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I salute Bruce Ticker for condemning Annelle Sheline’s lies and criticizing C-Span’s having failed to challenge her assertions. (“Column: Did You Know? Holocaust Guilt Cost Arabs Their Own State. Just Ask A Revisionist Named Annelle Sheline.” boulderjewishnews.org August 21, 2025) However, I wish he had given more information for the readers so that they would be better able to refute others who repeat the false claim that the Palestinians are being punished for Europe’s sins.
Most, but not all, Jews were driven from Eretz Yisrael millennia ago. The Jews in the Diaspora retained Hebrew as their language of prayer and religious study, supported Jewish communities that remained in the Holy Land, and prayed frequently and fervently for a return to Zion. As outsiders in all places of their residence, the Jews of the Diaspora were subject to discrimination, mistreatment, and expulsion, always contributing to communities where they resided until they were forced to move and begin again in the next (temporary) location. The Zionist Movement, which began in the mid-1800’s, posited that the Jews needed a home (a place where, if a Jew needed to go there, he (or she) could not be turned away).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Nordau
When Zionists began arriving in the Jews’ ancestral homeland (called “Palestine” and located in the Southern Syrian administrative area of the Ottoman Empire), they found a largely underpopulated and underdeveloped area). The Zionists bought land and improved its productivity, built schools and hospitals, organized civil defense units, and lobbied world leaders for their cause. Many of today’s Palestinians descend from families which moved to Palestine only after Zionist activity had raised the area’s living standards.
https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/muslim-aliyah
The Balfour Declaration, issued in 1917, indicated that the British Government looked favorably on the establishment of a national home, in Palestine, for the Jewish people on condition that the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish residents would not be diminished.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/balfour.asp
Today, Muslim and Christian Arabs comprise twenty percent of Israel’s population. They enjoy full civil rights. Arabs and Jews are treated in the same hospitals by Jewish and Arab health practitioners. Arabs and Jews study in the same universities and do research together under the direction of Arab and Jewish faculty members.
Most Arabs are not required to serve in the Israel Defense Forces (the Druze are subject to the Draft because Druze leaders believe their people should defend the country in which they live) but Arabs can (and do) volunteer to join the IDF. Arabs serve as judges on Israeli courts; Arabs can bring suit in Israeli courts and petition the government over perceived wrongs.
So, why don’t the Palestinians have a state of their own? Arab leaders went to war instead of helping the Arabs of Palestine get ready for the autonomy offered them by the UN Partition Plan. And Arab states denied citizenship to the Arab refugees displaced by Arab-initiated wars (the 6,000,000 Palestine Refugees on UNRWA’s rolls are children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Arabs who fled Palestine or were displaced in the 1940’s). Calls for Israel to grant a right-of-return to the refugees, who’ve grown up seeing their peers honored and rewarded for killing Jews, are part of a plot to convert Israel into a Muslim-majority state.
Several Israeli Prime Ministers have issued proposals for the formation of a Palestinian state: Ehud Barak (2000); Ehud Olmert (2008); Benjamin Netanyahu (2009 in a speech at Bar Ilan University). These, and other suggestions, have all been refused, because each proposal demanded that the Palestinian state would co-exist, peacefully, with the Jewish state.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-netanyahus-speech-at-bar-ilan
Toby F. Block
Atlanta, GA
