Israel and Palestine -- Yet Again
Wed., June 11, 10:18 AM
Well, look at that! The Register only took a week to print my letter this time. They edited it, of course; it lost something because the offensive letter I was answering was long gone. What it said, basically, was that of course the Palestinians feel they have lost their rights, because Israel “always intended to take the whole territory anyway.” I think I shall just strike through the stuff they didn’t use and bracket what they added. I hope you don’t mind. Some of it spoke specifically to that letter.
I have to take exception to Stanley Heller’s letter about Zionism (Register 6/2/08). Who are you, to read Israel’s mind and decide what its intentions have been? Maybe you don’t remember what it was like, sixty years ago.
In 1948, the partition of Palestine that created the state of Israel gave the West Bank to what was then called Trans-Jordan. When the British pulled out of Palestine and Israel declared independence, who started shooting first? You could look it up; it was in all the newspapers. Arab terrorists (and, yes, I know that not all Arabs are terrorists) used that territory as a convenient pied-à-terre [sanctuary], from which they could cross the border each night and kill a few more Israelis. (Y’know, that wasn’t mentioned in the newspapers so much.)
There was not yet much of an Israeli army. Citizens lived in fear of who might be dead in the morning. It was within walking distance, after all .
Jordan held the West Bank until the 1967 wars, when Israel seized it. To cement their hold on the land, the Israelis built settlements; the Palestinians yelled, “Foul! That’s ours. We demand a Palestinian state.”
But, if a Palestinian state is so important, why didn’t Jordan create one? The land was there, the people were already on it.
While the Israelis on one side of the border struggled to make the land productive, the Arabs on the other side taught hatred — for three generations.
How else could one [They] encourage young people to fight rather than to negotiate? They call them heroes if they strap explosives to their bodies and set off their human bombs in heavily populated areas.
There is a frame of mind, on both sides, that will take at least another generation to change.
Let me paraphrase something that Golda Meir said: “We can perhaps forgive you for killing our sons. We cannot forgive you for forcing us to kill yours.”
I am waiting for this guy to tell me that he taught social studies for thirty years, so I can say, “Is this what you were teaching my children?”
