LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

By LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Updated: MARCH 14, 2016 20:40
Letters (photo credit: REUTERS)
Letters
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Weak proposal
S. Daniel Abraham’s proposal for peace in our land (“Only way for Israel to get peace is to make peace,” Comment & Opinion, March 13) is contradictory to both logic and history. It argues that peace will come if Israel just speaks to Arab leaders in Ramallah and offers them land to build their state.
The following reasons indicate the proposal’s weakness: 1. The Arab leadership in Ramallah does not want a state. It wants Israel to cease to exist. The war was never about land. (Israel has offered the Arabs almost all of the land captured in 1967, and these proposals were rejected.) The core of the conflict has always been of a religious nature – the Arab argument is that the land cannot be controlled by non-Muslims, so any discussion becomes futile.
2. Abraham’s proposal fails to take into consideration the civil rights of Jews living in Judea, Samaria and half of Jerusalem. Don’t Jews have a right to live and work in this land? If so, it would be immoral, illegal and logically absurd to force them to leave.
3. The proposal would make the 500,000-800,000 Jews living in these areas refugees.
Where would they go? Who would pay for their resettlement? What would happen to the billions of dollars already invested in the infrastructure? We already saw the difficulties Israel experienced in resettling 8,000 Jews living in Gush Katif.
4. Who could guarantee that the Arabs would then be peaceful? We witnessed the results of the withdrawal from both Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Moreover, an Arab state in Judea and Samaria would most likely be followed by the demise of Jordan, with ISIS control over both that land and the new state of Palestine.
5. Abraham’s argument that there will be a Jewish minority in Israel if nothing is done has been shown by demographic experts to be fallacious.
Jews living in Judea and Samaria represent the fastest growing population in all of Israel, including Arab communities in the territories.
There are no easy solutions.
However, a new approach should explore ways of manifesting Jewish sovereignty over all our land that provide rights to all peoples.
ALLAN SIEGEL Efrat
Whoa, Mr. Abraham! You’re going too fast!
Did you ever think of saying that the only way for the Arabs to get peace would be to make peace? What has Israel not done to get peace? We walked out of the security zone in Lebanon, and what did we get? Rockets.
We walked out of Gaza, and what did we get? Rockets.
We signed the Oslo Accords, and what did we get? Suicide bombings. We stopped building in Judea and Samaria because the American president assured us it would bring the Palestinians to the negotiating table.
It did not.
To this day, Palestinian schools do not show Israel as an entity. Hatred of Jews is part and parcel of the school curriculum. Today, far from apologizing for the current wave of terror, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas continues to glorify these acts and pays money given to the PA for infrastructure to families of dead terrorists.
He has added incitement to his arsenal against Israel.
As for “Palestinians [being] better able to raise themselves out of poverty,” they are inundated with dollars and euros, which disappear into private pockets or are used to improve the ability to terrorize Israelis instead of going toward schools, hospitals and roads. They don’t pay bills they owe to Israel.
They weep and wail when they don’t get what they want instead of working toward bettering their lot.
Do you, Mr. Abraham, really believe they want a peace agreement with Israel? Have you not heard their cry that all the Land of Israel is Arab land, and that we, Israel, are the occupiers? Have you not heard that any state the Palestinians get will be judenrein? Have you not heard that the terrorist group Hamas is now more popular than Fatah in the West Bank, and will easily take it over should there be a state? Is that the peace Israel should seek – another Hamas enclave in the very heart of our nation? It seems to me, Mr. Abraham, that you are the model for the sayings “There are none so blind as those who will not see,” and “There are none so deaf as those who refuse to listen.”
EDMUND JONAH Rishon Lezion
Everyone talks of a twostate scenario as the answer to all the world’s problems.
They ignore the fact that there is already a three-state situation: We have Israel, Jordan and the Gaza Strip.
Jordan was created by the British reneging on their commitments and taking 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine to crown a desert chieftain, leaving just 22% for the Jews.
Now we are expected to divide this minuscule remnant and have another irredentist entity imposed upon us. This would add up to four states! We have to be strong and not fold, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wont to do. We have to shout from the rooftops that we are here, and those who don’t like it can leave. We have nowhere else to go! JUDY PRAGER Petah Tikva Not surprised It hardly surprises me that Oxford students found it amusing to hear of the death of Jews (“Oxford students laughed at attacks on Parisian Jews,” March 8). It would be interesting to know what proportion of these students were of the Muslim faith, and how many had no faith at all.
I think their reaction proves the point that knowledge does not necessarily mean you possess intelligence.
RALPH RAINE Ra’anana
He’s mistaken
South African Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein extols our virtues (“Nation of heroes,” Sinai Today, March 4). Since the beginning of October, at least 33 of our people have been killed and 360 injured in what have so far been 192 stabbings, 72 shootings and 39 vehicular attacks – and the rabbi writes that an “extended onslaught of this nature would break the morale and ability to function of any society, and yet Israelis go about their daily lives in fortitude and bravery....”
If, as I believe, Rabbi Goldstein thinks this is something in our favor, he could not be more mistaken.
Yes, we are a society filled with a joy for life and a will to celebrate every part of it, but this is not “the greatest answer to the terrorists.” The answer should be the total destruction of the enemy.
We do not seek the so-called glory of a nation of heroes.
We seek to live our lives free from terrorism and the deaths resultant therefrom, free from the occupation of our land by our enemies. We seek to live without the same countries that abandoned us before, during and after the Holocaust, dictating to us where and how we should live in our sovereign state.
The rabbi, like a vast majority of Jews in the Diaspora, feels such love and gratitude toward us from the safe distance of his gentile host country. This and all the other countries would like nothing better than to see us disappear, having been disappointed by our survival of the Holocaust and our chutzpah of returning to and building our historic land.
PHYLLIS STERN Netanya