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Deceitful Palestinian Supporters Fuel Violence
(Albany Democrat-Herald) Nancy Sher - I am a Jew living in Jerusalem. While we live in constant interaction with our Arab neighbors who enjoy full rights here, we know that a Jew daring to live in our ancient homeland can be murdered on any day at any moment - stabbed in the drugstore directly below my daughter's apartment, mangled in a car ramming while waiting for a bus, or shattered by a bomb on the main street of my walk home: all true near-misses in my recent life. The author of an article on Aug. 15 claims that Israel is guilty of stealing Palestine from a Palestinian people and that violence against Israelis is justified. But when we began to return to our ancient homeland in the mid-1800s, there was no state of Palestine, no Palestinian national identity, no Palestinian history and borders. Until British occupation during World War I, the Land of Israel was nothing more than part of Greater Syria, controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The author tells us there were 1 million Palestinians here "before Israelis immigrated," but the entire area held only a half-million people by the 1878 Ottoman census, including Jews and Christians. The Mandate period saw the Arab population double, reaching a million by 1948, driven by the immigration of Egyptian Muslims, Bedouin Arabs and Bosnian Muslims. Palestinian terror is not justified revenge for the theft of a state that never existed. Jews had been massacred by Arabs long before Jews had any power here, for example, in Hebron in 1517, again in 1834, and yet again in 1929. These massacres were not a reprisal for an as-yet nonexistent "Israel."