CAMERA Corrects on ‘Understanding Palestinians’

The following unpublished letter to the editor was sent to correct a misleading letter in the Richmond Times Dispatch:

“Where Edward Yadlowsky’s letter “No peace until we understand Palestinians” does not invoke falsehoods, it misleads by omission and uses a questionable quote.

The purported quote by Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion, “Why should the Arabs make peace?…We have taken their country…” comes from a conversation Nahum Goldmann claimed to have had with Ben-Gurion. However, Yadlowsky omits that Goldmann was a political enemy of Ben-Gurion and only claimed, after the latter’s death and without written evidence, that Ben-Gurion made such a statement.

Yadlowsky alleges that recent terror attacks by Palestinian Arabs against Israeli Jews—many of which have targeted civilians, including the elderly and children—are the result of “anger and hatred engendered in the Arab population by the 1948 partition of Mandatory Palestine creating Israel.” However, this ignores numerous terror attacks by Arabs against Jews prior to 1948. Among other instances of organized violence, Arabs in Mandate Palestine—often led by future Hitler collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini—engaged in attacks in 1920, 1929 in which 133 Jewish men, women and children were killed and 339 wounded and again in 1936-1939. In the latter instance, terror attacks resulted in British officials appeasing Arabs by closing Palestine, created by the League of Nations to assist in re-establishment of the Jewish national home, to European Jews trying to flee Hitler.

Yadlowsky claims that “no Palestinian state exists because Israel has constructed illegal settlements.” This is false. It ignores British creation in the 1920’s of Jordan, a country with a Palestinian Arab majority, on three-fourths of the original Palestine Mandate. It also omits any mention of Arab rejection of the 1947 U.N. partition plan, which called for an Arab and Jewish state in the mandate. And it is silent on U.S. and Israeli offers for a “two-state solution” in exchange for peace in 2000 at Camp David, 2001 at Taba and 2008 after the Annapolis conference. All were rejected by Palestinian leaders, as was U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s proposed framework to restart negotiations in 2014.

Continuing his tendentious claims, Yadlowsky asserts that “Palestinians have accepted Israel’s right to exist and desire a state side-by-side with Israel.” However a recent poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research shows that that 58 percent of West Bank Palestinians and 65 percent of Gazans polled said that even if a “two-state solution” is negotiated the “struggle is not over and resistance [terrorism] should continue until all of historic Palestine [Israel] is liberated.” According to the poll, clear majorities of Palestinians polled support the use of violence over peaceful negotiations to achieve this end and believe that Jews have no rights to the land of Israel.

In this rejectionism, they have the support of their leadership. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said on September 16, 2015 “We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem.” Echoing claims regularly made by his state-run media, Abbas said on October 28 that all of Israel is “occupation.”

He made these claims—which went unprotested—at the U.N.—the same organization Yadlowsky suggests can be responsible for achieving peace.

Sincerely,

Sean Durns

Media Assistant
CAMERA—Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America”