Stone: Israel is to blame
I am a Jewish resident of Carbondale.
Israel is to blame for this present Mideast crisis. It is Israel’s ongoing terrorism and evil doings from the very beginning that spawned the evil of Hamas.
After the May 1948 war, Israel occupied the western half of the land allotted to the Palestinians. They promised to give it back to the Palestinians if admitted to the UN. They never did, and now the West Bank comprises 22% of historic Palestine rather than the 45% allotted to them.
Prior to Israel declaring statehood in May 1948, Israeli forces drove out 300,000 Palestinians from lands the United Nations had designated for the Palestinians. Prior to 1948, Haifa was an Arab village of 70,000. Israel drove out almost all. In July 1948, the remaining 3,500 were moved out and packed into ghettos.
According to Wikipedia, in April 1948, Jewish forces went into the Arab village of Deir Yassin, murdering over 100 Palestinians, men, women, and children. A number of Palestinian prisoners were executed, some after being paraded in West Jerusalem, where they were jeered, spat at, stoned, looted, and eventually murdered.
In October 1953, an Arab in the West Bank killed 3 Israelis. In retaliation, Ariel Sharon, the future prime minister of Israel, led Israeli forces into the West Bank town of Qibya, destroying schools and houses, killing innocent men, woman, and children. In Nuremberg trials after WWII, Nazis were jailed or executed for similar retributive actions.
Israel knows that eliminating Hamas will not change anything. They know that their policies will spawn another generation of their likes. Then the Israelis will still have an excuse for continuing their displacement and killings of the Palestinians in the West Bank and the appropriation of their land.
Robert Stone
Carbondale
