Plight of the Palestinians
Re “The deepest circle of hell,” Opinion, April 20
Jamal, a young Palestinian recently displaced from the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria because of that country’s civil war, says he wants “to return home, to Palestine.” Instead of blaming “the West” for Palestinian refugees who are caught up in the Syrian war and are “not allowed home,” Jamal should look to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.
As reported in 2013 by the Associated Press, Israel agreed that Palestinians fleeing Syria could be admitted into the Palestinian territories so long as they relinquished any “right to return” to Israel. In response, Abbas reportedly said, “It’s better to die in Syria than give up their right of return.”
Flooding Israel with hostile Palestinian refugees and their millions of descendants is tantamount to the elimination of the Jewish state.
In 1948, when it launched a failed war to destroy the nascent Jewish state, and in 2013, the Palestinian leadership prioritized rejectionism over the welfare of the Palestinian people.
Jerusalem
The writer is director of the Israel office of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.