The Arab Boat | Ramzy Baroud

[Tace]

It’s an Arab-Palestinian Nakba, and We Are All Refugees

Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust

May 13, 2015

In a western capital far away from Gaza and Cairo, I recently shared a pot of tea with an “Egyptian refugee.”

The term is familiar to me, but never have I encountered an Egyptian who refers to himself as such. He stated it as a matter of fact by saying: “As an Egyptian refugee ...” and carried on to talk about the political turmoil in his country.

It made me shudder as I tried to conjure up a possible estimation of Arabs who have been made refugees in recent years. But where does one start the estimation if we are to set aside the Palestinian Nakba in 1948? Or forget the successive waves of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians that followed, and disregard the various exoduses of Lebanese civilians as a result of Israeli invasions and civil war?

Iraq can be the start -- the country that served as a foundation of everything Arab. Their culture, history and civilization, which extends to the very beginning of human civilization, ushered in the new Arab exodus.

The American promise to bomb it “back to the stone age” was worse than expected. Millions of Iraqis became refugees after the U.S.-led war, a situation that was exasperated in the mid-2000s with the invasion-provoked civil war.

Last year alone more than 2 million Iraqis were displaced, most of them internally as a result of the so-called Islamic State’s violent takeover of numerous territories in northern and western Iraq.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/the-arab-boat-ramzy-baroud

[oberliner]

1. Very interesting piece

It is fascinating how he puts the Palestinian story in the context of the rest of the Arab world.