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Jeremy Moodey, CEO of the group Embrace the Middle East, notes ("Are we any nearer peace in Israel -Palestine", March 10) that in 1981, American President Ronald Regan launched a peace plan with him quoting Romans 14:19, "So then let us pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding". That earlier effort at negotiating peace between Israel and its enemies, as others yet before and many after, ignore basic fundamentals.
It has been over some nine decades that Israel's enemies have been employing war, terror and even ethnic cleansing (from Hebron, Gaza and other locations they lived in for centuries) to deny Jews their legal and natural right, internationally recognized by the League of Nations in 1922 and later, in 1947, by the United Nations, based to a great degree on Great Britain's Balfour Declaration of 1917. Territorial compromises have been offered in the past.
The Jews lost Transjordan, originally part of the Mandate area, and as we know from the New Testament, Acts 8:1, Judea and Samaria, in current parlance "Palestine", the correct geographical terms, are also very much. [They ignored my error here. It should properly be: ...Judea and Samaria, in current parlance "Palestine", are the correct geographical terms.] Jews accepted the 1947 partition, withdrew from Sinai in 1957 which served as a terror base for the fedayeen, the forerunner of Fatah, again withdrew from Sinai in 1981, offered autonomy in 1979, agreed to a Palestinian Authority in 1993 and in 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu recognized the need for a Palestinian state, albeit demilitarized. None of this has persuaded Mahmoud Abbas and before him, Yassir Arafat, to engage in any worthwhile peace talks.
Given this reality, together with the ever persistent anti-Jewish incitement stemming from official Palestinian Authority outlets, in the media and in school, and from Islamic religious figures, I would suggest to Mr. Moodey that he pay attention to other verses from Romans 14 - "4 Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master[a] that he stands or falls... And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand...10 Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God".
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Thank you for your letter Mr Medad. I have responded to the Church of England Newspaper in the following terms (no idea if they will publish, or draw this exchange to a close):
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Sir
There are so many historical inaccuracies in Yisrael Medad's response to my recent article on the prospects for Middle East peace (letters, 17 March) that it would take at least a page of your newspaper to correct them. Two examples should suffice to demonstrate his historical myopia. If there has been ethnic cleansing in Palestine in modern times, it has not been by Arabs of Jews. Until Jewish immigration became a key issue in the early 1930s, with the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, most Arabs and Jews (who incidentally called themselves Palestinian Jews, so there is nothing "current" about the term) co-existed quite peacefully.
What did constitute ethnic cleansing, as demonstrated by Professor Ilan Pappé of Exeter University and others, was Israel's forcible dispossession and displacement in 1948-1949 of over 750,000 Palestinians, more than half of the Palestinian population at the time. These were not just "casualties of war"; their forced eviction was part of a deliberate strategy described euphemistically by David Ben-Gurion in 1939 as one of "compulsory transfer".
Secondly, Israel's "territorial compromises" since 1947 have been more illusory than real. For example, the 1993 Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority and the fiction of some kind of autonomy for the Palestinians, but this has been rendered meaningless by the introduction of a further 300,000 Jewish settlers into the West Bank, in violation of international law and the Oslo Accords themselves, which enjoined Israel not to "change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations". Mass Jewish settlement has of course changed the status of the West Bank to such an extent that the two-state solution envisaged in the Oslo Accords is now effectively dead.
Mr Medad invokes the Letter to the Romans to support his case, but he overlooks Romans 12:18: "If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone." It is Israel's lack of a true vision for peace, and its desire to grab as much Palestinian land for itself as it can, that has been the main contributor to the current impasse.
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