Toronto, July 26, 2000

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Letters

Four letters on Israel’s occupation of Palestine 

War and peace

By Hermann Janzen

Toronto — What a breath of fresh air James Ron’s article (For Peace’s Sake, Israel Must Return All Land — July 25) is! What a balm of sanity! It’s a pity that the moral spokesmen of the Jewish people are so slow to lend their voices to the cause of justice for the Palestinian people. Eli [sic] Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal and other prominent wise men remain stuck in a one-way moral universe. All the goods flow to them, none of the obligations to make amends. The automatic backing of the U.S. for Israel has fed this moral blindness for many years. It is also turning the leader of the free world into a hypocritical hegemonist.

 

By Ismail Zayid
President,
Canada Palestine Association

Halifax — James Ron, an Israeli intellectual, must be applauded for his courage and integrity. Simply put, Israel has committed enough dispossession and devastation against the Palestinian people. All that is required now is for Israel to put an end to its continuing defiance of international law and to comply with repeated UN and Security Council resolutions, so that peace and security is secured in the Middle East for all.

 

By Alex Hacker

Toronto — James Ron states that “During [the 1948] conflict, Jewish soldiers forced or encouraged some 750,000 Palestinians to flee their homes.”

I was a soldier in the Israeli army in 1948, having arrived there in 1947. I served on all major fronts, north and south. Had there been any organized, massive Israeli action that by the remotest stretch of the imagination could have been compared to “ethnic cleansing,” as claimed by Mr. Ron, I would have known about it. There was no ethnic cleansing. There were some isolated incidents perpetrated mostly by the eventually outlawed rightist Irgun group, which was disarmed by the army at the beginning of the conflict.

The main cause for the Arab exodus was the shrill propaganda from the Arab League urging the Arabs to leave, promising an early return, following the victorious Arab armies that planned to annihilate Israel. These Arab armies invaded Israel contrary to the UN resolution that partitioned Palestine and created Israel.

I am not a Zionist, and I favour a peace built on mutual compromise; nevertheless, Mr. Ron’s gross distortion of history needed correction.

 

By Nancy Lev

Thornhill, Ont. — Israeli expatriate James Ron begins his article by stating categorically: “We took their land. The occupied territories are not Israel’s to keep.” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak is being particularly generous in his willingness to turn over almost all of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority. He, however, is not doing so because Israel “took their land.” Before the 1967 war, Israel pleaded with Jordan to stay out of the conflict, but King Hussein decided otherwise. It was by virtue of Jordan’s entry into that war and the ensuing battles that Israel came into possession of the West Bank. Saying “we took their land” is nothing but historical fallacy.