Letter: Response to falsehoods

Response to falsehoods

Cathleen Krahe’s latest anti-Israel screed is filled with her usual omissions, half-truths and outright falsehoods.

First, she makes it appear as if Jews suddenly appeared in Palestine in 1948, when in fact Jews have lived there for thousands of years. When the U.N. partitioned, what was then Palestine the Jews accepted the division. The Arabs did not, and five Arab armies attacked with the hope of driving the Israelis into the sea. They failed, and Israel ended up with more territory than before. It’s true that Arabs voluntarily left, or were pushed out, but the same number of Jews left or were thrown out of most Muslim countries; countries where they had lived for centuries. Israel settled and absorbed Jewish refugees into their society. The Arabs didn’t, and it appears that they never will. Jewish refugees lost their houses and lands also but are now citizens of a thriving first-world country.

Her statistics on land percentages are bogus, too. British mandated Palestine was present-day Israel, the West bank and Jordan, so her 77-percent figure is total fantasy.

Now to 1967: Nasser, the then dictator of Egypt threw out the U.N. peacekeepers patrolling the Sinai, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, moved hundreds of thousands of troops to Israel’s borders and threatened all-out war. So, yes, the Israelis, rather than wait for war to come to them, destroyed the Egyptian airforce on the ground and the war was effectively won in one morning. Context is everything, but Krahe has only her bias and hate to lean on.

Israel has made peace with Egypt, returning all of the Sinai. Krahe also has made peace with Jordan. Hopefully most of the settlements will be removed and peace can be made with the Palestinians, as well, but it’s tough when so many of them want a Palestine “from the river to the sea”, which translates to no Israel.

Jerry Epstein

Philadelphia/Aspen