Responding to a WashPost Letter-to-the-Editor

The Washington Post has a letter-to-the-editor this morning:

The next time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announces he is willing and ready to negotiate a two-state solution with the Palestinians, I hope readers will remember what he has just done. In a speech last week, he said that his Likud party “is ‘committed to settlement in the Land of Israel,’ a nod to a growing constituency of settlers and their supporters in the party’s ranks” [“Netanyahu strengthens his base within Likud,” news story, Feb. 2]. According to The Post’s coverage, his government also “approved new housing subsidies and loans for people who move to more than 500 communities in designated ‘national priority areas,’ including 70 West Bank settlements.”

The meaning of these moves is clear. Mr. Netanyahu and his party have no intention of stopping the growth of settlements in the West Bank, no matter what he might pronounce to be seen as a man of peace and reconciliation. The “peace talks” that Israeli leaders say they support are a farce, and the Palestinians realize that.

Joanne Heisel, Columbia

I left this comment there:

I don't understand JHeisel's thinking. The residency of Jews in the territory some people wish that a "Palestinian" state be established somehow is wrong, part of a farce, unhelpful to peace or reconciliation. If that is her conceptualization of a resolution of the conflict the Arabs began in 1920 by launching a series of riots and violent attacks agaist Jews during the Mandate Period, should the reverse also be true: that the residency of Arabs in "settlements" in the state of Israel is somehow wrong and intrusive and not assisting reconciliation and peace? Or can it be that she does not recognize any historic, religious, cultural or legal right the Jewish people possesses - and which was recognized by eh League of Nations at the time - to reconstitute our national home in that territory at all? If she does, then just as Arabs reside in Jerusalem, Beer-Sheba, Acre, Rahat and Um Al-Fahm, Jews can and should live in Shiloh, Hebron and Bet-El - and even in Rabat-Ammon, for that matter. No?

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