In an interview last month with the Union Leader, retired Goffstown teacher Carolyn Cicciu made several inaccurate and unfair statements about Israel and the Palestinians when recounting a recent trip to that part of the world. They deserve to be corrected.

She asserted that Israel is deliberately making life difficult for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza, making them “poorer and poorer” since 1967 in order to drive them out of the country. She even accused Israel of “enslaving” the Palestinians.

The facts tell a different story. When Israel occupied these territories in 1967, they were desperately impoverished backwaters. Israel’s occupation led to dramatic improvements in living standards. Consider some key measures of social well-being in the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli administration (as presented by University of London historian Efraim Karsh in his book “Arafat’s War,” pp. 44-45). Per capita GDP in the West Bank and Gaza rose tenfold between 1968 and 1991, surpassing the levels of Jordan, Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia. Mortality rates in the West Bank and Gaza fell by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 1990, while life expectancy rose from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 (compared to an average of 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa).

Israeli medical aid reduced the infant mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000 (better than the rates for Iraq, Egypt, Jordan or Syria for the same time period). A systematic program of inoculation eradicated childhood diseases like polio, whooping cough, tetanus and measles.

By 1986, 92.8 percent of the population of the West Bank and Gaza had electricity around the clock, compared with 20.5 percent in 1967; 85 percent had running water in dwellings, compared with 16 percent in 1967.

Equally dramatic was progress in education. In 1967, there was not a single university in the West Bank or Gaza. By the early 1990s, there were seven. From 1967 to 1987, the number of schoolchildren in the West Bank and Gaza had grown by 99 percent and the number of classes by 102 percent, though the population had grown by only 28 percent. Illiteracy rates had dropped to 14 percent of adults over the age of 15, compared with 69 percent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia and 44 percent in Syria.

These trends are not consistent with an Israeli desire to expel Palestinians.

Of course, Palestinians are still much poorer than Israelis, as Cicciu noted. But she failed to give a balanced account of the causes of this relative poverty. The extreme corruption of Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority after 1993 is a big factor behind Palestinian underdevelopment. Cicciu asserted that the United States gives no aid at all to the Palestinians. In fact, since 1993 the United States has poured millions of dollars in aid into the Palestinian Authority, both directly and indirectly via the United Nations. I myself have driven across the West Bank and seen dozens of signs identifying development projects paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Alas, much of this money has ended up in the Swiss bank accounts of top PLO officials, notorious for their corruption and incompetence.

Another reason for Palestinian poverty is the endemic violence of Palestinian society. Yasir Arafat signed the Oslo accords, which obliged him to renounce violence against Israel, but from his return to Palestine in 1993 until his death in 2004, he systematically used terrorism against Israel to exact more from the Israelis at the bargaining table. Arafat rejected every peace proposal put to him by the Israeli government without ever making a counter-offer, finally unleashing the bloody wave of suicide bombings in 2000 known as the “Al Aqsa Intifada.”

Cicciu maked the puzzling assertion that Palestinians are “portrayed as terrorists, but they aren’t at all.” In fact, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are Palestinian terrorist organizations with a long and bloody track record of indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilians. These attacks have necessitated Israeli checkpoints, the security barrier and the Gaza blockade, all of which certainly hold back Palestinian development. But the blame for this should be placed squarely on the Palestinian terrorists themselves, not on the Israelis, who are only defending themselves.

Any “advocate for human rights” should recognize that the right to self-defense is a human right, too.

Joseph S. Spoerl is a professor in the philosophy department at St. Anselm College.