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Reality Check: What Would Happen If The 'Free Palestine' People Got Their Way?

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Emanuel Engelmayer
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A common argument for the Palestinian cause is that many of the refugees from Israel's War of Independence (more like a war for survival) and subsequent 6-Day War have nowhere else to go and therefore, until this day, remain 'refugees' who are in a stage of limbo awaiting the return to Palestine. Besides that simply being untrue with 22 Muslim countries theoretically capable of accepting a relatively small amount of people, another question must be answered for that argument. Where would the Jews go if Israel magically became a fabled country called Palestine?

It is amazing how all it took to forget the unforgettable was two-thirds of a century. Between the years 1933-1945 over 6 million European Jews were violently and industrially killed for being born on the wrong side of elaborate Nazi race theories. It was made clear to the Jewish people of Europe that they are not welcome. Not only was this made clear by the Nazi invaders of the continent but also by the Christian neighbors of Jews in the various countries that saw the killing of them as the least of their problems. The final recorded pogrom on European soil took place in 1946, a year after Hitler shot himself.

In Kielce, Poland, over 80 Jewish refugees returning home to salvage what was long-lost were violently attacked not only by rural steel workers but by local Polish organized militias. It should be mentioned that local priests did all they can to stop the violence, but were no match for locals carrying iron clubs. Until this very day, European antisemitism is well documented and reassures the long-held European notion that Jews can remain friends as long as they are not neighbors.

Moving onward to another world that Jews used to inhabit for a millennium, the Arab world. Jews have been living in Arab and Northern African lands, later converted to Islam (mostly under threat of death), for over a thousand years, but compared to European Jewry, despite the 'once in a blue moon' uprising against them, had it easy. In 1492 due to the expulsion of Jews from Spain, a large amount of Jews migrated to countries such as Morocco, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt. These Jews became known as “Sephardim” derived from the Hebrew word for Spain and spoke a language called “Ladino”. With the exception of being forced to pay the non-Muslim tax known as The 'Jizyah' by the Ottoman empire and other local kingdoms, Jews mostly fared well during their centuries in the Muslim world.

However, with the rebirth of the Zionist movement in the late 19th Century, things got rough for Sephardic Jews. Locally reported violence became rampant along with the more than occasional killing spree. In the Arab world, you would be left alone so long as you did not express support for a Jewish state, and even then, it depended on whether the people asking you believed the answer. So perhaps classic European antisemitism would not be the word to use, but the suppression of a political and religious set of beliefs.

The final blow took place in 1948 when The State of Israel declared independence. Violence against Jewish-Arab communities broke out leading to the forced expulsion of most Arabic Jewry. It was literally a culling raid by the local Arab populations and if Jews wanted to survive, they had to leave. Talk about ethnic cleansing, what happened to the Jews in Arab lands post-1948 was probably the second largest ethnic cleansing of Jews in the twentieth century although few scholars talk about it.  Small amounts of Jews remain in Muslim countries to this day but under the unspoken guidelines of not mentioning anything about modern Israel or showing any Zionist support, despite Zionism being embedded in the Jewish faith. Naturally and not only for the reasons mentioned above, it would also be completely insane to suggest Jews move back to these lands.

After establishing that the two main Jewish diasporas are unhospitable for them, a final hypothetical option for the Israelites remains beside the existing State of Israel, The State of Palestine. A third option that jokingly can be examined would be the birth of a Palestinian state on the lands of modern-day Israel, and former Jewish-Israelis serving as a very large, yet still minority group. That option depends on so many things that are simply not aligned with today’s reality. Such as assuming that the existing Palestinian nationalists would not only not wish to kill the Israelis as they often do, but accommodate them and ensure all needs are met. This third outlandish option is rarely spoken of because even Pro-Palestinian advocates know that there is no chance it does not end in a bloodbath or Jewish genocide for the second time in less than a century. You cannot hear the slogan 'from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' and not understand that this means killing the Jews that currently reside between that river and that sea.

Surely, The Unites States would help absorb some of the Israeli refugees but is in no way capable or willing to take in over 8 million of them legally. One question remains of if the few who are taken in by America would still be considered Israeli refugees generations later, just as people like Rashida Tlaib, Linda Sarsour, and Amer Zahr are 'technically' Palestinian refugees under UNRWA rules, despite having been raised in and citizenship of the United States. Will the United Nations create a special refugee department for the Jews of Israel as they did the Palestinians? No need to speculate, the question was cynical.

Back to square one, where should the Jews go? Well, the answer should be very obvious to anyone with half a brain, Israel! Israel is a refugee state made up of people with various ethnic backgrounds that really, genuinely, have literally nowhere else to go. There are Israelis who dream of leaving Israel for political and financial reasons, some singular ones may do so, but a community of Israelis trying to relocate somewhere outside their natural habitat will find no such place that welcomes them with open arms. In the end, the only true home for the Jew is the land and State of Israel.

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