Source of the "Refugee" Problem

Today, the WSJ has an interesting quote by Abu Mazen.

[Abu Mazen] penned [an article] in March 1976 in Falastin al-Thawra, the official journal of the PLO in Beirut. "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe..."

The article goes on discuss a short history of the "refugee" problem.

In 1950, the United Nations set up the United Nations Relief and Works Agency as a "temporary" relief effort for Palestinian refugees. Former UNRWA director Ralph Galloway stated eight years later that, "the Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die." The only thing that has changed since then is the number of Palestinians cooped up in these prisons.

...Today the United Nations spends more than a quarter billion dollars a year to keep Palestinian refugees in their camps, which are often the factories of desperation that produce suicide bombers.

Israel has repeatedly offered to help smooth the settlement of the refugees elsewhere, but Arab states refuse, preferring to use the refugees as political pawns to perpetuate the conflict with Israel and divert public consciousness away from festering domestic problems...

Refugees are a sad by-product of war, boundary changes and other tumult. Difficult refugee issues have arisen time and again -- in Germany after World War II, after the India-Pakistan conflict in the 1960s, following the Yugoslav wars -- and are usually resolved imperfectly with a combination of restitution and pay-off. That will be the only practicable solution in this case too, as Abu Mazen knows well. The question is whether he cares about peace enough to admit it.