Displaced Persons

     I’ve been thinking about a WWII troopship, the USS General Leroy Eltinge. In 1965 I spent three weeks aboard the Eltinge with 4000 soldiers enroute from Oakland Army Terminal to Cam Rahn Bay. I recently came across an historic footnote involving the old tub. In 1948 congress passed the Displaced Persons Act authorizing entry of 200,000 European refugees into the US. The Eltinge was one of the ships sent to fetch them.
     It was a small part of the greatest humanitarian relief project in history. By some accounts WWII produced over 80 million refugees. Millions of them were survivors of Nazi slave labor camps. We remember them as mostly Jews but the vast majority were not Jews. They were Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, White Russians, and Hungarians. By 1947 they were gathered in DP camps across the continent with no place to go.  One of the UN’s first missions was to take charge of them and get them resettled.
     And they did; by 1962 when I first visited Germany there were only a few thousand of the most tragic cases left. The others had all gone home or, if they had no homes, been admitted into England, Belgium, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and Australia. They and their families were getting on with life. By 1970 the last of the European camps were gone. Then there are the Palestinians. At Arab insistence many thousands of Palestinian who left Israel in 1948 remain refugees today, they or their descendents, for no other reason than to serve as pawns in the dispute with Israel. The squalid camps in Gaza, the West bank, and Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley are there to keep attention focused on their misery. They represent perhaps the most intractable issue in one of the world’s most dangerous confrontations.
     I have a proposition. Tell Arabs we have had enough of their intransigence. It’s time to resettle Palestinians so they can get on with productive lives in much the way their European predecessors did fifty years ago. Give the Palestinians something to do besides sending suicide assassins into Israel. We can help of course, in much the same way we helped in the reconstruction of Europe. But it’s time we stopped pouring money down a rat hole. The aid money we and our European “allies” send to Palestine should go to infrastructure projects; roads, schools, hospitals, irrigation systems, desalinization plants – the sorts of things a thriving economy needs. Not one more nickel should go to the corrupt heirs of Yasser Arafat, or to ensure the refugees stay in their camps, especially not to terrorist organizations like Hamas, even if they are in office through free and fair elections.
     I have another suggestion, that we make a show of faith by passing a Displaced Persons Act of 2006 authorizing immigration for 200,000 Palestinian refugees. If the USS Eltinge isn’t scrap metal by now we can send her to get them. I calculate the Eltinge could make the trip in three months and carry 5000 people. At that rate it would take ten years to get them all here. I suspect there would be no shortage of applicants. We could solicit the aid of local churches and mosques to resettle them, much as we did the boat people in the 1970s. 20,000 people a year is a drop in the ocean of American immigration. We should be able to screen out bad actors. Families only would be a good start. The threat of deportation for families of recalcitrants should be a strong incentive for good behavior once they get here.