Editor,
I am surprised that UNM would hire someone as ridiculously blind to the facts as Shlomo Karni, whose letter appeared in Wednesday's issue of the Daily Lobo.
I will base my letter from statistics, as opposed to the desperate clichÇs used by those who still believe in Manifest Destiny.
To start, the 1947 United Nations resolution was never accepted by the Palestinians or their neighbors, but was forced on them. Under the resolution, the Jewish state would be carved out of 55 percent of Palestine - and Israelis subsequently captured 80 percent of the land. The tens of thousands of Palestinians originally on the land became refugees.
Karni writes that Palestinians refuse peace - of course, everyone wants peace. Peace is just a little hard to get when someone else is constantly bulldozing away your homes to make a wall that cuts through about half of the Palestinian districts. That alone shows that the wall is not a defensive measure, but a successful attempt to annex more land.
The wall doesn't go around Jewish settlements, but instead zigzags through the West Bank. For the Palestinians, this results in the loss of land, water, property and other resources that provide for their basic existence.
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The 25-foot wall not only goes through dozens of communities, but also has a 230- to 330-foot buffer zone, which means that anything within that range has to be bulldozed to make room for trenches, roads, razor wire, cameras and trace paths. Palestinian towns near the wall have become isolated ghettos where movement in and out is limited, if not impossible, and travel for work, health, education and visiting is extremely difficult.
Yes, this kind of peace is great.
I would simply love to live in a place in which I can't go to school or work because I'm imprisoned by a massive wall. What's that? Someone wants me to leave my home so they can extend their wall? I would be glad to - I'll go to the starving refugee camp right up north. Oh, and my relatives live in that house over there - if they don't cooperate, feel free to blow up the house while they're inside.
Tally them in with the other 3,800 Palestinians that have been killed since September 2000. It's OK if many of them are children - you can always justify it by mentioning the Holocaust and the fact that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.
All the death and destruction of Palestinians' homes don't matter and shouldn't be mentioned by the media - what should be mentioned is how the Palestinians are ungrateful for the trashed bit of Gaza they were given.
Funding for the elected Palestinian government should definitely be cut off. Forget their attempts at peace talks and starve them - that's a good idea.
Let's focus instead on wasting billions of dollars to attack Iran and forget that billions are also used to make our nukes here in Albuquerque and support Israel's wall and military.
Actually, I denounce the bombing of innocent civilians - it's too bad Karni can't say the same.
Ahmad Musleh
UNM student
