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Much has been made of the Palestinian exodus of 1 948 . Yet during their decades of dispersal, the Palestinians have experienced no less traumatic ordeals at the hands of their Arab brothers. As early as the mid-1950s, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Libya expelled striking Palestinian workers. In 1970, Jordan expelled some 20,000 Palestinians and demolished their camps; in 1 994-95, Libya expelled tens of thousands of long-term Palestinian residents in response to the Oslo process; and after the 2003 Iraq war, some 21,000 Palestinians fled the country in response to a systematic terror and persecution campaign. As recently as 2007, Beirut effectively displaced 3 1 ,400 Palestinian refugees when the Lebanese army destroyed the Nahr el Bared refugee camp during fighting between the militant Fatal al-Islam group and the Lebanese army.1
But the largest forced displacement of Palestinians from an Arab state took place in 1 99 1 when Kuwait expelled most of its Palestinian residents in retaliation for the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) endorsement of Iraq's brutal occupation of the emirate (August 1 990-February 1 99 1 ). It mattered little that this population, most of which had resided in Kuwait for decades, was not supportive of the PLO 's reckless move: From March to September 1 99 1 , about 200,000 Palestinians were expelled from the emirate in a systematic campaign of terror, violence, and economic pressure while another 200,000 who fled during the Iraqi occupation were denied return. By September 1 99 1 , Kuwait's Palestinian community had dwindled to some 20,000.
Yet while this expulsion was near the order of magnitude of the Palestinian 1 948 flight (estimated by the Israeli government at 550,000-600,000 and by the Arab League at 700,00O),2 driving PLO chairman Yasser Arafat to declare that "what Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories,"3 it was largely ignored by the international community with neither the U.N. Security Council nor the General Assembly doing anything to assist the newly displaced refugees and punish their ethnic cleanser.
ASETTLEDAND INTEGRATED COMMUNITY
The first Palestinian Arab immigrants to Kuwait arrived in 1936 at the invitation of its ruler, Sheikh Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, and the positive impression they...