Hassan Has It Wrong

A letter (*) I had published in Berkley elicited two responses:

Letters Regarding Israel-Palestine
Thursday July 23, 2009
SETTLER MOVEMENT

Editors, Daily Planet:

I am writing in response to Yisrael Medad’s July 16 letter to the editor. I am thrilled to hear Mr. Medad is writing from Israel. He should be able to go to B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, (www.btselem.org for those not in Palestine/Israel) which is located in Jerusalem. He will find that the effort to expand Jewish presence on territory the Palestinians had claimed for their future state is exactly what the goal of the settler movement in the early 1990s was.

Tracie De Angelis Salim

•

ISRAEL’S JEWISH COLONIES

Editors, Daily Planet:

Yisrael Medad defends the colonial Jewish settlements by writing from Israel that they are built “within the legally recognized community area.” That is exactly the problem. Israel’s apartheid laws consider the theft of Palestinian lands to build Jewish colonies “legal.”

Not long after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Ariel Sharon, later an Israeli prime minister, exhorted his followers to “move, run, [and] grab more hills, expand the territory. Everything that is grabbed will remain in our hands. Everything we don’t grab will be in their hands.”

The same Sharon wrote In 1973, “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years, neither the United Nations, nor the U.S.A, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”

People who defend Israel’s colonial settlements under any pretext have no shame. Equally shameful is that the American taxpayer, unknowingly for the most part, subsidizes these colonies by billions of dollars of direct and indirect assistance while many Americans are without healthcare, adequate education or proper infra structure.

Hassan Fouda
Board Director, Israeli Committee Against House Demolition
(ICAHDUSA.org)
Kensington

Of course, I was thrilled that Tracie was thrilled. I am glad I was able to give Tracie a thrill.

As for Hassan, he has it all wrong.

In writing of "Israel’s apartheid laws", he seems unable to grasp that Jews and Arabs should have an equal right to live in the area of the former Palestine Mandate, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. However, whereas Arabs live in Israel, go to universities there, play in the national soccer league, appear together with a Jew at the Eurovision competition and vote for Arab parties and be elected to Israel's parliament, Jews are told they can't live in what is supposed to be this new "Palestine" state. And during the earlier 1948-1967 period, Arab terror of the fedayeen and the PLO, founded in 1964, sought to prevent Jews from living in the state of Israel before it began administering additional territories gained in defending itself from Arab aggression in the year 1967.

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(*)

SETTLEMENTS

Editors, Daily Planet:

Tracie De Angelis Salim claims that “Settlers began building settlement outposts in the early 1990s in an effort to expand Jewish presence on territory the Palestinians claim for part of a future state. These settlers had no government sanction” (“The Settlements Are the Real Barrier,” July 9). This is incorrect.

The so-called outposts were built on land properly zoned and registered within the boundaries of existing communities. The process accelerated when the Barak government agreed to redefine the limits of the communities by agreeing to Arafat’s demand that the Palestinian Authority could encroach as close as 50 meters from the last house rather than the previous arrangement. Faced with this alteration, outposts were set up as far away from the built-up area but within the legally recognized community area.

Yisrael Medad
Israel

And if you're wondering what the readers of this journal think on the issue, try this letter from July 16:

NOT SO COMPLEX

Editors, Daily Planet:

In response to Rabbi Andrea Berlin’s letter to the editor:

Dear Rabbi, I need to inform you that the Israeli-Palestinian situation is not complex at all. On one side are a people who had prospered in their orchards and towns for more than 1,000 years, without invading and murdering their neighbors. On the other side are violent and criminal ideologues, who used the deaths of six million Jews in World War II death camps (where another six million gypsies, the retarded, disabled and others from at least six national populations also died) for their justification to enact the Jewish National Fund plan for invading Palestine in 1948. The Irgun and Lehi soldiers began the slaughter of civilians and the destruction of towns and orchards in 1948, and those who continue to murder civilians and destroy others property today are criminals and terrorists. Ninety-five percent of the world’s adult population realizes that the State of Israel treats the defenseless Palestinian population with the same contemptuous zeal that the German SS and Gestapo treated European Jewry in World War II. Fanatics with a cause, and cowards with power, attacking defenseless women and children. Theodore Hertz, the founder of Zionism, articulated the policy: “Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor (Palestinians) must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” Not so complex, Rabbi, ya think?

Mark A. Wetzel