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Who Failed the Palestinians?
(Jewish News-UK) Hen Mazzig - On Nov. 27, I took part in a debate at the Cambridge Union on the topic: "This House believes the international community has failed Palestine." Palestinians have been failed catastrophically. But who failed them and how? The proposition wants you to believe the international community failed because it didn't give the Palestinian leadership enough money, enough impunity, or enough land. They want you to believe that Palestine is a helpless victim of Western neglect. My argument is the opposite. The international community failed the Palestinian people by indulging a political fantasy at the expense of human reality. For decades, they treated Palestinians as a geopolitical weapon to be sharpened against the State of Israel. Palestinians as human beings are deserving of dignity, but "Palestine" as a political project is run by factions who have spent decades holding their own people hostage. There has been a hundred-year war. But it has been waged by Arab nationalists against every non-Arab, non-Muslim indigenous community in the region. The international community normalized the idea that Arab majorities should control the entire region, even at the expense of older indigenous cultures. My own grandparents were among the 850,000 Jews violently expelled from Iraq, Tunisia, and across the Middle East. In 1941 with the violent terror attacks on the Jews of Iraq called the Farhud, my grandmother watched her best friend being raped and mutilated in the streets of Baghdad, just because she was Jewish. A Middle Eastern Jewish civilization, indigenous to the region, was uprooted and erased within one decade. They received no UN agency. They received no perpetual refugee status. They received no annual resolutions. They were forced to move on. The international community treated Jewish refugees from Arab lands as people to be resettled. But they treated Palestinian refugees as pawns to be kept on a chessboard. They created UNRWA - the only agency on Earth that passes "refugee status" down through generations, effectively forever. It was to ensure that a child born in Gaza today is not raised to build a future in Gaza, but is raised to believe their only future lies in a "return" to a war from 1948. The international community pays for schools that indoctrinate children to believe that statehood does not come from negotiation, but from the conquest of the land "from the river to the sea." According to the latest data for 2024, Palestine was the single largest recipient of humanitarian assistance on the planet, receiving $3 billion a year. We pay for their welfare, so they can spend 100% of their own budget on warfare. The international community failed because, for 75 years, they prioritized the preservation of a political conflict over the preservation of human dignity.