Bush Introduces Common Sense and Reality to Palestinians

June 26, 2002

by Mary Mostert, Analyst - Banner of Liberty

Monday afternoon in the White House Rose Garden, according to the Jerusalem Post, President George W. Bush, was the first to “look reality in the face” and end the Oslo Peace accord. The strategy of the Oslo accord, “born on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993” in the early days of the Clinton Administration, the Post observed, was “…a simple one: Deputize thugs to take care of thugs. Revive the weakened strongmen of the PLO and they will do Israel’s dirty work against Hamas and Islamic Jihad without fear of cavil from sundry human-rights groups in Israel and beyond. Wash your hands of the Palestinians once and for all, leave them to their squalor, their corruption, and their tyranny, and they will leave us alone.”

In effect, in the Oslo Accord Europe and America said to the Palestinians, “You want Yasser Arafat, a discredited terrorist as your leader? OK.” And, so they picked him up, brushed him off and gave him millions of dollars. And the living conditions of the Palestinians have worsened while the Israelis got the blame.

On Monday at the White House, another American president, nine years later, said what should have been said a long time ago: “A Palestinian state will never be created by terror - it will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change, or veiled attempt to preserve the status quo. True reform will require entirely new political and economic institutions, based on democracy, market economics and action against terrorism.”

This is really the first time that an American president has actually considered the position of the non-terrorist Palestinians, many of whom have been routinely assassinated by Arafat’s thugs for daring to oppose him.

From the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 to the present, there have been both Jewish and Muslim citizens of Israel. Today, twenty percent of Israel’s voters are Arab-Israelis. However, many of the so-called “Palestinians,” like Arafat for example, were not born in the West Bank, Gaza or the State of Israel. Arafat was born in Egypt. Yet, he claims he has a greater “right” to the land in Israel than the Jews, who had purchased six to eight percent of the total land area of Palestine by 1946. This was about 20% of the land that could be settled and cultivated.

According to Aaron T. Wolf’s carefully researched Hydropolitics along the Jordan River published by the United Nations University Press, there were only about 340,000 people in Palestine in 1878. However, due to immigration, especially Arabs from Yemen and Jews from Europe, the population of Palestine rose to 722,000 by 1915 and Jews were about 11% of the population by the end of World War I. At the beginning of World War II in 1940, as Jews fled the Holocaust, the Jewish population of the Palestinian Mandate was 463,535, or approximately 30% of the population.

In the next 20 years, a massive exchange of population took place - as approximately 700,000-900,000 Arabs fled to nearby Arab States - 50% ending up on the West Bank, which had been taken over by Jordan. Also, an estimated 700,000 Jews fled the Arab States to settle in Israel, along with nearly one million European Jewish refugees, many of them from British refugee Cypriot refugee camps.

By the year 2000, the population of Israel reached 5,749,760, with a non-Jewish, mostly Arab, population of 18% or 1,034,956. There are also more than 3.7 million Palestinians who claim either to be refugees and their descendants, registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza who claim they are refugees from Israel. Verifying those claims is difficult, of course, since there was no one on the borders of Israel in 1948 and 1967 taking down names of those leaving and no mention is ever made of the 700,000 Jews who left nations like Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, etc., and resettled in Israel.

What the Arabs need is a dose of reality and common sense, which George W. Bush dished out in his speech on Monday. Their problem isn’t the Jews. Their problem is they spend too much of their time, money and energy making bombs, whining and teaching their children to hate.

They need to find a new leader who believes in their capabilities as much as George W. Bush does.

_____________________________________

Mary Mostert was writing professionally on political issues as a teen-ager in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1940s. In the 1960s, she wrote a weekly column for the Rochester Times Union, a Gannett paper and was one of 52 American women who attended the 17 Nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland to ban testing of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere. She was a licensed building contractor for 29 years, as she raised her six children. She served an 18 month mission as Public Affairs Director for the Africa Area for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1990-91. In the 1990s she wrote a book, Coming Home, Families Can Stop the Unraveling of America, edited the Reagan Monthly Monitor and talk show host Michael Reagan’s Information Interchange for seven years. She now operates the website, Banner of Liberty.

Send the author an E mail at Mostert@ConservativeTruth.org.

For more of Mary's articles, visit her archives.