Francine Klagsbrun’s book, Lioness; Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel, suggests an eerie similarity with current refugee crises. Today, the millions of people forced from their homes by war and famine mirror those of Golda Meir’s lifetime.

Before World II, as the Nazis began rounding up their Jewish populations, too few nations were willing to take in Jewish escapees from Nazism.

Today, many balk at accepting refugees from the horrors of wars in the Middle East. Some Americans resent, not only Middle Easterners, but refugees from their own hemisphere.

After World War II, refugees flooded Europe, becoming the DP’s, the displaced persons, a haunting reminder of today’s displaced men, women, and children.

Many Jewish survivors, their homelands ripped apart by the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, moved to the Middle East and became part of the modern state of Israel.

A mass exodus is never orderly or pretty or completely containable. Understandably, existing cultures do not appreciate strange ideas and customs knocking at their gates in large numbers.

Arab culture in Palestine changed beyond recognition. Today, in some African nations, war and famine (the two often go together) have sent desperate people to overwhelm the local populations of small towns.

No one solution is going to solve migration problems. A manageable number of newcomers can contribute to the revitalization of an older nation. New, energized citizens provide energy and entrepreneurs for the society, benefitting it at least as much as the refugees are helped.

However, great numbers, as in Middle Eastern nations like Lebanon and Jordan and in several African countries like Chad and Uganda, have swamped the local populations.

We have not, so far, supported peacemaking as we have supported war. That choice is tragic. Peacemaking aims to keep populations safely in their own countries. If we do not channel more effort and resources into this ancient art, we will be overwhelmed by unstoppable calamities.