Backing up the argument: The war that was launched upon Israel on the eve of its independence created a double refugee problem (or exchange of populations): historians including Bernard Lewis and Martin Gilbert agree that an estimated 900 000 Jews had to leave Arab countries, while an estimated 600 000 Arabs (according to League of Nations’ mandate and Arab census figures) flew from Palestine. What this created was an Arab-Jewish refugee problem. But while the Jewish state immediately absorbed the Jewish refugees, the Arab states purposely kept the Palestinian refugees in camps in order to use them as political pawns, rather than integrating them or assisting them in the establishment of a state. The 900000 Jewish refugees who were expelled from the Arab and Muslim countries had lived there for hundreds or sometimes thousands of years, even before the advent of Islam. The Arab-Jewish refugee problem was not the inevitable consequence of the establishment of the State of Israel. It was created by the Arab decision to reject partition and the Arab attempt to destroy the nascent Jewish state. There would have been no Arab refugee problem had the Arab states accepted the 1937 or 1947 partition plans. While it is now recognized as perfectly valid for the Palestinians to aspire to be autonomous in their own state, there is no doubt that the Palestinian refugee problem could have been solved between 1948 and 1967 when Jordan controlled and annexed the West Bank. Instead of integrating them into the religiously, linguistically, and culturally identical society, they were segregated into refugee camps and made to live on the UN dole, while being fed propaganda about their glorious return to the village down the road. During the same period of time, many other refugee problems in the world have been solved by host nations accepting and integrating the refugee population into their own. Exchanges of population took place between several nations, including India and Pakistan and Greece and Turkey, without the need to build permanent refugee camps. The Arab states (with the notable exception of Jordan) have deliberately perpetuated the Palestinian refugee problem, exploiting it as a weapon in their struggle against Israel, at the expense of the Palestinians themselves. The Arabs have chosen to invest in supporting terrorism, making little attempt to help rehabilitate the lives of the refugees. The international community has also played a role in perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem by averting efforts to resettle them, and by giving them an exception from the internationally accepted definition of refugees. This definition inflated their number over the years. The Palestinians are the only displaced persons to have become wards of the international community. No special international relief organizations were established to aid them in resettlement. ( See background )