Secretary Baker’s Mideast Visit

Your editorial was both unfair and inaccurate in stating that “the basis of the Arab-Israel conflict is the refusal of most Arab regimes to accept Israel’s presence.”

Only if the history of the region began in 1948 with both the Jews and the Arabs in place, both with equal claim to the region, would such an argument approach accuracy. Even then it ignores the fact that the Palestine Liberation Organization itself has been a consistent proponent of a two-state solution to the conflict in contrast to Israel, which has repeatedly been the party refusing to negotiate such a solution. Israel has been the holdout on implementing a solution that harks back to the very 1948 solution that it bases its independence upon.

Aside from this, the history of the conflict does not begin in 1948. From the beginning, Zionism as a program intent upon establishing not only a “homeland” but a land whose predominate culture was Jewish was met with resistance by the inhabitants.

One does not have to be anti-Semitic to see in this an Israeli refusal to accept the Palestinian inhabitants presence as the more correct cause of the original and ongoing conflict. It is Israel that needs to show itself flexible enough to negotiate a two-state solution similar to the 1948 mandate.

JIM GLASER, Monrovia