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Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Not Black and White

(Business Day-South Africa) Rhoda Kadalie - Why Israel is always held to the highest standards of democracy when every other country flouts them intrigues me. I think the world is jealous of a small country that has turned a desert into a garden, adversity into prosperity. Those who are prejudiced against Israel for ideological reasons do us a disservice when they portray the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in black-and-white terms. In Algeria there were 140,000 Jews in 1948, by 2008 none; in Morocco there were 250,000, today there are about 6,000. For more than half a century there was a flight of more than 850,000 Jews from Arab lands, which, in effect, means that more Jews were forced to flee Muslim persecution than the approximately 762,000 Palestinian Arabs who left their homes in the newly declared State of Israel. Add to this the successive wars against Israel after 1948, by Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967, the Yom Kippur war in 1973, and the constant destabilization by terrorist incursions, then Israel's socioeconomic and military strength is quite astounding. The writer is a South African human rights activist.
2010-05-12 08:42:57
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