History on Palestinian Arabs

To the editor:

(re: “Fieldston was right to fire Brager,” Jan. 30)

The BDS movement is a scam and a sham.

Their only purpose is to discredit Israel, or laud the Palestinian Arabs, no matter what each group does. Why else when Kuwait summarily threw out an estimated 250,000 Palestinian Arabs from its country were they silent?

American students have a lot on their minds, and the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not necessarily one topic they need to be informed about.

The movement that focuses on boycott, divestment and sanctions takes advantage of these students’ lack of knowledge. Their professors should not.

A very short history may enlighten all who want to have an informed and intelligent opinion — and negate misleading lies.

For more than 100 years — from the time of the Ottoman Empire — the Palestinian Arabs have engaged in wars and conflicts they initiated or supported, and resisted all efforts for peaceful solutions and statehood for themselves. The most egregious was their refusal to accept the U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine of 1947 at the end of World War II — during which they actively supported the Nazis (the Mufti of Jerusalem spent the war as Hitler’s guest in Germany — while Palestinian Jews formed a military brigade, which became part of the Allied forces.

Instead, in 1948, the Palestinian Arabs invaded the nascent state of Palestinian Jews. They lost that war, but never complained when Jordan seized their territory, and for 19 years, they didn’t establish their own state or claim they were “occupied.”

The Palestinian Arabs control all of Gaza. They have elected an internationally recognized terrorist group as their government that has spent billions on rockets and nothing on housing or schools for their subjects. They live in abject poverty whereas Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of Israel have the highest standard of living of any average Arab in the Middle East.

They present a false narrative that demands rights and conditions for themselves that they would not grant others — no Jews allowed in any Palestinian state.

This conflict many not be eliminated in our lifetime, but the lies perpetuated by the BDS movement and their followers should end right now.

Rhoda Alben-Aronson