Letters to the editor: Readers comment on UN Resolution 2334

By crossing this line the US stabbed its ally Israel in the back, and by voting with such stalwarts as Venezuela, Malaysia, Senegal, and yes, New Zealand.

By LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Letters (photo credit: REUTERS)
Letters
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Readers comment on UN Resolution 2334
In order to justify the US abstention on the anti-settlement resolution in the UN Security Council, “Jerusalem furious over US bombshell at UN,” December 25, American Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power invoked the opposition of previous US presidents of both parties to Israel/ Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria.
But, all those presidents also supported direct bilateral negotiations between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs, rather than an imposed solution decided by the overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian UN.
By crossing this line the US stabbed its ally Israel in the back, and by voting with such stalwarts as Venezuela, Malaysia, Senegal, and yes, New Zealand, Obama expressed his fundamental enmity to the Jewish state.
By abrogating this basic principle of fairness, this leaves Israel now to take whatever action it needs to in order to protect its own interests.
The ultimate result of this resolution will be only to undermine the so-called “two-state solution.”
We hope that President- elect Donald Trump will soon restore the friendly relations that should exist between the US and Israel.
JACK S. COHEN Netanya
The time for pussyfooting is over. To quote the late British prime minister Winston Churchill, the wartime leader: “Action this day!” Or in the words of the Shimon the Hasmonean: “We have not occupied a foreign land, we have liberated the land of our forefathers from foreign occupation” (Book of Maccabees A 15:34).
As proposed by the left-wing writer A.B. Yehoshua: Annex area C in Judea & Samaria, where there are about 450,0000 Jews and grant Israeli citizenship to the 100,000 Arabs living there.
JACK SHEBSON Jerusalem
Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once remarked that the only free people in the Soviet Union were those imprisoned in the Gulag as they had already been condemned.
We have been granted that privilege by the United Nations Security Council. Being already condemned we are in a way free to pursue our own needs. And to be proactive for a change.
One obvious step would be to annex the settlement blocs that we intend to keep.
Should this be done after the change of US administrations we might hope for a US veto of a likely new Security Council resolution.
SIDNEY HANDEL Tel Aviv
More revealing than disappointing, Obama’s Security Council abstention seems above all an act of childish pique rather than an element in a larger policy formulated to resolve the Israel- Palestinian conflict.
It seems above all a reflection of the American president’s deep personal hostility to the current Israeli prime minister, a hostility he has nourished from the beginning.
A few years ago, reporter Bob Woodward pointed out in a book about the US president the degree to which Obama’s thinking on key issues is shaped by personal attitudes, by an inability to see beyond the likes and dislikes of individuals he has needed in his capacity as chief executive to deal with.
His hostility to the late and enormously capable Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan, was no secret.
Obama’s inability to deal with the Republican leadership in Congress seemed above all responsible for the legislative stalemate that characterized much of the man’s presidency.
Palestinians need to understand that they have nothing to celebrate.
DAVID LEVY Montreal
It is an absurdity of history that, of all nations, New Zealand should introduce a bill against Israeli construction in the settlements.
Does New Zealand need to be reminded that its land was taken from the native Maoris by European settlers? This was followed by an extermination of the native culture as well as a large portion of the native population.
The New Zealand wars resulted in the government confiscating 12,000 sq. km. of Maori land.
The controversy of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, where there were two different versions – one in Maori and the other in English, which carried different meanings – continues to this day in the Waitangi Tribunal.
So before you introduce a bill against the Jewish people’s right to return to their ancestral homeland, Israel, after 2000 years of persecution in the Diaspora, sort out your own land! ERWIN PAVEL Ra’anana At a time when the president of the United States is trying to engulf the Middle East into a state of darkness along comes Hanukka and reminds us that this darkness can be overcome with light.
I am almost 80 years old and have never experienced a US president whose Middle East policies have been so consistently misguided and incorrect.
I hope that Israel will not panic and react out of anger. We need a cooling off period until the new president takes over and then in coordination with him develop a Middle East strategy that will roll back the errors of the Obama administration and set a clear direction toward finding a solution suitable to all in this region.
P. YONAH Shoham
A pungent hypocritical stench wafts through the “hollow halls” of the United Nations, condemning Israel for allowing her citizens to settle throughout land justifiably won in a war of survival, while so many exploitative, indeed genocidal terrorist-coddling regimes planet-wide, escape that institution’s wrath.
Complicity in this farce by the Obama administration, politically toxic to already staggering Democrats, will bear no fruit, as it lacks historical perspective.
Indeed, the US kept her southwest, once governed by Mexico, won in a war justified by the notion of “Manifest Destiny.”
Is the US an occupying nation? Furthermore, Jews, persistently unwelcome throughout the Middle East, in the 1920s were promised a homeland by the British, who were in charge, codified within the 1917 Balfour Declaration, encompassing modern-day Israel and today’s Jordan.
The Brits subsequently reneged due to Arab pressure, lopping off 80%, relegating Israel to a land mass about twotenths of 1% percent the size of the Muslim-dominated region.
Locating a sovereign Palestinian state within the boundaries of Jordan, paying relocation costs for those who choose to populate their own homeland, mostly financed by wealthy Arab regimes, would go a long way in creating peace within this dysfunctional part of Mother Earth.
LAWRENCE UNIGLICHT Galloway, New Jersey
While one might wish to blame our prime minister for the UN debacle, one should recognize that Education Minister Naftali Bennett is only really the sum of his parts.
On the one hand, you have a member of his coalition alienating a large part of non-Orthodox world Jewry, and on the other you have one part sticking its finger in the nose of the US president.
Bennett was a very successful businessman, and he leads a party, but he lacks a basic and necessary character trait: wisdom.
Wisdom comes from learning the humanities: art, social science, literature, all subjects he and the culture minister have taken to attacking with venom.
True, we should reinforce our students skills in math and science, but without knowledge of the humanities we will raise a society of Bennett clones.
How many people want to be known as the person who did more to damage the “settlement” enterprise than anyone else in Israeli history?
BARRY LYNN Efrat


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