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Palestine's Peace Bomb: What Will Happen When One Million Refugees Return to the West Bank?

(Foreign Policy) Steven J. Rosen - With the creation of a Palestinian state, opening the West Bank to a flood of refugees from the neighboring Arab countries could sow the seeds for the rise of further extremism and terrorism on Israel's borders. The refugees who are most likely to resettle in the West Bank and Gaza (or be forced to do so by Arab governments) are the legions who are kept wretched in Syria and Lebanon, the ones who are economically desperate and politically extreme. Worst of all, from Israel's perspective, the refugees most likely to come are the ones who have decades of membership and training in the terrorist organizations that proliferate in the Palestinian camps in Syria and Lebanon. Will these Palestinians consider the West Bank their final home, or see it as merely a step on the road toward their final struggle with Israel? Bringing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into the tiny area of the West Bank, which lies a few miles from the heartland of the Jewish state, alarms many Israelis almost as much as bringing them to Tel Aviv. How will the swarms of jihadists that will be imported to the West Bank be stopped from bringing violence to Israeli towns and villages? The writer, director of the Washington Project of the Middle East Forum, served for many years as a senior official at AIPAC.
2014-02-03 00:00:00
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