The Palestinians have no interest in living peaceably with Israel. They want to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth, and Israelis are not interested in helping them.
As it does periodically, Israel entered the Palestinian city of Jenin with a thousand soldiers to clear out terrorists and their weapons infrastructure. Recently, shootings, stabbings, and bombings have occurred with greater frequency against Israeli civilians and the quick in-and-out raids over the past few months apparently were not enough to stop the killing, including the drive-by murder of a mother and her two daughters. Her husband was in the car behind them and witnessed the entire horrific scene as it unfolded.
The reporting of the Israeli incursion mentioned a great deal of activity in the Jenin refugee camp. Now, the Israeli war of independence was 75 years ago, so that refugee camp is of the same age as Israel. Seventy-five years. Think about that. European displaced person (DP) camps were set up for the 40 million people who at the end of the war were “displaced,” including former POWs, death camp inmates and populations moved by victorious armies. Most camps were closed by 1952 and the very last one was closed in 1959. Picture those same DP camps still being open 75 years after the end of World War II. It would be a colossal scandal. So why are Palestinians still living in squalid refugee camps in Jenin, Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere? Because the Palestinian leadership wants it that way. In the 1970s, Israel proposed building new housing for Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war; Yassir Arafat flat out rejected the proposal. He and his terrorist friends have consistently wanted to keep their Palestinian brethren in miserable conditions to encourage their hatred of Israel and willingness to become terrorists. Never mind that Arafat and his inner circle made billions from foreign donations and seizures of salaries of Palestinians working in Israel.
The continued existence of Palestinian refugee camps is consistent with the lack of care of the Palestinian leadership for the well-being of its people. If they were truly concerned with improving the lives of the Palestinian people, they would have made peace with Israel decades ago. But their goal is to wipe Israel off of the map. The proof is both in what they say publicly (a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea”) and in their demands for “peace” negotiations. Indefensible borders based on the 1948 armistice lines and a return of ersatz refugees to dilute Israel’s Jewish majority are two of the non-military proposals they put forward in order to make Israel easier to destroy. Israel’s longtime ambassador to the UN, Abba Eben, referred to those borders as the “Auschwitz borders”. If a 15-year-old Palestinian child whose great grandparents left Haifa of their own free will is a Palestinian refugee, then certainly I, the son of parents who fled home under duress, am a bonafide German refugee. The UN would never recognize me as a refugee, but they recognize nearly 2 million descendants of those who left Israel in 1948. For the record, of the 720,000 Arabs who fled, half left at the urging of advancing Arab armies, while the other half were removed by the victorious Israeli forces. Around 800,000 Jews were forced to flee from Arab countries in the years after the formation of the state of Israel. They have never been compensated for their lost property and livelihoods in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, etc.
If the Palestinians were truly interested in peace, they would be building the infrastructure for receiving these refugees; instead, they have made it clear that they have no interest in the people still in camps in Lebanon and elsewhere coming back to any future Palestinian state. In the past 50 years, they have built all of one new city, Rawabi. And that only takes care of the natural growth of the locals and is not for future returning refugees. The Palestinians are not planning for peace and prosperity; rather, they are continuing a war that started well before the formation of the state of Israel. As Jews came back to the Holy Land in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the local Arab population became concerned. The Balfour Declaration supporting Jewish nationhood in Biblical Israel only heightened tensions. There were several pogroms against early Jewish settlers well before the state was declared. Grand Mufti Amin Husseini, Yassir Arafat’s uncle, was a virulent Jew-hater and a strong supporter of Hitler. He asked the latter to extend Axis policies towards the Jews in Arab lands that Germany promised to liberate. A very important point to note in any discussion of Israel-Arab peace is that there was never an independent Palestinian state, however much BDS groups and other terror supporters claim to the contrary. This part of the Levant was for the past several hundred years under the control of Ottoman Turks, then the British, then Israel with the West Bank in Jordanian hands and Gaza run by Egypt, and finally in 1967 Israel alone. In 1993, the Frankenstein experiment of the Palestinian Authority was started. Israel’s leaving Gaza led to the rise of Hamas and frequent rocket fire on Israeli towns and cities. The areas of the West Bank under Palestinian control are hotbeds of terror activity. The Palestinians often appeal to a fictitious country that never existed for a people who have never ruled themselves.
Israel, like the US, uses too much self-constraint in military confrontations. It does everything possible to minimize civilian casualties and often refrains from hitting a target for fear of collateral damage. Israelis, even those on the left, have come to realize that there is no one on the Palestinian side with whom to discuss peace. Thus, there are the periodic wars in Gaza and military actions in Jenin. There is little alternative. The Palestinians do not want peace and they are not going anywhere. Rabbi Meir Kahane was vilified for suggesting paying Palestinian families to move to Jordan. So the Palestinians will stay put, filled with hatred and dreaming of a country that never existed. Israel will do its all to protect its citizens. And six months or a year from now, there will be a new headline about Israel entering Jenin to address terror infrastructure. Show me a Palestinian leader who truly wants peace with Israel and an end to this stalemate, and I’ll show you prime ocean-front property in Nebraska.