By Peter Fernandez

The University of Vermont and Middlebury College each have a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), while Dartmouth College lists two similar but separate programs: Palestine Solidarity Coalition of Dartmouth Students (PSC) and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. But where are their organizations to protest and advertise the occupation and subjugation of other unrecognized peoples?

According to The Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations, there exist 350 stateless countries.

Some of these stateless nations are arcane and small, like the 1.3 million  Mjerteens of Somalia and the 790,000 Jejuvians of  Korea. The 70 million Tamils of south India and northern Sri Lanka, as well as the 6.5 million Tibetans in China, are better known.

Directly after WWII, fifteen million ethnic Germans, who had lived for centuries in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, were expelled from these countries. Their crime was for being German, as some welcomed the Nazis as liberators during the war. But they didn’t riot and resort to violence, or organize German terror groups  to murder innocent Czechs and Poles, etc., “to publicize their plight and dramatize their demands.”

One of the annalists of the German expulsions, Alfred de Zayas, stated that “Unlike the Palestinian expellees who became terrorists in spite of millions of dollars of United Nations help, the German expellees transformed Marshall Plan Aid into work which not only  enabled them to survive but also gradually  to rebuild their lives  in a liberal, democratic -and -peaceful-society.” (Cited in Alfred Maurice de Zaya’s, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Eastern European Germans, page 83.)

The ethnic German refugees responded productively, as did Germany, which didn’t place them in refugee camps for decades, as the Arabs have done to the Palestinians.

Palestine/Israel receives most of the world’s attention, but there is another Arab tribe that is “homeless,” the Arabistanis (also known as the Ahwazis). The Iranian government renamed its ancient homeland Khuzestan in the 1920’s. Khuzestan/Arabistan is located in southwestern Iran, at the head of the Persian Gulf. They number from 5 to 8 million today after their ancient lands were usurped by Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925. Some have resorted to terrorism, yet not on the massive and consistent scale as the Palestinians.

Arabistan’s Arabs are discriminated against in employment, education, culture, and politics, according to  David Grog, author of Reclaiming Israel’s History. More than half of their population lives in poverty. Even in a minority of Iranian schools, where the student majority is Arab, the Arabic language is not allowed to be taught. The Iranian government is bent on ethnically cleansing Arabistan of its Arabs.  

Amnesty International stated that “Land expropriation by the Iranian authorities is reportedly so widespread that it appears to amount to a policy aimed at dispossessing Arabs of their traditional lands. This is apparently part of a strategy aimed at the forcible relocation of the Arabs of their traditional land.” 

It appears that the Arabistanis will not be experiencing freedom soon, as ninety percent of Iran’s oil revenues are derived from the Arabistan oil wells. Yet, Western protesters only have time to praise Palestine and demonize Israel. During a speech on September 6, 2014, at the Eyal Hotel in Jerusalem, Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh expressed the media’s bias with the phrase “no Jews, no news.”

In 1950, after the Arab-Israeli War, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was founded. It was and is dedicated only to Palestinians. This, of course, is a just and benevolent cause, since many lost their lives and homes in the 1948 War. Its charter defines any Palestinian displaced by the 1948 War as a “refugee.” However, it also states the perpetual rights of “the descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children.” This means, technically and legally, that Palestinian exiles can pass their exile status to their descendants indefinitely. 

“When the agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees,” states the official UNRWA website. It continues, “Today, some 5 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.” No other program dedicated to helping refugees has ever recognized the perpetual rights of the descendants of the original refugees.

In the same year, 1950, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was also established to care for the remaining refugees worldwide. A “refugee,” as defined by the UNHCR, is a person driven by unwanted force from “the country of its nationality.” This definition presses two critical limitations. Firstly, refugee status cannot be transferred adfinitum. And lastly, when a refugee gains citizenship in another country, they are no longer in exile, period.

“In the Muslim world alone, the Assyrians, Chaldeans, Copts are Christian nations that have long sought independence from the majority Muslims states in which they live,” writes Grog. He goes on to express that these infidels “are facing increasingly serious persecution at the hands of Islamic militants. Yet the West remains largely indifferent to their plight.”

Grog’s book also documents that over 6.8 million Muslim Hejazis in Saudi Arabia desire their own nation. The Arab Alawites, like the Arab Druze, also lack a state. Interestingly enough, a large number of Druze serve in the Israeli army, which doesn’t seem to back the apartheid myth propagated by anti-Israel voices.