By Paul Weiser
There exist two refugee states whose treatment by the “international community” could not be more different. The disparities tell us much more about that so-called community than about differences between the two states - but those, too, bear recounting.
The two states (“states” in scare-quotes for one) are the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Taiwan (formerly the Republic of China). There are many similarities: each ejected from its former homeland in the late 1940s, and each was sustained by more powerful sponsors against its dispossessor. Furthermore, time has altered the political nature of each - though in opposite directions.
Indeed, specifics reverse each generality. The Kuomintang, defeated in mainland China as convincingly as the Arabs by Israel, fled to Taiwan. There it practiced corrupt, undemocratic rule which gradually (by influence of its American patron as well as generational and economic realities) mutated into robust democracy. Palestinians, by contrast, bit the hand of every sponsor - Jordan (which eventually purged them violently), the Gulf states, and finally Lebanon. Their original anarchy worsened with Arafat’s corrupt rule and - if possible - worsens further under Hamas while international recognition as a proto-state increases.
Which raises the subject of international reaction to these events. The “international community” abjectly supports the PA even as it launches constant attacks at Syrian and Iranian behest. As for Taiwan, that same “community” cast it out of the United Nations and refuses admission to humanitarian organizations at the behest of Red China... which constantly threatens it with a larger-scale version of Palestinian rocket-barrage and invasion.
Why? Does the “international community,” motivated by resentment, hate the democratic success of Israel and Taiwan or sympathize with the corruption of the PA and Red China? On the whole, since sympathy implies some integrity while envy requires none, it is surely the former.
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