In his letter to the editor of April 20, Robert Sargent asked “What’s going on?” in Israel? His concern was that American foreign policy tacitly denied the Palestinians self-claimed right of return to Israel, after they had fled the country in 1948 at the urging of the Grand Mufti. “Get out of the way so we can push all the Jews into the sea,” said the Mufti.

Now, what’s going on is that after 56 years of trying to push Israel into the sea, the surrounding Arab dictatorships have a new strategy: crowd out the Jews. They call it right of return but it’s just another attack on the Jewish country.

Sargent is more than correct, because the denial is more than tacit. It’s real, totally valid and fully consistent with American Mideast policy as first elucidated by Harry Truman in 1948 and re-affirmed by every president since then. Indeed, there may still be academic debate on the correctness of American positions in 1948, opposed as Truman was by the foreign policy establishment of the day. But these debaters do not give adequate consideration to a key purpose of a frequent-election presidency: to have an executive who represents current popular and political thought, often quite different than that of a long-in-place bureaucracy And Truman represented the people, all the way!

The fraction of Arabs who followed the Mufti’s urging were herded into camps and held by their brethren like pawns in a chess game. The Kingdom of Jordan, but no one else, absorbed the Palestinians and made them part of their country. Jordan made peace with Israel and moved on with building a modern society under the late King Hussein’s leadership.

The hundreds of thousands of Arabs who did not leave became Israeli citizens. They have elected representatives in the Israeli parliament; they have businesses and have prospered with the new country. They are, in fact, integral parts of a modern, energetic society.

The fact is that the Arabs in the refugee camps have a country to return to, and they’ve called it Palestine and it’s in the West Bank territory. One Israeli government after another has tried to negotiate a peace, but it has not been possible with Arafat. With Anwar Sadat and King Hussein of Jordan, yes. Armies could not wipe out Israel, and terror isn’t scaring them out. So, the new strategy is to crowd them out.

Send all those Arabs, now multiplied into the millions, to turn Israel, a Jewish state, into another Islamic country. It’s a clever new propaganda idea, but it’s not going to happen; it serves to harden Israel’s stance since it tells them, once again, that Arafat doesn’t want peace with Israel, he wants peace without any Israel at all, or at least without a Jewish Israel. So, what’s going on is one more roadblock, one more attempt at justifying murder and terror.

With much respect, I repeat that this is more than tacitly clear to the U.S. government. It is perfectly clear to our government. In addition, it was clear to all parties right through the Oslo negotiations that a real peace cannot include negotiating either group out of existence, which the Arabs’ right of return ploy implies.

Once the concept of Israel’s right to exist within secure borders and the Arab Palestinians’ right to separate nationhood are accepted by all, the end to terror and misery becomes a real possibility.

Samuel Goldman is a retired executive living in Brooksville. He is associated with AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.