The Arab 'exodus' that wasn't

(JNS) — Did you know that moving a few miles to temporarily get out of the way of gunfire constitutes an “exodus”?

I didn’t either until I read the appalling headline on the front page of The New York Times on Feb. 18: “In West Bank, Israel’s Tactics Cause Exodus.”

This was a thinly disguised attempt to invert Jewish history by headline writers. Look, it says, the Jews are doing to Arabs what Pharaoh did to the Jews! But while the Jews experienced an actual exodus in ancient Egypt, the Palestinian Arabs of today are undergoing nothing of the sort.

According to the Times, Israel’s recent counter-terrorist operations in the Palestinian Authority cities of Jenin, Tulkarem and Tubas have “displaced roughly 40,000 Palestinians from their homes.”

Where have they gone? Not to another continent or another country. Not even another city. This fake “exodus” appears to consist of heading just a few blocks away. The “displaced” people are living with “friends and relatives” or in “wedding halls, schools, mosques, municipal buildings and even a farm shed.”

Since you can’t fit 40,000 people in a farm shed, we may assume that most of those who have relocated are staying with friends nearby or are temporarily housed in the local schools that the Times mentioned. How many times has it happened when residents of some American town have had to temporarily shelter in a local school because of a flood or a hurricane? Does anybody ever classify that as an “exodus”?

Further down in the piece, it mentions that “roughly 3,000” of those residents have already returned home. And by the time you read this, thousands more undoubtedly will have gone back to their homes, too. This is likely to be the shortest “exodus” in history.

In any event, the “exodus” nonsense should not distract us from talking about the real issue: Why are Israeli forces taking action in P.A.-governed cities? The answer is simple: Because its 89-year-old leader Mahmoud Abbas and his P.A. refuse to.

Article VII of the first Oslo Accord, signed by Israel and the P.A. in 1993, authorized the P.A. to establish a 12,000-man “police force.” While the international community turned a blind eye, the P.A. expanded it into a 60,000-man “security force” that has become a de facto army.

And that’s all courtesy of the American taxpayer: The CIA has been training and arming the P.A. security force since its inception. Last week, the Trump administration announced its suspension of that assistance. Hopefully, the suspension will last, especially in the wake of the recent revelations that numerous members of the P.A. security forces have been directly involved in terrorist attacks against Israelis.

In the meantime, according to the World Atlas, the P.A. now has the sixth-largest per-capita security force in the world. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy calls the Palestinian Authority-governed areas “one of the most heavily policed territories in the world.”

The Oslo agreements spell out what the P.A. security forces are required to do about the proliferation of terrorists in cities such as Jenin, Tulkarem and Tubas: They must “apprehend, investigate and prosecute perpetrators and all other persons directly or indirectly involved in acts of terrorism, violence and incitement.” (Annex I, Article II, 3-c of Oslo II)

Yet the P.A. has never fulfilled those obligations. It doesn’t arrest terrorists, or shut down their explosives labs, or confiscate their weapons depots, or extradite them to Israel.

A few weeks ago, some American media outlets reported that the P.A. was taking unspecified action against the terrorists in Jenin. It’s noteworthy that the alleged P.A. campaign was never reported in the P.A.’s own news agency, Wafa. If the P.A. did take some action, even just for PR purposes, it sure didn’t last long. On Jan. 18, The Jerusalem Post and other media reported that the P.A. “signed a truce with the Jenin Battalions” (which consist of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists).

Want to prevent Israeli actions in P.A.-administered cities? Want to head off any “displacements,” even if they involve just moving a few blocks, for a few days? There’s a simple formula: The P.A. should stop signing peace agreements with terrorist groups and start waging war on them, as the Oslo Accords require. Or is the P.A.’s signature on the Oslo agreement not worth the paper on which it appears?

Moshe Phillips, a veteran pro-Israel activist and author, is the national chairman of Americans For a Safe Israel. A former board member of the American Zionist Movement, he previously served as national director of the U.S. division of Herut and worked with CAMERA in Philadelphia. He was also a delegate to the 2020 World Zionist Congress and served as editor of The Challenger, the publication of the Tagar Zionist Youth Movement. His op-eds and letters have been widely published in the United States and Israel.