Letter: Kiros and Chevalier Are Sincere in Their Concern. Their Blame is Misplaced.

Dear editor:

I believe that Melat Kiros and Darialize Avila Chevalier are sincere in their concern for the plight of the stateless and poor Palestinians. (“Column: Sore-Thumb Department: The Two Worst Israel-Bashers Bound for Congress” boulderjewishnews.org July 3, 2026) However, I feel obliged to point out that Israel is not responsible for the Palestinians’ plight. The true persecutors are Arab and Palestinian leaders who are using the Palestinians in an attempt to replace the world’s only Jewish state with a Muslim-majority state, a plot that originated in the 1940’s.

Arab leaders began threatening violence against Zionists and against Mizrachi Jewish residents of Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa even before the UN voted on the 1947 Partition Plan for Palestine.

After Israel declared independence in 1948, over 1,000,000 Mizrachi Jews were forced to leave their homes by Arab leaders ashamed that their armies had failed to prevent Israel’s rebirth. Some of the Mizrachim forced to flee their homes and businesses emigrated to the United States or France. But tiny, renascent Israel absorbed and uplifted 800,000 of them while also rehabilitating Holocaust survivors, dealing with terrorist incursions from lands occupied by Egypt and Jordan until 1967, and repairing damage done by invading Arab armies. Descendants of the Mizrachi “refugees” comprise the majority of Israel’s current Jewish population. Every position 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 between 400,000 and 700,000 Arabs who had fled, or who had been displaced from, Palestine, and to their descendants. Today, there are 6,000,000 Palestine refugees on the rolls of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Work Agency). Fully 99.5% of the Palestine “refugees” were  born into refugee status. They have been told that they will remain in refugee limbo until Israel is forced to give them the homes the “refugees” claim their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents,… lost  when the modern state of Israel was born in 1948.

 It is noteworthy that the UN’s other refugee agency, UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), which was established after UNRWA was set up, considers five years in a refugee camp to be a “prolonged stay” and actually works at finding new homes for refugees and provides help in rebuilding the lives of the refugees under its aegis.

In closing, I have to note that, in addition to not finding new homes or work for the Palestine refugees, UNRWA textbooks teach the Palestine refugees to hate Jews. Israel must stand firm in refusing a “Right of Return” for the Palestine “refugees,” not only because of their large numbers but because the “refugees”  have grown up seeing their peers honored and rewarded for killing Jews. No Jew would be safe in a Palestinian-majority Israel.

Toby F. Block
Atlanta, GA