Palestinians Attempt to Convince World They Are Just Like the Ukrainians

The Palestinians, furious that the world is paying so much attention to the Ukrainians and not enough to them, have been trying to convince the world that they are even more mistreated by the Israelis than the Ukrainians are by the Russians. It’s a hard sell, as reported here: “Some Uncomfortable Ukraine-Israel Analogies,” by Stephen M. Flatow, JNS.org, March 11, 2022:

With news of war in Ukraine grabbing all the headlines, Palestinian Arab officials and advocates are straining to find comparisons between the Ukraine-Russian crisis and their own cause. There are indeed some comparisons, though not the ones they have in mind.

PLO official Nihad Abu Ghosh sees an analogy between the collapse of the Soviet Union (in 1991) and the Ukraine crisis − in both situations, he complains, Israel is taking advantage of the situation in order “to increase settlement building in the occupied West Bank by promoting immigration.”

How terrible of Israel, according to Nihad Abu Ghosh, to have taken in Jews who were leaving the Soviet Union as it collapsed in 1991; how unacceptable, too, for the Jewish state to provide refuge to Jews (and also to 25,000 non-Jewish Ukrainians) who have fled the Ukraine war in 2022. How absurd it is, rather, for Abu Ghosh to criticize Israel for its samaritan behavior, by describing it as sinisterly “taking advantage of the situation.” I suppose when French Jews made aliyah because of Muslim attacks on them, Israel was “only taking advantage of the situation.” And when 850,000 penniless Jews fled Arab lands between 1948 and the mid-1950s and found refuge in Israel, the Jewish state, according to Abu Ghosh, was not helping the desperate but only “taking advantage of the situation.” Should the only Jewish state not have offered such refuge? Isn’t that one of Israel’s reasons for being, to provide a homeland and a refuge for Jews fleeing not just persecution and murder but also political chaos (as in 1991) and war (as in 2022)? Should Israel have turned Jewish refugees away? On what theory?

Abu Ghosh sees Israel’s welcoming these refugees as part of a plot to increase “settlement building.” He might be interested to learn that Israel has not built a new West Bank settlement in the past 20 years, though it has allowed new apartment units to be built in existing settlements to accommodate a natural increase in the population.

Abu Ghosh, it should be noted, is a longtime official of the PLO as well as head of information and education for the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a PLO member organization. Over the years, he has served as head of diaspora affairs for the PLO, and head of information and education for the DFLP.

That’s important because it was the PLO that signed the Oslo accords with Israel in 1993; the Palestinian Authority had not yet been established. The Oslo accords do not prohibit Israel from building new towns in the Israeli-controlled portion of Judea and Samaria. Nor do the accords bar Israel from allowing Ukrainian Jews, or anybody else, to settle in those towns.

Israel has a right to build settlements anywhere in Judea and Samaria according to the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (1922), which intended all of “Palestine,” from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, to become part of the Jewish National Home. That right was reinforced in U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 (Nov. 22, 1967), which allowed Israel to keep territories won “in the recent conflict” — the Six-Day War — that it needed in order to have “secure [i.e., defensible] and recognized borders,” which meant much of Judea and Samaria would remain in Israeli hands. Finally, in the Oslo Accords that Israel made with the PLO in 1993, there is nothing prohibiting Israel from building settlements in the parts of Judea and Samaria it controlled.

In other words, Abu Ghosh is complaining about something that is permitted by the agreements [the 1993 Oslo Accords] his own organization signed and is bound by. Indeed, any PLO or PA official who protests against more Jews becoming residents of Israeli-controlled territories is protesting against something that the PLO and PA leadership already agreed to.

So why do PA officials − and advocates of the Palestinian Arab cause in general − keep complaining about “illegal Jewish settlements”? Because they know they can get away with it. No reporter ever asks them, “But don’t the Oslo accords permit Jewish settlements in Israel’s territories?” No editor ever fact-checks them or corrects them before publishing their op-eds about “illegal settlers.”…

The PA and its supporters can count on the sheer laziness of many journalists, as well as on the hostility toward the Jewish state of many others. The lazy ones can’t be bothered to check on the relevance of the 1993 Oslo Accords to Israel’s settlement rights. The malevolent ones don’t want the public to know what Israel is permitted according to those accords. For that matter, many journalists who cover the Arab-Israeli conflict remain unaware of the contents of the Mandate for Palestine, and the territory — from the river to the sea – that was meant to be included in it. Similarly, they rarely study the significance of UN Security Council Resolution 242, or the gloss on its meaning provided by its eloquent author, Lord Caradon, who insisted that it most definitely did not require Israel to withdraw within the 1949 armistice lines; the Jewish state could keep whatever territory it had won in the Six-Day War that it needed for its defense.

For decades, the Arab regimes surrounding Israel have been supporting the violent Palestinian Arab terrorist-separatists in Judea, Samaria and Gaza − just like Russia has been supporting the terrorist-separatists in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of eastern Ukraine. The Arab regimes have periodically launched wars against Israel based on the pretext of the “suffering” of those separatists − again, just like Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The Arabs, like the Russians, are the aggressors, trying to take over a country that belongs to somebody else. Israel, like Ukraine, is an embattled democracy with deep roots in their land.

Israel is akin not to Russia, as the Palestinians want the world to think, but to Ukraine. Like Ukraine, which has had to fight separatists in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions who have been supported by Russians, and now battles the invading Russian army that wishes to end its independent existence, Israel has had to fight “terrorist-separatists” supported by Arab regimes that three times – in 1948, 1967, and 1973 – have tried to destroy the Jewish state. The Arabs have always been the aggressors in their attempts on Israel’s life; the Russians, too, have been the aggressors in their wars with Ukraine, seizing the Crimea in 2014, and since that year Putin’s army has been trying to break off the Donetsk and Lugansk regions in a conflict in the eastern Ukraine that has been going on for eight years. In 2022, Russia has launched a full-scale invasion to bring Ukraine back into the Russian fold and to turn it away from the West.

As for the suffering of innocent civilians − again, there’s a valid comparison, just not the one that Gigi Hadid or Nihad Abu Ghosh have in mind. The repeated Arab invasions of Israel have claimed the lives of thousands of Israeli civilians. The daily attempts by Palestinian Arab terrorists to shoot, stab or stone Jews to death cause constant suffering to Israeli civilians. I wonder when Hadid will donate some portion of her earnings to alleviate their suffering.

So, by all means, let’s examine the Ukraine crisis for comparisons to Israel, even if what we find proves uncomfortable for PA.spokesmen, pro-Palestinian cultural celebrities or other advocates of the Palestinian cause.

Again here, in Stephen Flatow’s article, is convincing refutation of the narrative being pushed by the Palestinians and their supporters, who want the world to think they are just like the victimized Ukrainians and the Israelis just like the Russian invaders. But it won’t wash. The Jews of Israel are not “invaders”; they live on territory that has been continuously inhabited by the Jewish people for 3000 years — that is, at least 2400 years before the first Muslim Arab arrived. And a distinct Ukrainian people have been living in Ukraine since at least the 11th century. It is Israel, like Ukraine, that is threatened by aggressors determined to end its existence. It is Israeli civilians, like Ukrainian civilians under merciless Russian bombardment, who have for more than 70 years been deliberately targeted by Palestinian terrorists.

Yes, there is a comparison to be made between the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the Israel-Palestinian war, but it is not what either the malevolent Nihad Abu Ghosh or the witless Gigi Hadid have in mind.