palestine

Having read all the comments it seems to me that it is saddam who turned out to be the Palestinians' true friend; and he was after all a self proclaimed pan-Arabist. Another tick in the plus ledger, perhaps. (Along with the healthcare, the infrastructure, the education, and emancipation of women?)
You didn't hear all this when messianic simpletons like Tony Blair, Britain's biggest undeclared zionist, decided to kick over the Middle Eastern antheap.
When Saddam fell it's not surprising the favoured people of the regime suffered. Happened to the Jews, darlings of the habsburg empire, in the 1920s and 30s.
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Second, as everyone goes enthusiastic over the Germans' ability to integrate refugees I say: ask any Turk in Kreuzberg,
Wikipedia:
The migrants, mostly male, were allowed to work in Germany for a period of one or two years before returning back to the home country in order to make room for other migrants. However, many migrants decided not to return to their home countries and were joined in Germany by their families. Children born to Gastarbeiters received the right to reside in Germany but were not granted citizenship; this was know as the "Aufenthaltsberechtigung" ("Right to reside").

As they started to settle down and form new ethnic minority communities, the government and others in society ignored the integration of the migrants. This led to educational, religious and social discrimination of the migrants in Germany. A factor contributing to the creation of these problems was Germany's birth laws, which did not automatically grant citizenship to those born in the country; a new born would automatically gain the nationality of his parents

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The pro-Israelis are getting the better of the argument today, so Norman Finkelstein provides another perspective.
(Finkelstein is the Jewish writer who exposed the WJC's extortion of the German state)
He says the Israeli intelligence knew the army would cream the Arabs but the Israeli leadership went ahead with scaremongering about another holocaust a) they wanted to finish Nasser. The idea of an Arab leader modernising the Arab world was intolerable to their sense of uniqueness and racist superiority; and they feared a modernised Arab world where they would be outnumbered. b) they were greedy for territory.
So, from 1966, they set in train a number of provocations against the Syrians, shooting down their jets, prompting the latter to ask Nasser for help as protector of the Arab peoples. He pushed the UN troops out of Sinai, but left the door open for diplomatic negotiations, and offered several openings. These Israel ignored because, as Finkelstein puts
it, the Israelis wanted war.
And now they're picking on Iran.
His words, not mine. And you can write to him at
www.normanfinkelstein.com

I feel sorry for the Palestinians. It's hard to do all those nation building things that look so neat on the drawing board when their spirit has been broken, they're walled in like rats in a cage, their territory sectioned off by roads, suffering daily searches. Unlike the zionists, they hadn't been to training school for fascism in Europe (tutor: A Hitler) so they didn't what hit them when these toughened people waded in in the 1940s.
I have just been reading Nicholas Kristof's book on poverty: and the problem is for the African poor is that, in addition to being disadvantaged, their behaviour has also turned self destructive, where drinking and drugs and risky sexual behaviour is only the start of the problem