In reference to the full page advertisement (it clearly states that it is an advertisement, and really is nothing more than that) in last week’s Echo, it makes me happy that Bassim Shomaly and his family had a good life in Palestine before his family decided to leave, but makes me very, very sad that there are so many anti-Israel untruths in his content.
My family were also indigenous Palestinians, but they were Jewish, and lived in the Jewish majority areas of Palestine. Bassim claims to be Christian, therefore he would know that THE ONLY place in the entire Middle East where the Christian community is growing and flourishing, and not oppressed, is Israel.
Unlike Bassim’s family, my family DID NOT have such a good life, simply due to the fact that they were Jewish. They were incredibly poor, and starving most of the time. My mother remembers being constantly hungry and crying regularly because there was simply nothing to eat. They lived in fear of the local Arabs (before the establishment of the state of Israel, the local Arabs referred to themselves as Arabs, Southern Syrians, Northern Egyptians; anything but Palestinian).
Let’s be very clear. When the UN voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and non-Jewish areas, the Jews agreed, and wanted peace, but the Arabs had no intention of allowing the Jews to have one bit of the land, and Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon then immediately invaded Israel with the full intention of her complete and utter destruction.
Importantly, they never planned on creating a Palestinian state, and had pre-planned the dividing up of the land. The Egyptian border was to be moved northward to meet the expanded border of Syria after they took northern Israel, and Jordan was taking land to the west.
The following is a brief summary of the major massacres against Jews by Arabs in the region of Palestine (Palestine was never in history a country and was simply a region, including all of Jordan and beyond, so modern day Israel, is but a small portion of the land). The following does not include the murder of small numbers of Jews, as murdering small groups of defenceless Jews was common.
1517: 1st Safed Pogrom, Ottoman Palestine
1517: 1st Hebron Pogrom, Ottoman Palestine and
1577: Passover Massacre, Ottoman empire
1660: 2nd Safed Pogrom, Ottoman Palestine
1834: Safed Pogrom, Ottoman Palestine
1847: Ethnic cleansing of the Jews in Jerusalem, Ottoman Palestine
1920: Irbid Massacres: British mandate Palestine
1920: 1930: Arab riots, British mandate Palestine
1921: 1st Jaffa riots, British mandate Palestine
1928: Ikhwan Masacres, Egypt, and British mandate Palestine.
1929: 3rd Hebron Pogrom British mandate Palestine.
1929: 3rd Safed Pogrom, British mandate Palestine.
1933: 2nd Jaffa riots, British mandate Palestine.
1936: 3rd Jaffa riots, British mandate Palestine
1942: Jerusalem Mufti collaboration with the Nazis. plays a part in the final solution
1948: 1st Arab Israeli war (1 out of every 100 Jews was killed)
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
