Letters to the Editor | Details of Israel-Palestine conflict inaccurate

Ross Weingarten’s description of the current negotiations between Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah (02.15.07 edition of The Miscellany News) is quite accurate. However, his history is in some places ill-informed, and the sweeping judgments he makes based on this history need be addressed.

Weingarten calls Israel’s creation “a misguided idea” and says that post-Holocaust “leaders failed to see that simply importing a group of people into a place where a population already existed was not going to work.” But Jews were not “imported” to Israel; they fought desperately to go there, long before and after the Holocaust, and many were prevented from immigrating by the very leaders Weingarten claims sent them. There have been Jews in Israel continuously for millennia, and hundreds of thousands more immigrated to Israel to escape persecution starting around 1900. When the British mandate over Palestine ended in 1947, the Palestinians rejected a U.N. partition plan and the two sides went to war, with five other Arab nations fighting on the Palestinian’s side against the Jews. The state of Israel emerged.

Weingarten states that “The process of shutting native Palestinians out of their land, which has happened for decades, is simply wrong.” But given his correct assertion that there has been violence ever since (and before) the creation of Israel, one wonders how and when he thinks the Palestinians should have been allowed to return.

Weingarten’s later prescription is accurate: the only solution, which has become accepted by most Israelis, is a Palestinian state consisting of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But when he says that the Israeli government must remove its Jewish settlers from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and cede control to the Palestinians, Weingarten seems unaware of the fact that in 2005, Israel completely withdrew from the Gaza Strip. The withdrawal was followed by an unending barrage of missiles fired from Gaza into Israel, the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, and the election of Hamas, which vows to destroy Israel. Despite this, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert asserted a plan to pull out of the West Bank, too, within the next decade. Israel should speed this up.

However, it is irresponsible to prescribe only what Israel should do. The Palestinians must renounce the use of violence, and their new Palestinian government must remove the “destruction of Israel” as one of its central tenets. Palestinians must give up the “right of return” to Israel, which Israelis see as synonymous with the end of the Jewish state. Arafat’s refusal to do so, even for an Israeli offer of an autonomous Palestinian state in over 95 percent of the occupied territories and access to the holy sites, has led even famously anti-Zionist historian Benny Morris to harshly reproach the Palestinians.

Both sides have to stop playing a zero-sum game and accept the necessity of compromise. Israel must again offer, and the Palestinians must this time accept, a state comprised of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There are no other options for peace.
—Danny Kadishson ’09