To the Editor:
I’m writing in response to Ms. Dawson’s article covering the recent fundraiser held at the Grange Hall to aid the children of the Middle East who have been victimized by war (“Raising money and awareness for children of war,” May 15). While I am in full support of anything that is being done to bring aid to the children of the Middle East regardless of religious or ethnic background, I take issue with the characterization of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) as a result of the independence (and existence) of the state of Israel.
When Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, it did so in acceptance of the U.N.’s 1947 partition plan creating both a Jewish state and an Arab state from the former British Mandate of Palestine. The Palestinian Arabs rejected this plan and initiated a civil war against the Jewish population. Upon Israel’s declaration of independence, it was attacked by the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. During the course of this war (which Israel won), land was conquered and occupied by both Israel and Jordan — which occupied the West Bank, and later annexed it in 1950. During the course of the fighting, roughly 800,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced from their former homes. What many people do not remember is that after the war concluded, roughly 800,000 Jews were forcibly displaced and exiled from the surrounding Arab countries and compelled to emigrate to Israel. What many people also do not remember is that despite all this, Israel extended full citizenship to the Arab population that remained. To this day, 21 percent of Israeli citizens are ethnically Arab, and 10 members of the Israeli parliament are Arabs.
So, to correct the story’s history. The Nakba was not the “mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinian people as a result of Israeli independence.” It was the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinian people as a result of a war that was started not by Israel, but by five neighboring Arab nations who shared the goal articulated by Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the Arab League, to wage “a war of extermination and momentous massacre” against the Jews of Israel. War (when it comes) creates victims on both sides of the conflict, but the 1948–49 War of Independence was not a war that Israel chose.
The Rev. Matthew Splittgerber, lead pastor
Vineyard Assembly of God