Letters to the Editor
CrunchyFrog
Published Letters: 257 Editor's Choice: 5
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Posting "non-facts"
[Read the article: The catastrophe that never ends]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Freddie deBoer asks: "How can you call a country a democracy when one half of its people have no citizenship rights? How can you call a country a democracy when it has different classes of citizens, separated on religious and ethnic grounds?" Whatever country he's writing about, it isn't Israel. Arabs in Israel have equal voting rights; in fact, it is one of the few places in the Middle East where Arab women may vote. Arabic, like Hebrew, is an official language in Israel. More than 300,000 Arab children attend Israeli schools. Why would Salon choose to highlight a letter with such gross inaccuracies? I'm really starting to question my subscription.
margaretleo notes: "I am in my 40s, have a college degree, read the newspaper every day, and yet I have never heard about al-Akba." Well, Margaret, maybe that's because it didn't go down exactly as Sandy Tolan writes. There are well-documented reports from the time period and subsequently that Deir Yassin was no massacre. See, e.g., http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf14.html#f which has copious footnotes. But verifiable documentation appears to mean nothing to Tolan who simply believes anything a Palestinian source says, even when it's demonstrably false.
Look, I know Israel is not faultless. But its leaders have acknowledged some of their errors and taken responsiblity for them. When have the Palestinians ever done as much? Nothing is ever their fault. Do you know of any dispute, particularly of this kind of complexity, where one party is always 100% in the right?
I do feel sorry for the Palestinian people who I believe (as others have noted here) to be pawns of the rest of the Arab world. If Israel fell off the face of the earth tomorrow, there would still be no independent Palestine -- the other Arab nations would gobble it up.
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Borders
[Read the article: The Mideast death dance]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Anonymous asked:
isn't it Israel that's occupying territory it was asked to let go of by the U.N. all the way back in the sixties? Wasn't there a border that was drawn that Israel refuses to recognize?
No, but that's a common misconception thanks to Palestinian propaganda. U.N. Resolution 242 (Nov. 1967) calls for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict." Note that it says "from territories" and not "from the territories." This was a deliberate choice of words at the time, indicating that Israel was not expected to withdraw to the pre-1967 armistice lines. Those lines were never officially recognized "borders" anyway -- they were just where the soldiers of each side happened to be when fighting stopped in 1948. Lord Caradon, the chief architect of the U.N. resolution stated "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial." The intention was start a process to negotiate viable boundaries and a lasting peace.
Note also that Res. 242 also clearly calls on the Arab states to make peace with Israel. When Israel negoiated meaningful peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, it withdrew from Sinai and portions of Gaza and the West Bank, which collectively represented 93% of the territories occupied in the 1967 war.
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Benny Morris and the refugee issue
[Read the article: The catastrophe that never ends]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Several letter-writers have cited Jewish historian Benny Morris to support the claim that Arabs were expelled en masse from Israel in 1948. Based on subsequent research, that is not Morris's current position. See, e.g., his interview in The Atlantic Monthly of March, 2004:
Morris concluded that both the Arab and the Israeli official versions of the story were wrong. Israeli leaders had not, as Arabs charged, masterminded a large-scale expulsion of Palestinians. Nor had the Palestinians simply fled voluntarily from war-torn regions, as Israel claimed. Morris rendered no final verdict on the guilt or innocence of either party...
In the same interview, Morris says:
And when I think of Israel's behavior today in the occupied territories, Israel is behaving with an enormous amount of restraint vis-à-vis the Palestinians and their provocations.
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Ignorant comparisons
[Read the article: The Mideast death dance]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Israelis are no better than their neighbors, probably worse.
If this is actually what you believe, then I feel sorry for your staggering ignorance. Arab Israelis and Christians have the right to vote and even serve in elected office. There are probably more Arab women with the right to vote than in Arab countries. There are hundreds of Arab schools in Israel, and the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot allocate land based on religion or ethnicity, and may not prevent Arab citizens from living wherever they choose. A little basic research could easily dispel your mistaken notions, but apparently, ranting baselessly is easier.
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U.N. Resolutions
[Read the article: Why Israelis believe they're right]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If we are going to start discussing UN resolutions let's start with those that require Israel to return it's various Middle-Eastern land grabs shall we?
Which simultaneously call for the Arab nations to make peace with Israel. Where peace has been made, land has been returned, e.g., the Sinai peninsula to Egypt, other lands to Jordan and (I believe) Syria. In total, over 90% of the land Israel occupied as a result of the 1967 war has been returned.
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Numbers don't tell the story
[Read the article: Is Israel facing a quagmire?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Alan Dershowitz offers an analysis at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1153291973626&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
IT SHOULD BE obvious by now that Hizbullah and Hamas actually want the Israeli military to kill as many Lebanese and Palestinian civilians as possible. That is why they store their rockets underneath the beds of civilians; why they launch their missiles from crowded civilian neighborhoods and hide among civilians. They are seeking to induce Israel to defend its civilians by going after them among their civilian "shields." They know that every civilian they induce Israel to kill hurts Israel in the media and the international and human rights communities.