The suffering of the Palestinian Arabs has certainly been terrible and many continue to exist in horrible conditions today. Of course, their suffering is not unique. There have been many refugees in the twentieth century, not a few of them Jews. I, myself, am the son of European Jews who survived World War II and my first memories are of the refugee camp in West Germany (then called a Displaced Persons Camp) that we lived in during my early childhood. Some of our family moved to Israel, but my parents chose the United States.

The commonly publicized propaganda tends to include true history mixed with falsehoods, added for propaganda reasons. Jews did not begin coming to Israel, nor first settle in Jerusalem, after the Balfour Declaration, as is often implied. The Jews have been a majority in Jerusalem at least since the end of the 19th Century.* The Jews have had an almost continuous presence in the city since its conquest by King David, broken by only three short periods of forced eviction; after the Babylonian conquest of 586 BCE, after the Roman reconquest of the city in 135 CE and after the Crusader conquest of 1099. There are many Jewish families with deep roots in the Holy City. My wife, born in Jerusalem just after World War II, is a descendant of Israel Beck, who came to Jerusalem in 1838 and started the first Hebrew printing press there. She is the seventh generation of her family to be born in the city.

Many Arab families lost their homes in West Jerusalem during the 1948 War of Independence, which was started by Israel's Arab neighbors when they, and the Palestinian Arabs, refused to accept the UN partition. Jewish families also lost their homes in East Jerusalem. The Jordanian army occupied the old walled city and evicted the inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter. Some of them resettled in the homes vacated by Arabs in West Jerusalem. Most of the present inhabitants of previously Arab neighborhoods in West Jerusalem are not from Europe and the United States, as usually assumed by Palestinophiles, but rather, are the families of Jewish refugees from Iraq and Arab countries in North Africa.

When my wife was a small child in Jerusalem there was a jingle sung by groups of Arab and Jewish children, often prior to throwing stones at each other. The Arab version translates as:

" Homeland (Baladiyah), Homeland,
Palestine is our homeland,
The Jew is our dog!"

The Jewish version was the same with the last verse changed to "The Arab is our dog!" I keep seeing endless new variations of the same old message. Although terrible things happened on both sides, it really is time to move on so that the suffering may end.

Lewis Reisman, MD

*Since the first modern population estimates were made in 1844, Jews were close to a majority. These estimates were not reliable enough to be conclusive. The census of 1894 showed a clear majority