Needs Repeating

A letter writer, one Michael F. Brown of Takoma Park, Md., who was a former executive director of Partners for Peace, had these two sentences published in the New York Times today:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Bush have arrogated to themselves the right to negotiate away Palestinian land. Past colonial powers did precisely the same.

Pardon me, sir. This is the land of the Jewish people, their national patrimony. The territory was intended to be where the Jewish state was to be reestablished.

And then the Arabs, who only arrived there in 638 CE (2500 years after the Jews) as a conquering force and were dislodged as a sovereign power by the Crusaders, etc. and et al., initiated violence and refused all attempts at compromise, negotiation and understanding.