Talk looks at plight of refugees

The program examined the status of Palestinian refugees. With the current crisis in the Middle East dominating the news, 20 students attended a lecture on Palestinian refugees in Houston Hall's Smith-Penniman Room Sunday. The program, sponsored by the Middle Eastern Awareness Program, examined the status of the refugees during the ongoing peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. David Rabiyya, a Middle East expert, as well as a Hebrew and Judaic Studies professor at Bryn Mawr College, began the lecture with a general speech about Palestinian and Israeli history. "In 1948, upon the creation of the state of Israel during the British mandate over Palestine, the unprecedented refugees had created some financial and economic burdens for some neighbor countries," Rabiyya said. He added that 500,000 more Palestinian refugees had become homeless by 1967. Following Rabiyya's comments, Cornell University Visiting Professor Salim Tamari, a Palestinian delegate to the 1991 multilateral peace negotiations between Israel and the Arab world, focused on the peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, which he said had been addressed "in a variety of ways." Tamari added that multilateral negotiations and solutions on broader issues require coordinated action and support from the international community. The experts' comments intrigued many of the students in the audience. After Tamari called on other countries to take part in the negotiations, College sophomore Ariel Soiffer asked whether or not global support could be continued financially. "Of course, it was assumed that the multilateral [negotiations] would create regional forms of cooperation that would facilitate the atmosphere of negotiations," Tamari responded. But College sophomore Michael Levy questioned how the negotiations would affect the refugees. "Then where do you think they would go finally?" Levy asked. But Rabiyya stressed that people who have not witnessed the situation for themselves should not pass judgment upon the Palestinians. "The matter is that Palestine should be recognized as some kind of destination, not just as people struggled with wars -- otherwise they cannot expect any better situation," he said. Following the lecture, College senior Sarah Weiss, a MEAP coordinator, said she hoped to bring more events like this to Penn. " I want to thank to everyone who came and the Hillel community and Greater Philadelphia, which supported funding," Weiss said. "MEAP is only two years old -- I hope we can expand our activities a lot more."