Israel's Iron Heel

While Zionists and many Jews cheered the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, for the Arabs who fled their homes in what became Israel, it was a disaster. They were never allowed to return. UN Resolutions demanding Israel respect the right of return guaranteed under international law were ignored, the Zionist state shielded from censure and sanctions by a United States prepared to exercise its Security Council veto. Today, any Jew can immigrate to Israel. Arabs who fled what became Israel can't. But some can gaze upon their former homes, or what might have been their homes, from squalid, crowded refugee camps only miles from where they, or their parents, or grandparents once lived, exiled for who they are, never to return for the demographic threat they are.

While diaspora Palestinians continue to demand they be allowed to return to their homes, commentators dismiss the demand as unreasonable. It would change the ethnic face of Israel, they say, threatening the ascendant place of Jews in the country's political and social structure. Palestinians are expected to live with their dispossession, quashing their demands for justice in the face of the indifference -- if not open hostility -- of the two powers in whose hands their fate resides: Israel and the United States.

In 1967, more Palestinians fled, often to refugee camps, with names like Sabra and Shatilla. Ariel Sharon, directing Israeli operations in occupied Lebanon, looked the other way as Israel's ally, the Christian Falangists, ran rampant through the camp, slaughtering men, women and children -- an earlier operation to root out the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure. Terrorism finds fertile ground in dispossession, injustice, humiliation.