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Dear Letter to the Editor:
I have a few questions (and some information) for Ed Kass (Opinion: When Are We Going to Say Atzor! Stop! Enough!, BJN 7/31/2025).
Why did Arab rulers threaten violence against the Zionist community in Palestine and the Mizrachi Jewish communities in the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa as soon as the UN suggested partitioning the 20% of Mandatory Palestine not used to created Transjordan into a Jewish state and a second Arab state?
How is it that tiny, renascent Israel, under Arab attack essentially throughout its seventy-five years of existence, managed to absorb and uplift 800,000 Mizrachim made homeless when Arab leaders made good on their threats, but Arab countries (with vast land holdings and (some with) oil riches), condemned Arabs who fled Palestine (or were displaced) in the 1940’s and their descendants to perpetual refugee limbo, to end only when Israel could be forced to take them in?
How can it be that the UN agency (UNRWA) that was supposed to find homes and work for the “Palestine refugees” now has 6,000,000 such people on its rolls, with 99.5% of them having been born into refugee status?
How can it be acceptable that UNRWA hasn’t resettled a single refugee when UNHCR (the UN agency that handles all refugees, aside from the Palestine refugees) considers five years in a refugee camp “an extended stay”?
Palestinian leaders have rejected proposals that should have led to the establishment of the first-ever-to-exist Arab State of Palestine from leaders spanning Israel’s political spectrum. However, even after the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority continued paying lifelong stipends to Palestinians who answered the PA’s call for “violence against the Occupation” (with the size of the stipend given to the murderer and/or the murderer’s family being tied to the number of Israelis killed). Hamas, while claiming that an Israeli blockade prevented the development of Gaza’s economy, spent $1,000,000,000 building an extensive network of terror tunnels in, and under, Gaza in a manner that essentially destroyed any distinction between civilian areas and military areas in the enclave, so that Israel’s exemplary (and successful) attempts to avoid killing civilians would be guaranteed to fail sometimes.
Why does Mr. Kass accept the anti-Israel propaganda fed to our news media and politicians instead of the words of Major John Spencer and Khaled Abu Toameh?
Palestinians weigh in: The real reason Hamas wants to sacrifice them Khaled Abu Toameh
Toby F. Block
Atlanta, GA
