PALESTINIAN ARABS
SIR,—Mr. Rosenn (April 17) quite rightly corrects the original number of Arab refugees, though his figure of half a million is probably erring the other way. He makes the correction in an ostensible plea for help to 'the average Israeli to be fair about this thorny problem.' But in the heavy, biting sarcasm of his earlier paragraphs, and in his very next words, he robs his appeal of all validity. Extending his query to the number of vacated Arab homes, he dismisses
these as 'the crumbling mud-huts of about half a million.'
I do not think he intended to mislead your readers. But his choice of words surely reflects the frightening superiority complex of much modern Zionism. A moment's honest thought will remind Mr. Rosenn that Palestine Arabs built in stone; and that the use of the disdainful term 'mud-huts' is another sub- conscious expression of the familiar Zionist attitude that Arabs are some lower species of human being who forfeited right to land and property by not using it to the full. Mr. Rosenn presumably wants 'the average Israeli' to be fair towards Arabs. Yet Israelis, above all, should be ready to acknowledge that the quality of hearth and home is not what affects the homeless, but the fact of its loss. The Arabs' homes may have been 'backward' by Western standards. But they were quite as precious to their owners, and their loss quite as heartbreaking, as were the lost homes of many European Jewish refugees. Human beings cherish what they have. Palestine Arabs were, and are, human beings. The world was asked to think of homeless Jews as human beings, and went so far in response to this appeal that every normal code of self-determination and entitlement was put to one side in Palestine. The world is surely entitled now to ask Israelis that they show a little humility and humanity towards the people they displaced. Nor is the asking merely moral. As long as Arabs see this constant Zionist arrogance, and see it unchallenged in the West, the Jews of Israel will find no safe haven in the Holy' Land. They, and we, as well as the Arabs, Will bear the consequences.
It is not pleasant to have to make these observa-
tions. But in all the years of Arab-Israeli impasse—
and quite apart from deliberate official Israeli lying about such matters as the cause of the Arab Exodus
—one great obstacle to a solution obtrudes. This
tragic conflict is a problem in human relations, in Which the reasonable fears and other reactions of both sides must be studied and met in any solution. The paramount reality is that Arab psychology has been heavily discounted to date—and to no small extent because of this underlying attitude, both Zionist and in the West, that Arabs are not quite as human as Jews or 'advanced' and 'white' Gentiles. It is in this spirit, very much thinking of the safety of Israelis, that I beg to comment on Mr. Rosenn's letter.—
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