Editor,
Richard Forer’s letter published in Tuesday’s Daily Lobo, ”Glossing over history is bad, Israel never content,” is dumbed-down anti-Semitism at its best. And before anyone says the author is “Jewish,” what does that mean? Does being born into a religion, ethnicity or culture mean anything except that you were born into it? Being Jewish certainly doesn’t excuse one from being ignorant, nor does it excuse one from being an anti-Semite.
Forer speaks of documented history. Funnily enough, there is a lot of documented history to go around. In 1917 the Balfour Declaration provided the stateless exiled Jewish people (the majority of Jews were ethnically cleansed by the Roman Empire from the land of Israel in the year 135, when Israel — then called Judea — was renamed “Palestine”) an official return to their homeland, joining the existing Jewish community that had been there for millennia. That’s documented. The Declaration was also documented in the Sèvres Peace Treaty with the Ottoman Empire. The League of Nations, which preceded the United Nations, and whose mandates and resolutions are equally binding, further endorsed it in the Declaration at San Remo in 1920. That declaration and Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations were the basic documents upon which the British Mandate for Palestine was constructed. That is documented.
It is also documented that the British offered close to 90 percent of western Palestine (eastern Palestine had already become “Transjordan” later renamed to simply Jordan) to the Arabs and the remaining crumbs to the Jews. Guess what? The Jews accepted this and the Arabs rejected it — as they would later do to any division of the land. Perhaps it’s really the Arab leadership that was and is, as Forer accused Israel, “never content”?
In 1947 the Arabs received the bulk of the fertile land areas while the Jews received most of the desert and a much smaller amount of fertile land. Nonetheless the Jews accepted this and the Arabs did not. Less than 3 years after Nazi Germany had committed the Holocaust and murdered 75 percent of the European Jewish population, Arab leaders and media called for pushing the “Jews into the sea.”
Lastly, over the years the UN has become an increasingly political tool that bends to the whims of the superpowers and to the oil powers who are largely Arab and Muslim. It is not for nothing that Israel has been the target of more UN resolutions than Syria, Iran, North Korea, Rwanda, Serbia-Croatia, China, Mynamar, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world combined. A ratio of 56 Muslim nations to 1 Jewish nation, and of 22 Arab nations to 1 Jewish nation is hard to overcome. Maybe Forer should mention those facts if he wants to appear unbiased.
Israel, a tiny country smaller than New Jersey surrounded by regimes that murder hundreds of thousands of their own, and are in a state of war with Israel simply because it is non Muslim, must be secure. If the day comes when the male Arab Muslim world at large accepts all others, all minorities and all genders — such as the Kurds, the Berbers, Black Africans, Egyptian Coptic Christians, Lebanese Maronites, and more — as equals, then Israel will no longer be threatened because the Arabs in Judea and Samaria will also accept the Jews in their own homeland. Then there will be true peace, not the misdiagnosis of peace that we have today.
Jacob Chalet
Daily Lobo reader
