Alexander Dolitsky: Setting the record straight on Israel’s history with Palestinians

March 4, 2024

By ALEXANDER DOLITSKY

“Palestinian residents are helpless victims in attacks made by leaders,” written by Dixie Belcher and published in the Juneau Empire on Feb. 26, was a perfect and unfortunate example of how historic events and factual truth can be misconstrued by an amateur historian claiming to be an “expert” and a “leader” in the movement for world peace.

Not only did Belcher misconstrue the reality of the Israel/Gaza conflict, she also managed to convolute statistical data and historic events related to this subject.

Let me present several misleading statements from Belcher’s article:

“In 1948 the United Nations gave the country of Palestine to European Jews escaping hundreds of years of pogroms, ending with the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis. These Jews were escaping hell.”

This narrative is a complete nonsense and far from the factual truth. Pogroms were brutal government-organized destruction of the Jewish settlements, mostly on the territory of the former Russian Empire (today Ukraine, Belorussia, Poland, etc.). In fact, my grandparents were victims of pogroms. The anti-Semitic practice of pogroms ended in the early 1920s under the Bolsheviks’ rulings of a newly formed Soviet Union in 1922.

In 1948, the Soviet Union and other Soviet East European countries were closed for migration and no Jews could leave those countries to Israel until 1973, after President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated with the Soviet Union a departure of the Soviet Jews to Israel and to other Western countries.

I left the former Soviet Union in 1977 under the status of a political refugee with the Israeli visa, and then detoured to the United States, arriving in Philadelphia on Feb. 1, 1978. Later, my immediate family joined me in Philadelphia in 1979.

In 1948, after Israel was re-born again under the auspices of the United Nations, most Jews that had settled in their historic homeland (Judeo/Israel) arrived from Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and other Middle Eastern territories. Today, virtually no Jews left in those Middle Eastern countries. Many Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel in the 1970s and 1980s.

Belcher falsely stated that, “Gazans have the highest level of education of any other group in the world and the lowest level of illiteracy.”

Really, not Singapore, Finland, or the U.S.? Where did this peculiar data come from? Indeed, from kindergarten on, Gazans teach their children to hate and, eventually, to exterminate their nearest neighbor—Israel—and all Jews worldwide. How can anyone in the right conscious negotiate a peaceful agreement or two-state coexistence with a nation committed to this type of hateful ideology?

Here is another “beauty” from Belcher’s article: “Frustrated with the Palestinian Authority, in 2006 they [Gazans] voted in Hamas, hoping for change. There was never another election. Gazans grew to hate them—realizing that Hamas didn’t care about the lives of the Israelis or the Gazans.”

Indeed, Palestinians voted the terrorist organization, Hamas, to govern Gaza. Even today, some polls conducted by independent organizations suggested that most Gazans support Hamas’ heinous attacks on Israel; given a chance, they will attack Israel again and again, and again…. until its complete annihilation “From the river to the sea.”

Belcher continues her remarkably distorted statements:

“The Jews, desperate for safety and a country they could call their own, forcibly expelled 750,000 Palestinians to Jordan, Lebanon, and other countries, blew up 500 villages, marching their occupants across the desert to Gaza which they surrounded with barbed wire and soldiers. Now an open-air prison of 2½ million dependent on food, clean water, medicine and fuel from their captors. Their lives have been difficult—no one I’ve met wants to be there. They long to “go home” to their villages.

This narrative is nothing based on the factual truth, and I don’t even know where to start in dismantling it. In fact, the entire Belcher’s column is full of false assertions and a complete lack of understanding of Middle Eastern and Jewish history. Belcher is not alone in her bias and uneducated assertions on this subject. The far-left media notoriously make various historical and statistical errors that lead the public to a divisive conclusion on Israel–Gaza/Hamas wars.

CREATION OF MODERN-DAY ISRAEL

The Arab-Israel conflict in the Middle East is centuries old. The conflict over land is particularly perplexing. Before the time of Christ, the Jewish people lived in their own kingdom; a Jewish-ruled state was located where Israel is today. In 586 B.C., however, the Babylonian Empire defeated Israel.

As a result, many Jews were brought to Babylonian as slaves. Returning to their homeland after years of captivity, the Jewish people constructed a new state, only to then be incorporated into the Roman Empire. Then, in 70 A.D., the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and the Jewish people scattered throughout the Roman Empire and beyond. From this time until 1948, Jews had no state.

During the intervening centuries prior to 1948, Palestinian Arabs and the Islamic religion predominated in the territory where Israel had been. The Palestinians, like the Jews, claimed the territory as their own. Thus, at one time or another, Palestinian Arabs and Jews both owned the land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

This leads to a question, “Whose land is it?” Unfortunately, there is no simple, universally accepted answer.

In 1948, the United Nations proposed that Palestine be partitioned, with Jewish state being created along the Mediterranean coast and Palestinian state inland. It was not a perfect solution, and few people, least of all the Arabs, were pleased with it. But, at least, it was a solution, and both superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were behind it.

ISRAEL-GAZA/HAMAS WAR

Far-left media and activists accuse Israel of excessive and disproportionate use of force against Gaza/Hamas in defending itself in today’s war initiated by Gaza. Historically, there have never been proportionate wars. None.

On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise aerial attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The attack killed 2,403 U.S. personnel, including 68 civilians, and destroyed or damaged 19 U.S. Navy ships, including eight battleships.

In response, on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 Japanese respectively, most of whom were civilians, and remain the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict.

The allied bombing of Germany from 1942-1945 almost completely ruined several major cities (Dresden, Berlin, Cologne), in bombing essential infrastructure and, in the process, killing thousands of civilians. Nearly 27 million Soviets were killed during the war, including some of my relatives in Kiev, compared to nearly 9 million civilian and military Germans killed by allied forces during the war.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the Arab terrorists attacked and killed 2,977 people and injured thousands at the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington D.C., and in Somerset County, Penn.

In response, the United States and its allies invaded two countries — Iraq and Afghanistan — and, in the process, disproportionately killed and wounded tens of thousands of civilians and military personnel.

The causes of the Oct. 7, 2023, heinous Hamas attack on Israel are deeply rooted in multi-faceted historic, religious and ethnic issues of global terrorism. Historically, terrorism has always been a complex problem for humanity and for peace-seeking nations. Only united will we win against anti-Semitism and world terrorism.

Alexander B. Dolitsky was born and raised in Kiev in the former Soviet Union. He received an M.A. in history from Kiev Pedagogical Institute, Ukraine, in 1976; an M.A. in anthropology and archaeology from Brown University in 1983; and was enroled in the Ph.D. program in Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College from 1983 to 1985, where he was also a lecturer in the Russian Center. In the U.S.S.R., he was a social studies teacher for three years, and an archaeologist for five years for the Ukranian Academy of Sciences. In 1978, he settled in the United States. Dolitsky visited Alaska for the first time in 1981, while conducting field research for graduate school at Brown. He lived first in Sitka in 1985 and then settled in Juneau in 1986. From 1985 to 1987, he was a U.S. Forest Service archaeologist and social scientist. He was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Alaska Southeast from 1985 to 1999; Social Studies Instructor at the Alyeska Central School, Alaska Department of Education from 1988 to 2006; and has been the Director of the Alaska-Siberia Research Center (see www.aksrc.homestead.com) from 1990 to present. He has conducted about 30 field studies in various areas of the former Soviet Union (including Siberia), Central Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and the United States (including Alaska). Dolitsky has been a lecturer on the World Discoverer, Spirit of Oceanus, andClipper Odyssey vessels in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. He was the Project Manager for the WWII Alaska-Siberia Lend Lease Memorial, which was erected in Fairbanks in 2006. He has published extensively in the fields of anthropology, history, archaeology, and ethnography. His more recent publications include Fairy Tales and Myths of the Bering Strait Chukchi, Ancient Tales of Kamchatka; Tales and Legends of the Yupik Eskimos of Siberia; Old Russia in Modern America: Russian Old Believers in Alaska; Allies in Wartime: The Alaska-Siberia Airway During WWII; Spirit of the Siberian Tiger: Folktales of the Russian Far East; Living Wisdom of the Far North: Tales and Legends from Chukotka and Alaska; Pipeline to Russia; The Alaska-Siberia Air Route in WWII; and Old Russia in Modern America: Living Traditions of the Russian Old Believers; Ancient Tales of Chukotka, and Ancient Tales of Kamchatka.