Double Standards in Mideast

Re “Roots of Mideast Crisis Span the Globe,” Commentary, March 26: Mohammad Tarbush is wrong when he calls the idea that “Judaism is a nationality as well as a religion” an “anachronistic Zionist idea.” It is, rather, a fundamental truth about the Jewish people, many of whom are nonbelievers.

Particularly in the 20th century, Jews have been defined as persecuted not by their religious beliefs but by their ethnicity. Ironically, it is the Palestinians who are clearly not a people.

They are, in fact, indistinguishable in culture, religion, language, cuisine, dress, appearance, etc., from Jordanians and other neighboring Arabs. Their “peoplehood” is an artificial creation cynically invented for political purposes.

Even if one accepts that a Palestinian national identity is now a fact, one may ask how long their struggle to return to their homeland will remain a just cause. I am sure that Tarbush would argue that the Palestinians will never give up their claims to their former homes. In that case, why deny the Jews the right to return to their homeland after only 2,000 years of exile? That is the real double standard in the Middle East.

Morris Schorr

Woodland Hills

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The history of the Palestinian debacle has been grossly and maliciously distorted in the Arab world. First, in September 1972, King Hussein of Jordan conducted a war of extermination against the Palestinians, forcing Arafat, the PLO and numerous ordinary Palestinians to flee into neighboring Lebanon.

From the creation of the Hashemite family Kingdom of Transjordan by the British in the aftermath of World War I, to 1967, Jordan owned the West Bank. Not one Israeli settlement or one Israeli citizen existed on that land during that period. Why was no Palestinian state created by the Hashemites and why was the Arab world not outraged by the Jordanian occupation of historic Palestine?

Second, during Israel’s war in Lebanon in the early 1980s, the Syrian-sponsored Palestinian Amal militias waged war on Arafat and the PLO, killing hundreds of their fellow Palestinians in the cause of Greater Syria. To this day, Syrian troops occupy Lebanon’s Bekka Valley and control the Lebanese government. Where’s the outrage in the Arab world over that double injustice?

Leopold Rosenfeld

Beverly Hills

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How very typical of Tarbush to assign the blame for the crisis in the Middle East to everyone except the Arabs. It’s the fault of those horrid British who assigned a sliver of land to the Jews in 1917, and the awful French who “promoted illegal immigration,” and Germany and Russia and European and American intellectuals, etc., ad nauseam.

In the process, Tarbush denies a Jewish national identity, assigns a historical nationality to the Palestinians, who never had such an identity until 1967, and in general plays fast and loose with both morality and history. He ignores the 1920s Arab pre-statehood pogroms, the massive expulsions of Jews from Arab countries and the 54 years of Arab military attacks.

By playing the perennial victim and by using outright prevarications to prove his supposed victimhood, Tarbush may assuage some inner pathology, but he does the Palestinian cause, which is badly in need of self-examination, no good whatsoever.

Herb Schiff

Culver City

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Crown Prince Abdullah’s initiative fell short of reckoning the Palestinian catastrophe. Predictably, it will gain support in the Arab summit in Beirut, but it will fail to materialize into real success.

A peace plan in the Middle East would work only when the United States and the rest of the international community pressure the Israelis and the Palestinians equally into implementing the United Nations resolutions and financially compensate the Palestinians for the loss of their properties, lives and all the devastations they’ve endured.

Fawaz Elmasri

Arcadia

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Re “The Only Hope for Peace,” Opinion, March 24: We welcome the underlying sentiment of the coming together of both Arab and Jewish Americans in support of an end to the violence and bloodshed in the Middle East. However, the unified message expressed by George Salem and Marvin Lender fails to mention the Tenet report, which calls for a cessation of violence as the prerequisite for the Mitchell plan.

The bottom line is that Arab American groups need to speak out against all terrorism, including Palestinian suicide bombers. The arsonist and the firefighter are not morally equivalent; neither are the Palestinian suicide bombers and the Israeli response to them.

Abraham H. Foxman

National Director, Anti-Defamation League

New York