Follow-up Letters to Tom Segev

Okay, so my letter didn't get in. Here it is:-

Why should Tom Segev limit his query of what could have happened if "Israel Had Turned Back?" (June 5) to the year 1967?

Could we not ask what would have happened had the Arabs accepted the territorial compromise plan of the United Nations in 1947? And would the answer be no refugees, on either side; no establishment of the PLO and its terror apparatus; no denial of Jewish rights to visit their holy sites in Jerusalem until the city was united, again, in 1967 but rather the beginnings of peace?

These did, though:-

The Six-Day War, Plus 40 Years

To the Editor:

Tom Segev poses some interesting “what if” questions in connection with Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the Six-Day War in 1967 (“What if Israel Had Turned Back?,” Op-Ed, June 5). Here are some additional “what ifs” that deserve equal consideration:

What if the Arabs had accepted the United Nations partition plan of 1947, dividing the remainder of mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state? What if in the aftermath of Israel’s 1948 war of independence the Arab states had assimilated the refugees into their societies, rather than leave them to fester in refugee camps for generations?

What if the Arabs had created a Palestinian state in the West Bank between 1948 and 1967, when it was held by Jordan? What if Jordan had heeded Israel’s pleas at the outbreak of the Six-Day War and not joined the attack?

What if the Palestinians had accepted the “Clinton parameters” in late 2000, calling for the creation of a Palestinian state on more than 90 percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza and with East Jerusalem as its capital? What if in the wake of Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 the Palestinians had sought to create a viable society rather than a launching pad for rockets aimed at Israel?

And what if the Saudi peace proposal was not premised on the “right of return” of Palestinians into pre-1967 Israel?

Rather than young Israelis questioning why their parents didn’t turn back in 1967, young Palestinians should be asking why, at every opportunity, their parents have chosen conflict over compromise.

Gregg M. Mashberg
New Rochelle, N.Y., June 5, 2007

•


To the Editor:

The major obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians is not Israel’s control of East Jerusalem, despite what Tom Segev writes. There is no peace today in the region because of Hamas’s firing Qassam rockets into the south of Israel and the continued threat of Hezbollah’s launching rockets into the north, as it did all last summer.

This, in conjunction with weak Palestinian leadership and the continued teaching of anti-Israel propaganda in the Palestinian school system, contributes largely to the complete lack of even a vision for a peaceful co-existence.

Stuart Pilichowski
Mevaseret Zion, Israel, June 5, 2007

•

To the Editor:

Tom Segev argues that, although “some kind of retaliation” by Israel against Jordan’s June 1967 attack was justified, it should have stopped short of taking East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Mr. Segev tells us that in January 1967, Israel’s leaders concluded that it would not be in the country’s interest to occupy those areas. That’s hardly surprising, since doing so then would have meant initiating an aggressive war against what appeared to be a relatively moderate Arab state.

But in June, King Hussein attacked Israel, ignoring the pleas of its leaders to stay out of the fighting. Had it turned out differently, the war Jordan entered would have been one of extermination, as evidenced by the blood-curdling Arab calls that preceded it for the destruction of Israel and the death of the Jews.

Israel’s only possible response to such aggression was to destroy Jordan’s capacity to pose a future threat; to suggest that it could or should have done so without achieving borders with some defensive depth ignores reality.

Howard F. Jaeckel
New York, June 5, 2007