Loan Guarantees to Israel

Conrad’s cartoon (of Shamir and with the caption) “Woody Guthrie he ain’t” (Jan. 27) is superficially witty and depressingly biased. Conrad ignores the fact that Arabs have been singing Shamir’s punitive song ever since their armies first converged on the newly created state of Israel.

Still, the cartoon might serve to point out an almost forgotten truth: Guthrie’s “land belongs to you and me” largely because it was snatched from its original indigenous populations by chicanery, treachery, and brutality. Shamir, whatever one thinks of him, at least can point to original Jewish possession of the Land of Israel in antiquity and to a continuing Jewish presence there from the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70 through the intervening centuries of the Diaspora.

ALAN D. ISLER

New York