Authority and declared the "State of Palestine" to replace it on 3 January 2013. Such declaration would certainly apply to Area A and possibly to Area B even though security is jointly shared with Israel.

This declaration was made contrary to the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap which leaves Israel without the Arab negotiating partner agreed on and designated in those internationally recognised agreements.

The PLO has made its bed. It can't complain if it is ridden with bugs,

#VK 3 AUU and #Rhrosty

Loudmouth has correctly interpreted my remarks in his responses to you both. Guess comprehension was not your strongest subject in school.

#Rhrosty

Do you understand that there are very few refugees still living from the 1948 War? The overwhelming majority are second, third and fourth generations of the original refugees who have earned the title of "refugees" thanks to the United Nations - which has created UNRWA specially for them but for no other refugees or succeeding generations anywhere else in the world.

Other refugees get settled and integrated into their countries of refuge by the UNHCR- but not the Palestinian Arabs who have been kept as pawns by their host Arab countries and UNRWA in refugee camps for the last 68 years. Its a disgrace.

Now that the PLO have unilaterally declared the "State of Palestine" those Palestinian Arab "refugees" are no longer "refugees" but citizens of that State entitled to the same benefits privileges and obligations as its other citizens.

Now you wouldn't want to see this State of Palestine declared an apartheid State because part of its citizens are treated as "refugees" and the other part are not - would you?

That is the tag the State of Palestine will earn if it doesn't resettle and integrate the 7600000 "refugees" in its midst very soon.