One side solved a refugee crisis, the other still uses it as a weapon

When I fancy a good ice cream in Jaffa, I like to walk a few streets over to a parlour called GOLDA. So too today. Delicious ice cream, at Israeli prices. For anyone who wants to discover this fantastic country: prices here are high.

Yesterday, too, I found myself thinking of Golda Meir. Israel's first female prime minister could set out her position with unaffected clarity.

Before a single centimetre of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria, with East Jerusalem) or the Gaza Strip was controlled by Israel, those areas were held by Jordan and Egypt from the 1949 armistice until the 1967 war. There was no independent Palestinian state then; Jordan and Egypt did not create one either.

The Arab leaders who launched the war in 1948 — and later Egypt's President Nasser, including around the Suez crisis — did not want another country alongside them. They wanted Israel destroyed and said so openly. No Jewish land for the original Jewish inhabitants.

Listening to her words decades later, what strikes me most is the profound moral asymmetry in how the world deals with refugees.

While the Jewish state absorbed millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors from European displaced-persons camps and nearly 850,000 Mizrahi Jews driven out of Arab countries, the Arab world made a deliberate, calculated choice to do the exact opposite.

They simply did not take in their fellow believers and kin from the former British Mandate of Palestine. They used them as a weapon. They kept them in permanent camps (see my article on Jordan), turned them into a lasting political instrument, had a flag designed for them (the Jordanian flag without the Hashemite star, to King Hussein's annoyance) and passed that status on.

Generation after generation. Not out of care, but to keep a bleeding wound open as a permanent excuse for continued violence against Jews.

Israel solved its refugee crisis through perseverance, responsibility and absorption. The Arab leaders institutionalised human suffering in the service of an ideology of elimination.

Mind you: more than twenty years ago, in 2005, Israel even withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip, after years of attacks on civilians, hoping for a long-desired peace.

In return, Israel received the massacre of 7 October.

For Golda Meir's own clear explanation: watch the video.