In Friday's Collegian, Walied Abdelkarim demanded the right of return of Palestinian refugees, claiming that they were forcibly removed by Israel and "did not volunteer to leave." According to the Web site of the internationally respected BBC, 700,000 Arabs left because of "Jewish/Israeli terror tactics, the chaos of war, the contagious panic of local residents, fractious and incompetent Arab leadership, the flight of influential families and the actual sale of Arab land to the Jews without coercion."

Jewish force was only part of the reason the Arabs left, and this force was not exerted in a vacuum. These Jews had suffered through decades of Arab riots and massacres, and their tiny, day-old state was under attack from the entire Arab world with explicit promises of genocide from Arab leaders. Were the Jews somehow supposed to look after the local Arabs, who had invited the Arab world to level their towns and kill their families?

Furthermore, the 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries following the war did not volunteer to leave either.

These people had lived in their home countries for generations, for example the 130,000-strong community of Iraq, who had lived there for 2,700 years and had essentially disappeared by May 1950. Will they ever get their homes back?

The difference is that Israel sacrificed everything to take care of these refugees. Meanwhile, the oil-rich Arab world still leaves their brothers in squalor in refugee camps, using their misery as a political tool in their endless quest for the destruction of Israel.