Violence in Gaza Settlements
Regarding the editorial “Arafat’s Folly: Is It Over at Last?” (April 12), it is easy to advise Israel to give stronger consideration to whether the Gaza settlements are really in its best national interests. However, a total pullout of all Israeli settlements in Gaza, as in the West Bank or the Golan, will make no real difference in the long run.
The Palestinian Arabs, with the support of surrounding Arab states, have made their long-range plans perfectly clear; they are to “drive all the Jews into the sea and to ‘take back’ all of the ‘Zionist entity.”’
Many influential Arab political and religious leaders, including Yasser Arafat, have advocated in their speeches and writings that their present policy of accepting some Jewish presence in Israel is only until the Arabs gain sufficient strength to drive all the Israelis out. The West Bank especially is to be used as a steppingstone for the Arab takeover of all of Israel.
There will be no peace in the Middle East until the Arab forces admit openly and in their government statements and documents that the Israeli Jews have the right to live in peace in Israel, just as the Israelis have accepted the rights of Arabs to live in peace in the surrounding Arab states. GABE GORDON San Juan Capistrano
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Now that The Times has again endorsed Israel’s position on violence in the Gaza Strip in both news stories and editorial opinion, suggesting in the process that it takes a long time to learn some things, perhaps it is a good time for its own editors to consider learning a simple message a group of us heard from both Israelis and Palestinians on a recent trip to Israel and the occupied territories: Peace is possible only when there is justice for Palestinians and security for Israelis.
Readers of The Times during April will find that the Israeli quest for security has been well-documented, including a piece on its internal security chief, on its military strikes against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and negotiations with Syria, and even a little bit on its spy satellite.
But where are the parallel reports on the issue of justice for Palestinians? Where are the stories that tell of the human-rights violations, the arbitrary detentions and arrests, the confiscation of land, the political and economic hardships that Israel imposes not only on its own Arab citizens but especially the Palestinians who live under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza? Where, for example, are the stories of the Jahalin Bedouin whose homes are threatened by the expansion of the Ma’ale Adummim settlement, well east of the Green Line? Where are the stories of Palestinian citrus growers whose fruit is rotting on the trees because Israel will not permit it to be exported? Where are the stories of justice?
Even more, where is the justice in reporting sympathetically the deaths of Israeli soldiers and a Jewish-American college student without mentioning the fact that they were en route to settlements illegally built in occupied territory?
To be sure, one regrets any loss of life, but where is the sympathy--and justice--for the 700,000-plus Palestinians who make up 99.8% of the Gaza Strip’s population? What is just about the Israel’s continued occupation of 40% of the land in the Gaza Strip, worked by a mere 4,500 armed settlers defended by the Israel Defense Forces? Indeed, what is just about Israel’s developing beach resorts in such locations?
ROD PARROTT
Claremont