Editor,
Vicki Johnson's letter published in the Daily Lobo on Thursday contains refugee figures extremely inaccurate and four to six times higher than the numbers given even by the Palestinians and the UN.
Following is the highest official UN estimate: In 1948, there were 726,000 Arab refugees, according to the Final Report of the United Nations Economic Survey Mission for the Middle East published by the United Nations Conciliation Commission issued on Dec. 28, 1949. According to the Web site badil.org, a Palestinian organization, 400,000 Arabs left Israel in 1967. That means a high-end total of 1,126,000 Arabs displaced from Israel when Arab nations attacked it.
How does this square up with the figure of 4 million to 6 million given by Johnson? Arab nations persecuted and expelled 800,000 Jews between 1947 and 1949, slightly more than the number of Arabs who became refugees during that time. Those who weep for refugees only weep for Arab refugees, which is a strong indicator of their real motives.
China invaded and conquered Tibet, a sovereign nation. Israel did not invade any nation in controlling the West Bank and Gaza, and it has at least as strong a claim to that disputed internal territory as the Arabs do. The comparison and the claim of Israeli occupation are completely spurious.
Johnson says that Israel has tortured Palestinians, like China has tortured Tibetans. However, neither the scope nor the severity compares between China and Israel. The number of torture cases in China and Islamic nations are vastly greater, both in numbers and proportion. China and Islamic nations use torture routinely as a means of managing their own populations and terrorizing foreigners.
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Israel sometimes uses torture on terrorist suspects but does not use torture systematically or on a wide scale. Anti-Israel activists are more concerned with demonizing Israel than with preventing the practice of torture, or they would condemn the enemies of Israel more than Israel for their systematic use of torture.
Johnson says that Palestinians are impoverished by Israeli government policies. An Arab who lives in Israel is an Israeli Arab. An Arab who lives outside of Israel is called a Palestinian. Some noncitizen Arabs do live in Israel, such as the man who murdered the eight Yeshiva students in Jerusalem this month. The vast majority of Palestinians, who by definition live outside of Israel, are impoverished by the governments they live under, not by Israel.
Any honest-minded person can easily check out Johnson's or Richard M. Berthold's statements and discover they are not facts. The fact that anti-Israel activists must regularly lie to make their point proves a case against them, not against Israel. The real question is why is there as concentrated public disinformation campaign against Israel?
For anyone who cares more about truth than political agendas, the question needs to be answered.
Lynn Provencio
UNM student
