Letter: NYC Mayor Mamdani’s Lies

Dear editor:

I fully agree with Bruce Ticker. (“Column: NYC Mayor Mamdani Lies, Accusing Israel of Expelling All Arabs in 1948 War” 5.21.26, Boulder Jewish News) Mayor Mamdani’s lies show a clear disregard for the safety of New York’s Jewish citizens and could lead to Jewish New Yorkers being attacked by people who consider themselves champions of the “Palestinian cause.” However, I feel compelled to expand a bit on the very different fates of the two groups of refugees created in the 1940’s when Arab leaders rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine which called for the creation of a Jewish entity and a second Arab entity in the 20% of British Mandatory Palestine not used to create the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan (now called Jordan), a place where Jews, by law, still cannot reside.

It is noteworthy that Arab leaders began threatening violence against both the Zionists in Palestine and the Mizrachi Jews living in the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa even before the UN General Assembly voted to implement the Partition Plan. As many Arabs had moved to Palestine only after Zionist activity had improved the area’s living conditions, some say that Arabs began leaving Palestine as leaders turned their efforts from civil matters to preparations for combat. Whether the Arabs left voluntarily or were displaced during warfare, the true Nakba (catastrophe) is that, at war’s end, the Arab League told its member states to deny citizenship to them and their descendants. There are now 6,000,000 “Palestine Refugees” under UN aegis. These multigenerational descendants of Arabs who left, or were displaced from Palestine, in the 1940s have been told that they will remain in refugee limbo until Israel is forced to give the “refugees” the homes they claim their forebears lost when the modern State of Israel came into existence. But the “UNRWA camps” in which the “refugees” live have become breeding grounds for terrorists and admitting any significant number of them into Israel would be the death knell for the Jewish state.

The second group of refugees numbered over 1,000,000 Mizrachi Jews driven from their homes by Muslim rulers embarrassed that their armies had failed to “drive the Jews into the sea.” Some of the displaced Jews emigrated to the U.S. or France but Israel uplifted and absorbed 800,000 of them. Their descendants comprise the majority of Israel’s current Jewish population. Every post in Israel’s governance, except Prime Minister, has been held, at one time or another, by someone with roots in the Mizrachi communities.

Tiny Israel absorbed and uplifted the MIzrachim while food was being rationed, survivors of the Sho’ah were being rehabilitated, and Israel was fighting Arab armies and dealing with terrorist incursions from lands illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt until 1967. Surely Arab countries, with vast land holdings and some having oil riches, should have welcomed the Arabs who’d left or lost their homes and even helped them to become productive citizens.

In closing, I’d also like to ask if Mayor Mamdani is unaware of the fact that 2,100,000 Arabs live in Israel, many being full citizens and all enjoying full civil rights.

Toby F. Block
Atlanta, GA