TO THE EDITOR:
I appreciated Ben Elkind’s call in “The JNF troubles in East Jerusalem” for a Palestinian family not to be evicted from their Jerusalem home. It is curious, though, that no similar article appeared in this newspaper in September when the Palestinian envoy to the United States, Maen Rashid Areikat, speaking to the Christian Science Monitor, said that no Jews should be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state.
In fact, there have been several articles this past semester about the recent bid for Palestinian statehood at the U.N. But there have been no articles about the plight of Jewish refugees evicted from Arab lands. In 1948, there were at least 780,000 Jews living in predominantly Arab countries. Today, there are perhaps a few thousand.
If there is to be a state for Palestinian refugees, should there not also be a state for the descendants of the tens of thousands of Jews who were driven out of Iraq, and another state for those from Egypt, not to mention Morocco, Yemen and Libya?
Marc Lange
Distinguished Professor and Department Chair
Department of Philosophy