Letter: Palestinians Persecuted?

Dear editor:

Where did Bruce Ticker get the idea that Israel has ever persecuted the Palestinians? (“Long Live October 7’ Anti-Israel Mob Tells Us” boulderjewishnews.org October 10, 2024) In fact, it is Arab leaders and, after 1964, Palestinian leaders, who are responsible for the Palestinians’ suffering and statelessness. After Great Britain used 78% of its League of Nations Mandate for Palestine to establish the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, the United Nations proposed that the remainder of the mandate be used to establish a Jewish state and a second Arab state.  The Zionists accepted the offer but Arab nations rejected it and went to war trying to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland. Arab-initiated violence eventually saw the creation of two refugee populations – between 400,000 and 700,000 Arabs fled Palestine and 1,000,000 Mizrachi Jews were driven from their homes in the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/was-there-a-palestinian-national-identity-prior-to-1964/

Some of the Mizrachim emigrated to France or the US, but Israel absorbed and uplifted 800,000 of them, at a time when food was being rationed in the reborn Jewish state, when Israel was recovering from damages inflicted by the Arab armies and dealing with terrorist incursions from areas illegally occupied by Egypt and (Trans)Jordan until 1967. Surely, Arab nations, with vast landholdings (and some having oil riches) should have been able to take in the Arabs who’d left Palestine. But the Arab League, fearing the Arabs of Palestine would forget Palestine if allowed to build new lives, told its member nations to deny citizenship to the Arabs who’d fled and to their descendants. Thus, the two sets of refugees have very different histories. The descendants of Mizrachi Jews comprise the majority of Israel’s current Jewish population and every position in Israel’s governance has been filled, at one time or another, by someone with roots in the Mizrachi communities. On the other hand, there are now 6,000,000 Palestine refugees in UNRWA camps (99.5% of them born into refugee status) who’ve been told they will remain on the world’s dole until Israel gives them the homes the “refugees” their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, … lost in 1948. It’s not going to happen – the “refugees” have grown up seeing Palestinians honored and rewarded for killing Jews and are not likely to live at peace with Jewish neighbors in Israel.  https://www.wsj.com/articles/expose-the-palestinian-refugee-scam-1530833146

Following decades of wars, intifadas, and terrorist attacks, Israel and Palestinian leaders signed the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990’s. Thus, Israel did what no Arab leader had ever done – afforded the Palestinians their first opportunity to live under the administration of leaders of their own choosing. Despite the refusal of Palestinian leaders to meet the Oslo call for setting secure and recognized borders between Israel and a Palestinian entity, the Palestinian Authority has been governing 95% of the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and Hamas has been governing all Palestinians in Gaza for nearly two decades. Unfortunately, these organizations clearly do not have their people’s best interests at the tops of their agendas. Leaders of both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have enriched themselves by embezzling monies donated for their people’s benefit and have also diverted humanitarian aid to efforts to delegitimize and destroy Israel. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/nyregion/hamas-gaza-aid-unrwa-lawsuit.html

Bottom line: If Palestinian leaders really want to build a state in which their people can become productive citizens, they need to begin preparing their people for co-existence with the nation-state of the Jews.

Toby F. Block
Atlanta, Georgia