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Dear editor:
I agree with Ed Kass. The conversation is a start. However, progress in settling the conflict between Arabs/Palestinians and Israel requires acceptance of past history.
Kass quotes Moshe Dayan’s statement that Palestinian hatred of Israel is certainly understandable. After all, Palestinians lost their homes, many of them have been trapped in refugee limbo for decades, many of them are living in poverty, while Israel and Israelis (including the 20% of Israelis who are Arabs) are prospering. This implies that Dayan believed that Israel is responsible for Palestinian suffering. The facts do not support that explanation.
Arab leaders began threatening both the Zionist community in Palestine and the Mizrachi Jews living in Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa even before the UN voted on the plan to divide twenty percent of the British Mandate for Palestine (the portion not used to create the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan) into a second Arab state and a Jewish state. Arab-initiated violence eventually created two refugee communities — between 400,000 and 700,000 Arabs who fled Palestine or were displaced and over 1,000,000 Mizrachi Jews who were driven from their homes by Arab leaders shamed by their armies’ failure to prevent the birth of the modern State of Israel.
Some of the Mizrachi Jews emigrated to France or the U.S. but Israel absorbed and uplifted 800,000 of them. Their descendants comprise the majority of Israel’s current Jewish population and every office in Israeli governance (except Prime Minister) has been held, at one time or another,by someone with roots in the MIzrachi communities.
In contrast, the Arab League told its member nations to deny citizenship to the Arabs who fled or were displaced from Palestine in the 1940’s. Of the 6,000,000 “Palestine refugees” now listed on UNRWA rolls, no more than 30,000 ever lived in Palestine.
These refugees have been told that they will remain on the world’s dole until Israel permits them to return to the homes the “refugees” claim their forebears lost in 1948. Granting such a “Right of Return” would be the death knell of the Jewish state, as shown by Hamas’ using its control of Gaza to wage war against Israel instead of building a place where Gazans could become productive citizens.
Palestinians could learn a lot from Israelis. Jews have a long history of thriving despite persecutions and expulsions. Detailed plans for demilitarizing Gaza and deradicalizing Palestinians (who cheered Hamas’ vow to inflict 1,000 October 7’s) have been proposed. It would be wonderful if discussion of those plans led to their implementation.
Toby F. Block
Atlanta, GA
