Letter to the Nation
June 5, 2007
“The Two Wailing Walls!”
The tone of your June 18, 2007 edition of “The Nation” was, for my eyes, quite anti-Israel, and by my definition anti-Semitic. Many people, Jew and non-Jew alike, attack Israel and claim they love Jews or the Jewish people. But with fellow Jews like Brian Klug, most of the Israelis would be dead today. Even though Klug, Benvenisti, and Makdisi, believe that Israel, unlike any other country in the world, does not have a right of self-defense, a vast majority of Jews believe that they have that right. When Columbus, New Mexico was raided by Pancho Villa in 1916, we sent an army into Mexico to hunt him down. Every country has that right of self-defense. While your troika of apologists to terrorism excoriates Israel, no mention is written about the 1500 missiles that have hit a small border town named Sderot. It seems that Jews are allowed to be targets of opportunity and their right to protect themselves is criminal. Jews have lived in Israel for thousands of years before there was a Muslim religion and without their forced dispersal in 586 BCE and 70 CE they would be the vast majority of people in the region. No one, on your staff, seems to remember that they fought the Babylonian, Greek-Syrian, and Roman Empires. They were the first “People's Liberation Movement.” They purchased barren land from absentee Egyptian and Turkish landowners and pieced together settlements in their desire to escape from European persecution in the post Herzl era. In the Mandate area, which now includes modern Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan, Jews purchased all of the land they occupied up into 1948. When they sought a “two-state” solution, and accepted a tiny portion of the land, their Arab neighbors refused and declared war on them with the intent of wiping them off the face of the earth. Nothing new! Out of that victory, and subsequent triumphs, the modern state of Israel emerged, survived and prospered.
Israel took in 800,000 Jewish refugees, but did the 22 other Arab countries absorb there own 800,000? No! In fact, most of these Arabs ran from pre1967 Israel, accepting the promise that the Arab armies would crush the nascent country and all the land would be theirs. Their Arab brothers kept them in camps to make sure that they would never forget and never be assimilated. They are all Arabs by the way! They are the only refugees since WWII that were not re-settled! Why? Your authors know why. But your authors want to re-write history for their own purposes and hidden agendas. Have your authors forgotten the Nazi ally and Jew hater, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who fomented hate and murder for years against legitimate Jewish settlers? By the way, there is a Palestinian state already, it is Jordan. But these authors seem to have conveniently forgotten that Jordan kept the West Bank stateless for 19 years. Why didn't the Jordanians give independence to the West Bank? Because they encouraged them with the dream that they would eventually conquer and destroy the “Zionist entity.” In closing, your magazine does disservice to justice and democracy, of which Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Fatah know nothing about. The truth is as plain as your faces. Do your authors really blame the murderous fratricide in Gaza on Israel? Maybe they should blame the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on the Jews! Maybe they should blame the age-old Sunni-Shiite struggle on the Jews, or the struggles between Muslim and Christian in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Nigeria and Bosnia. If there were no oil in the Middle East, the Arab world and Palestinians would be forgotten in a nano-second. I suggest you spend more time on Darfur, or the other hot spots around the world, where radical Muslims are killing other peoples, rather than excoriating the one democratic and free country.
Richard J. Garfunkel