12 | FEBRUARY 9 • 2023 

opinion
Palestinian Refugee: ‘We Must Confront 
the Violence in Our Culture.’
E

ven more shocking 
than the Jan. 27 Friday 
night massacre outside 
an East Jerusalem synagogue 
is that this assault on civilians 
peacefully 
praying in a 
sacred space 
has been not 
condemned but 
celebrated by 
Palestinians and 
their purported 
admirers as far 
away as Yemen. 
There is something deeply 
broken in a Palestinian street 
culture that honors violence 
against innocents, a culture 
in which some were filmed 
dancing in the streets and 
handing out candies after 
the 9-11 terror attacks. It is 
this: Multiple generations 
of Palestinian young people 
have been taught to hate 
Jews and Israel’s allies, and to 
equate attacks on civilians to 
attacks on military targets. 
Too much of the Western 
world has coddled this 
perverse cycle. Enough is 
enough. Palestinians and all 
those who truly support us 
must stand for humanity.
There are ominous signs 
that the forces of cruelty 
are already on the brink of 
dragging the Palestinian 
people and our neighbors 
through another round of 
terrible conflict. Friday’s 
shooting outside the 
synagogue came a day after 
an Israeli commando raid on 
an apartment building in the 
Jenin refugee camp targeting 
a Palestinian Islamic Jihad 

cell that was reportedly on 
the verge of launching a 
major terrorist attack. 
Israeli forces killed nine 
people in the raid, including 
seven men who Israeli and 
Palestinian officials said 
were armed. Militants in 
Gaza fired rockets at Israel 
in response. Then came the 
shooting that killed five men 
and two women outside the 
synagogue. Hours later, the 
next morning, a 13-year-
old Palestinian shot and 
wounded a father and his 
adult son outside Jerusalem’s 
Old City.
All humanity should 
recognize the difference 
between a preventative 
assault on a terrorist cell 
and the massacre of civilians 
in a house of worship. Yet 
Palestinian culture has 
somehow come to tolerate 
such chilling slaughter. It 
happened in 1972, after the 
murder of Israeli athletes 

at the Munich Olympics, 
and in 1976, with the plane 
hijacking to Entebbe, and so 
many times since.
Palestinians have 
been used as pawns by 
surrounding Arab nations 
that were pursuing a policy 
of eternal conflict with Israel. 
Most Arab countries refused 
citizenship to Palestinian 
refugees of the 1948 and 
1967 wars in Israel, leaving 
us crowded in squalid camps, 
to maximize the pitifulness 
of our plight for the world 
media. 
I should know. I was born 
in the Old City when it was 
under Jordanian rule. My 
family is Muslim, but we 
lived in the Jewish Quarter. 
Until 1966, when I was 8, and 
the Jordanian government 
forcibly relocated us to the 
Shuafat Refugee Camp, thus 
turning me and my family 
into “refugees.”
One must understand 

the refugee-ization of 
the Palestinian people 
to understand what has 
perverted our sons’ and 
daughters’ sense of humanity 
until they consider a mass 
shooting an occasion for 
sweets and dancing. 
A Palestinian refugee is not 
just a refugee for life: Unlike 
all other refugee populations, 
the United Nations has given 
Palestinian refugees the 
unique curse of inheritability, 
so that there are now 
Palestinian refugees of the 
fourth and fifth generations. 
This is how the number 
of Palestinians considered 
refugees registered with 
the United Nations 
Relief and Works Agency 
(UNWRA) ballooned from 
about 700,000 in 1948 — 
comparable to the 900,000 
Jews who were expelled from 
Arab and Islamic countries 
in the same period — to an 
astonishing 5.6 million today. 

PURELY COMMENTARY

Bassem Eid 
The Forward

OLIVIER FITOUSSI/FLASH90 VIA JTA

Israeli security and emergency forces at the scene of a shooting attack in Neve Yaakov, Jerusalem, Jan. 27, 
2023. 

