In the days prior to the 1967 Six Day War, my sister Lee was in Israel packing food for the Israeli army as the country and the world wondered if Israel could survive. Its resounding victory set the template for all that has since transpired between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
Six decades later it is instructive to compare today’s life in the West Bank and Gaza with how it was under Jordanian and Egyptian rule.
Lee posted this analysis from Leah Zakh Aharoni on her Facebook feed:
Every third Palestinian Arab alive today is alive because of Israel.
I know how that sounds. Stay with me.
In 1967, when Israel liberated Judea and Samaria (what you call West bank) from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt, we inherited a population of roughly one million Arabs living in conditions the modern world had mostly left behind.
One in six Arab babies died before their first birthday.
Life expectancy was 48 years.
Fewer than 30 villages out of hundreds had electricity.
Most Arabs in the hills of Judea and Samaria lit their homes with kerosene lamps and cooked over wood fires.
Only about 10% had running water.
There were 9 primitive hospitals in the entire territory for nearly a million people.
And there was not a single Arab university. Not one.
Then came us.
Within one generation of Israeli administration, the picture changed so completely that the numbers are hard to believe.
Water was connected to hundreds of villages that had never had running water in their history. Electricity reached villages that had been dark since the beginning of human settlement.
Four Arab universities were founded: Bir Zeit, An-Najah, Bethlehem, Hebron, where zero had existed before.
Israeli doctors trained Arab doctors. Israeli hospitals treated Arab patients for cancer, cardiac surgery, and the pediatric emergencies their local facilities could not handle.
Israeli vaccination programs reached Arab children whose grandparents had grown up when a childhood illness meant a childhood grave.
Life expectancy rose from 48 to 72.
Infant mortality dropped 90%.
All this in one generation. One of the fastest life-expectancy gains ever documented in any population, anywhere in the world.
And the population exploded.
One million Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza in 1967. Five million today.
Fivefold growth in one lifetime.
That does not happen when a population is oppressed.
Oppressed populations shrink. American Indians shrank by 90% under European contact. Aboriginal Australians shrank by more than half. Populations that live under colonial oppression do not multiply by five.
So do the demographic math.
Every third Palestinian Arab in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza today has a parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent who would have died in infancy or of preventable disease if the healthcare conditions of 1967 had persisted.
That is not political rhetoric. That is demographic arithmetic.
And the story does not end at Judea and Samaria.
Even in Gaza, the famous Shifa Hospital that made international headlines in November 2023 when IDF forces uncovered the Hamas command center operating beneath it, was expanded and modernized under Israeli administration by Israeli architects and engineers.
Israel built the hospital. Hamas turned it into a military bunker.
Jews build hospitals. Terrorists convert them into weapons of war.
Now ask the question.
If the Jews are foreign colonizers, why is every piece of modern infrastructure that keeps the Arab population alive something that Jews built for them?
Arab doctors trained in Israeli hospitals. Arab professors teach at universities Israel enabled. Arab babies survive childhood because of vaccines Israel administered. Arab farmers irrigate with water Israel connected. Arab homes are lit by grids Israel extended.
The Jews did all of this in Judea and Samaria within twenty years of returning.
The Arabs did none of it in the nineteen years they controlled the same land or in the four hundred years the Ottomans controlled it before that or in the thirteen hundred years since the Arab conquest of the Levant.
Here is the uncomfortable truth.
Water. Electricity. Hospitals. Universities. Roads. Vaccines.
Living children who would otherwise have died.
Every marker of modern civilization in this territory arrived when the Jews came home.
The land waited two thousand years for its people to come home. And when we did, we built. And when we built, they lived.
When you hear about "settler expansion," remember what was here before the "settlers" .
Kerosene lamps and infant graves.
When you hear about "occupation," remember what the occupier built.
When you hear about Arab suffering, ask who reduced that suffering by 90% within a generation.
It was not the Jordanians. It was not the Ottomans. It was not the British.
It was Israelis.
Look at what we built. Look at who is alive because of it.
Every third Palestinian Arab in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza today. Alive because Israel came home.
Now tell me who the colonizer is, concludes Ms. Aharoni.
