For years, the American Jewish Left has been accusing Israel of “imprisoning” Gaza’s residents. Now the Left is, in effect, demanding that the Gazans be prevented from leaving. What a tragic irony.
J Street, left-wing pundit Peter Beinart and the chairman of Americans for Peace Now have all publicly described Gaza as “an open-air prison” in the past. A featured speaker at a recent webinar by Partners for Progressive Israel went even further, calling it “the biggest open-air prison on the face of the Earth.”
But now that the US government is proposing to relocate Gazans while the region is rebuilt, Jewish left-wing groups are screaming bloody murder. J Street, Americans for Peace Now, and Partners for Progressive Israel are saying such a plan would be “ethnic cleansing.”
Why not let Gazans themselves choose?
It may be that some would want to remain in the midst of the devastation and rubble that Hamas’s terrorism has created. On the other hand, some might prefer to do what millions of Syrians did during their country’s recent civil war – go to neighboring Arab countries. Shouldn’t Gaza’s residents be given the same freedom of choice?
The latest, and most ironic, attack on the US reconstruction plan comes from Shira Efron of the Israel Policy Forum. Writing on the op-ed page of The New York Times on February 11, Efron strongly denounced the idea of Palestinian Arabs leaving Gaza.
Efron’s Israel Policy Forum was established in 1993 by Israel’s Labor Party, then headed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The motivation was to have a US support group for Rabin’s ideas and policies.
One idea that Rabin advocated over the years was that Gaza’s Arabs should move to Jordan. In an interview with Maariv on February 16, 1973, Rabin (then-US ambassador to Washington) discussed the question of what should be done about the large number of Palestinian Arab refugees from the 1948 war who resided in Gaza.
Here’s what Rabin said: “The problem of the refugees of the Gaza Strip should not be solved in Gaza or el-Arish [in the Sinai] but mainly in the East Bank,” that is, Jordan. He continued: “I want to create conditions such that during the next ten or twenty years there will be a natural movement of population to the East Bank. We can achieve that, in my opinion, with [King] Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat.”
Rabin was not a “racist,” “fascist,” proponent of “ethnic cleansing,” or any of the other harsh names that are now being hurled at supporters of free choice for Gazans. The future prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize laureate was simply examining a difficult problem and proposing what he considered to be a practical solution.
The heart of the problem facing Rabin was that when Egypt illegally occupied Gaza, from 1948 to 1967, it refused to absorb the refugees there into the Egyptian population. The Egyptian government kept the Gazans impoverished and sponsored constant terrorism from Gaza against Israel.
It was under Egyptian rule that the UN set up schools in Gaza run by the notorious United Nations Relief and Works Agency. In UNRWA schools, young Gazans were educated to hate Israel and Jews and to idolize terrorism. The result was that when Israel was forced to take over Gaza in self-defense in 1967, it had to deal with an entire population of hate-filled Gazans.
It was completely logical for Rabin to think of Jordan as a destination for the Gazans. The Palestinian Arabs who reside in Gaza and those who reside in Jordan have essentially the same history, culture, language, and religion.
One hopes King Abdullah II of Jordan will show some compassion for non-terrorist Gazans, as he did when he took in many refugees from the recent Syrian civil war. Doing so would represent a fulfillment of Rabin’s dream.
Sadly, the American Jewish Left is showing no such compassion. By insisting that Gazans remain amid the rubble, J Street and Shira Efron of the Israel Policy Forum are ensuring continued misery and homelessness for the very people they claim to care about.
A dose of irony is added to the mix by the fact that Efron is a leader of a group that Rabin’s government created. She is now dishonoring Rabin’s legacy by denouncing the Gaza relocation idea that Rabin himself publicly promoted.
A 1993 Jewish Telegraphic Agency news article describing the founding of the Israel Policy Forum noted that many American Jewish left-wing activists were using a new phrase – “Diaspora lag.” They claimed that most Israelis supported the concessions that the Rabin government was prepared to make to the Arabs, and Diaspora Jews were “lagging” behind because they were skeptical about such concessions.
How the tables have turned. Today, polls show a large majority of Israelis supporting relocating Gazans to Jordan and Egypt – and yet it is Shira Efron and others on the American Jewish Left who are trying to stop Gazans from leaving Gaza. Isn’t that sad?
The writer is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel (AFSI), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.