How Palestinian Refugees Differed From Others, How Jewish Refugees Differed From Them All

                                                                               Exodus 1947                          
Nadene Goldfoot                                                                       
Arabs have been migrants. Mark Twain can attest to that as he visited the Holy Land on a trip starting in February 1, 1867. Bedouins attacked his camp, the land where the man rides and carries the child on a pigmy jackass but the woman walks. Mark Twain traveled miles of desolate country whose soil is rich enough but was only weeds.  He saw only 3 people, Arabs, wearing only a long coarse shirt, and they were shepherds, and charmed their flocks with a reed pipe.  

 Migration comes from a tradition of migration and migrants.  They were wrongly regarded immediately upon arrival in Western Palestine as people "existing" for millennia within the Jewish-settled area of Western Palestine.  They were just continuing in 1948 their traditional pattern of moving to an area where they thought their relatives were better treated than they were.  The British made them into instant natives which in turn counted them as instant refugees.  Then they actually had a better life in the UNWRA camp setting than they had as "landless impoverished laborers in the Arab world."

Wrongly counted as refugees were these Arab itinerant workers from  the neighboring countries.   Many of the refugees were fleeing from Israel but the British neglected to realize that they had just recently gone into Israel and then counted them as natives when Israel was the Jewish-settled area of Western Palestine.   There they earned better wages and found better living conditions within the Jewish settlements.

On the other hand, German, Russian, Czech, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Afghan,  Lebanese and Syrian refugees had to flee and became migrants in order to escape persecution, dictatorship, or certain death.  Syrians and Lebanese have moved right over to Jordan and are in camps.  The land of Jordan, taken illegally by King Hussein, is land meant to be the Jewish National Home.

When the Jewish refugees were lucky enough to arrive on ships to Palestine, the British would not let them into the Jewish communities.  They were refugees fleeing for their lives from Nazis.  Even though The British were given the Mandate to bring about the Jewish National Home, they treated it  as "Arab" land.  So they restricted Jewish immigration and let "illegal" Arab immigrants in.  They were appeasing Arab "discontent." When my 2nd cousin, Stanley Goldfoot left Capetown, South Africa in 1933  at age 18 or 19, his ship put up the Swastika flag in the middle of the ocean and he wasn't sure he'd get to land in Palestine.  Luckily, he did.  A few years more and it would have been impossible.  At this time there were also restrictions on Jewish immigration into the USA.

On January 12, 1938 the Poseidan ship came to Palestine with 65 Jewish illegal immigrants.  By then 8,000 had entered illegally with the help of Jewish Agency in Palestine. The Aliya Bet worked from 1939 to 1942  and then from 1945 to 1948, trying to get illegal Jews into the country.  "No country was willing to take Jewish immigrants. However, some countries would give them transit visas."

The ship "Exodus" from France carried 4,500 Jewish refugees including 600 orphans  that were Holocaust survivors on July 11, 1947 and the Jews were considered illegal so couldn't disembark.  "Displaced person camps run by American, French and Italian officials often turned a blind eye to the situation, with only British officials restricting movement in and out of their camps. In 1945, the British reaffirmed the pre-war policy restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine which had been put in place following the influx of a quarter of a million Jews fleeing the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and had been a major cause of the Arab revolt of 1936-1939."

"Exodus was attacked by five British destroyers and a cruiser. Ruth Gruber, a journalist,  left Jerusalem immediately for Haifa and witnessed the Exodus entering the harbor, looking, as Gruber wrote, "like a matchbox splintered by a nutcracker."

During the "battle," the British rammed the Exodus and stormed it with guns, tear gas and truncheons. Gruber noted that the crew, mostly Jews from America and Palestine, fought back with potatoes, sticks and cans of kosher meat. The Exodus’s second officer, Bill Bernstein of San Francisco, was clubbed to death trying to prevent a British soldier from entering the wheelhouse. Two orphans were killed, one shot in the face point blank after he tossed an orange at a soldier.

When she learned that the prisoners from the Exodus were being transferred to Cyprus, she flew there overnight. While she waited for the Exodus detainees, she photographed earlier Jewish prisoners living behind barbed wire in steaming hot tents with almost no water or sanitary facilities. "You had to smell Cyprus to believe it," she cabled the New York Herald."

Half of 142 attempts to enter by Jews were stopped and the people were sent to internment camps in Cyprus.  50,000 ended up in such camps.  1,600+  Jews drowned at sea.  About 2,000 Jews actually entered Palestine.
 This was in violation of the International League of Nation Mandate.  They were, in fact, facilitating Arab settlement onto Jewish-settled land.  They just thought that Arabs had always been there which has caused the lies of today.  Here we have the case that Arabs came to Western Palestine because they were attracted by the superior economic conditions created by the Zionists.   No wonder Churchill could point out in 1939:

• Far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied until their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up (increase) the Jewish population.

Why were the British so pro-Arab besides being obviously anti-Semitic?  "Since the British relied on the Arab (or Arab-supporting) regimes of the Middle East, a pro-Arab policy in Palestine served them best to protect rights to Arab oil, the Suez canal, and British interests in India and beyond."  Since they had been in Palestine fighting against the Ottoman Empire during WWI and had solicited TE Elliot to help get Arabs to fight with them, they were the ones given the mandate.  Let us not forget that Jews fought against the Ottoman Empire as well with the British.  

Resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Exodus
Book:  From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters page 392-393
http://208.84.118.121/pf_mandate_oppose_immigration.php
Book: Exodus by Leon Uris
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Immigration/exodus.html
Movie:  Exodus with Paul Newman
http://www.zionism-israel.com/dic/Aliya_Bet.htm
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain