I don’t know whether Suraya Dadoo’s opinions are based on personal experience of Palestine/Israel. Her arguments make me suspect indoctrination. I worked in Israel from 1954 to 1958, and I’m well acquainted with its past and present.
I worked within sight of Gaza City for about two and a half years. Our water supply was sabotaged, our transport attacked, we had to be armed at all times, and could travel south of Beer Sheba only in military convoy. Not far from where we worked, at a place appropriately called Maaleh Acrabim (Hill of Scorpions), a busload of Israeli civilians was ambushed and massacred.
Before coming to Israel, I lived in South Africa and witnessed the implementation of apartheid. Nothing remotely like it existed in Israel. There quite simply was no official colour discrimination either at parliamentary level or at any other official institutions, be they hospitals, the judiciary, army, police, or elsewhere. I have visited Israel since on a number of occasions, and the sole evidence of discrimination I have seen has been forced on the country to protect it against terrorist attacks.
Allow me to provide some history, considering that Ms Dadoo refers to “occupied territories”. Jews settled in Canaan about 3 300 years ago. In spite of many foreign defeats and population displacements, there was always a resident Jewish farming community for the simple reason that the occupying armies had to be fed. For more than 1 000 years, there were Jewish kingdoms with temples in Jerusalem, something that the present Palestinian administration denies. The Ottomans were in occupation for about four hundred years.
During the Ottoman years, about 500 000 Arabs left their Middle Eastern countries of Syria, Egypt, and others, and settled in Palestine. This was confirmed by Arab historian Abd Al-Ghani on official Palestinian TV in 2017, saying that by 1917, there was no such thing as a Palestinian people.
Ms Dadoo quotes one Abu-Esheh, who describes the longing of millions of Palestinians to return to Palestine. Has it not crossed their minds that if they and five Arab states hadn’t attacked their Jewish neighbours in 1948, they wouldn’t be refugees today?
And who would want to see the return of such neighbours who, apart from their hostility, came down from their villages en masse to rob, mutilate, and murder the Israeli wounded?
