Abu Mazen Charges that the Arab States Are the Cause of the Palestinian Refugee Problem

Abu Mazen, from the article titled
"What We Have Learned and What We Should Do", published in Falastin el Thawra, the official journal of the PLO, of Beirut, in March 1976

"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, as if we were condemmed to change places with them; they moved out of their ghettos and we occupied similar ones. The Arab States succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They did not recognize them as a unified people until the States of the world did so, and this is regrettable".

Abu Mazen alluded, it was in large part due to threats and fear-mongering from Arab leaders that some 700,000 Arabs fled Israel in 1948 when the new state was invaded by Arab armies. Ever since, the growing refugee population, now around 4 million by UN estimates, has been corralled into squalid camps scattered across the Middle East - in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank.

Official PLO document (2000):
(From the very beginning, the persistent Arab strategy was to keep the refugees in the camps.)

“In order to keep the refugee issue alive and prevent Israel from evading responsibility for their plight, Arab countries - with the notable exception of Jordan - have usually sought to preserve a Palestinian identity by maintaining the Palestinians’ status as refugees”
(The Palestinian Refugee Fact files, PLO, Ramallah, 2000, p.22)

Palestinian refugee, Jordan newspaper, Ad Difaa (September 6, 1954), said:

"The Arab government told us:
Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in."