by Nonie Darwish

International donors pledged almost $4.5 billion in aid for Gaza earlier this month. It has been very painful for me to witness over the past few years the deteriorating humanitarian situation in that narrow strip where I lived as a child in the 1950s.

The media tend to attribute Gaza’s decline solely to Israeli military and economic actions against Hamas. But such a myopic analysis ignores the problem’s root cause: 60 years of Arab policy aimed at cementing the Palestinian people’s status as stateless refugees in order to use their suffering as a weapon against Israel.

As a child in Gaza in the 1950s, I experienced the early results of this policy. Egypt, which then controlled the territory, conducted guerrilla-style operations against Israel from Gaza. My father commanded these operations, carried out by Palestinian fedayeen, Arabic for “self-sacrifice.” Back then, Gaza was already the front line of the Arab jihad against Israel. My father was assassinated by Israeli forces in 1956.

It was in those years that the Arab League started its Palestinian refugee policy. Arab countries implemented special laws designed to make it impossible to integrate the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab war against Israel. Even descendants of Palestinian refugees who are born in another Arab country and live there their entire lives can never gain that country’s passport. Even if they marry a citizen of an Arab country, they cannot become citizens of their spouse’s country. They must remain “Palestinian” even though they may have never set foot in the West Bank or Gaza.

This policy of forcing a Palestinian identity on these people for eternity and condemning them to a miserable life in a refugee camp was designed to perpetuate and exacerbate the Palestinian refugee crisis.

So was the Arab policy of overpopulating Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, whose main political support comes from Arab countries, encourages high birth rates by rewarding families with many children. Yasser Arafat said the Palestinian woman’s womb was his best weapon.

Arab countries always push for classifying as many Palestinians as possible as “refugees.” As a result, about one-third of the Palestinians in Gaza still live in refugee camps. For 60 years, Palestinians have been used and abused by Arab regimes and Palestinian terrorists in their fight against Israel.

Now it is Hamas, an Islamist terror organization supported by Iran, which is using and abusing Palestinians for this purpose. While Hamas leaders hid in the well-stocked bunkers and tunnels they prepared before they provoked Israel into attacking them, Palestinian civilians were exposed and caught in the deadly crossfire between Hamas and Israeli soldiers.

As a result of 60 years of this Arab policy, Gaza has become a prison camp for 1.5 million Palestinians. Both Israel and Egypt are fearful of terrorist infiltration from Gaza — all the more so since Hamas took over — and have always maintained tight controls over their borders with Gaza. The Palestinians continue to endure hardships because Gaza continues to serve as the launching pad for terror attacks against Israeli citizens. Those attacks come in the form of Hamas missiles that indiscriminately target Israeli kindergartens, homes and businesses.

And Hamas continued these attacks more than two years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in the hope that this step would begin the process of building a Palestinian state, eventually leading to a peaceful, two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There was no “cycle of violence” then, no justification for anything other than peace and prosperity. But instead, Hamas chose Islamic jihad. Gazans’ and Israelis’ hopes have been met with misery for Palestinians and missiles for Israelis.

Hamas, an Iran proxy, has become a danger not only to Israel, but also to Palestinians as well as to neighboring Arab states, who fear the spread of radical Islam could destabilize their countries.

Arabs claim they love the Palestinian people, but they seem more interested in sacrificing them. If they really loved their Palestinian brethren, they’d pressure Hamas to stop firing missiles at Israel. In the longer term, the Arab world must end the Palestinians’ refugee status and thereby their desire to harm Israel. It’s time for the 22 Arab countries to open their borders and absorb the Palestinians of Gaza who wish to start a new life. It is time for the Arab world to truly help the Palestinians, not use them.

Mrs. Darwish, who grew up in Gaza City and Cairo, is the author, most recently, of “Cruel and Usual Punishment,” (Thomas Nelson, 2009).

Copyright – Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

I meant to write “Pro-Choice”, that should be the correct term, not “Pro-Abortion”.

Pro-Abortion doesn’t mean to “promote” abortion, but to have a personal choice. And they don’t impose their belief on the disagreed. But the “Pro-Life” do.

Pro-Life doesn’t mean to “protect” all life either, only the “unborn”, how about those living persons suffering from just “being born”, no mercy for these people? Even those innocent kids were unfortunately born in a unsettling world, should they all be killed under the assault of their opponent country?

Don’t you think your view of valuing “life” is kind of prejudice?

If you think twice, you wouldn’t make such a statement. You started to sound like the people you don’t agree with.

Hatred started to nourish when you generalize your enemies as all of them are not “living things”, even including the innocents, who are assumed guilty before they even have a chance to grow up.

Are you saying just wipe them all off the map including all unborn?

Personally I don’t think we have evolved a lot away from other mammal’s instinct We act just like them instinctively! Except we got a little “fancier” so called “civilization”.

To respond to another poster earlier, don’t count on westerners to save the world after all the damage they have left from China all the way to Africa from as early as 16th and 17th centuries.

Same as U.S. government. Condones or condemns, all evolve around its own benefits, not others. Why did U.S. condemned Russia air bombed Georgia, but not Isreal? (I am not choosing sides, but just to make a point only)

Right now, the new war is “OIL”. See how civilized the western nations will remain. Civilization sometimes is just a facade, it looks pretty and nice externally, but internally we are all driven by the same motive — survival!!

United States will pick a few enemies every few decades to remain its compatibility on the world stage.

If we call ourselves “Human Beings”, I don’t think we can live up to it yet!

Russia would do what they did in Chechnya, invade and use air power to flatten as much of the country as possible.

Israel does not have this option, it’s surrounded by hostile and semi-hostile countries.

The US has not invaded Mexico, and yet everyday there is a lot of drug related gang violence at the border and it is spreading across to the US side.

Getting back to Hamas they win whatever happens. They look like victims and they strive on the environment of chaos that is currently what Gaza is.