Palestinians own worst enemies

To the editor:

(re: “Would you call me antisemitic?” Feb. 9)

After spending a fair amount of effort over many years trying to change the rhetoric about fulminating anti-Zionism, I have come to the sad conclusion that being anti-Zionist or even antisemitic fulfills other psychological needs and does not depend on facts.

The only reason for this effort is that silence in the face of the recent Peter Wolf letter could be interpreted as acquiescence.

It is not.

• When the Romans completely destroyed any vestige of Jewish authority in present-day Israel, Jewish history moved to the Diaspora. For approximately 2,000 years, Jews lived in communities in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

There were periods of peace but they were punctuated with anti-Jewish laws, restrictions on means of earning a livelihood, religious persecution, forced conversions, pogroms, and expulsions together with confiscation of material possessions.

Lesson? Being a minority without political rights is a very dangerous.

• The British Mandate for Palestine was set up in the wake of the Ottoman Empire. When the United Nations decided to a division of land which seriously favored the Arab population, the Arabs refused and attacked.

• All of Israel’s wars have been defensive. Please do not equate defense with offense. When your enemy says he will kill you, it pays to believe him.

• Except for parts of the Arabian peninsula, most Muslim countries are political and economic failures. The world poured vast fortunes into the Palestinian areas, and the money is used primarily for weapons, payments for those who kill Israelis, not for civilian infrastructure.

Notice how many Arabs are happily willing to work in Israel because there is nothing for them in areas under the administration of their own people.

• Israel left Gaza in a fruitless effort to achieve peace. Instead of peace, it created a terrorist entity that oppresses its own people and tries to terrorize the civilian of Israel.

For two years while The New York Times and other American papers were daily writing stories about the horrific wildfires in our western states, there was almost no mention of the two-year program from Gaza deliberately setting fires in southern Israel, destroying animal preserves and fields. 

Gaza should be proof-positive that peace with people who tell the West what they want to hear while telling their own people about destroying Israel and the Jews is absolutely impossible.

The disastrous evacuation of Gaza and its conversion into its present state is what destroyed the Israeli peace movement. Sometimes a bit of reality versus rhetoric and ideology is important.

Pity the poor Palestinians perhaps, but recognize that they have proven to be their own worst enemies.

Sura Jeselsohn