Letter: “Memo to Vermont Victim”

Dear Letter to the Editor:

I agree with Bruce Ticker – no Arab should be attacked for walking in public while wearing a keffiyah, just has no Jew should be attacked for wearing a Magen David in class. Yet, some good make come from demonstrators who interfere with Christmas tree lightings and denounce American support of Israel. Such actions may help non-Jewish Americans to see that the demonstrators are Islamist supremicists who wish to impose their religion on the world. Their actions are not, by any means, the result of any Israeli “anti-Muslim” policy, but simply their refusal to accept  Jews’ having sovereignty in even a tiny portion of the Middle East (where, the Islamists feel, only Muslims should rule).

The seeds of the Arab-Israeli conflict (now the Israel-Palestinian conflict) go back a long way. In the 1940’s, Arab chose to use violence to prevent the establishment of a modern Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland instead of helping the Arabs of Palestine prepare for the autonomy offered them by the UN Partition Plan. This saw the creation of two refugee populations. Between 400,000 and 700,000 Arabs fled Palestine and 1,000,000 Mizrachi Jews were subsequently driven from their homes in the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Some of the Mizrachim emigrated to France or the US, but Israel absorbed and uplifted 800,000 of them in the first three decades following 1948. Their descendants comprise the majority of Israel’s current Jewish population. In contrast, the Arab League told its member nations to deny citizenship to the Arabs who’d fled and to their descendants. There are now 6,000,000 Palestine refugees under the aegis of UNRWA, a UN agency created solely to deal with this refugee population. It has not resettled a single person and, in fact, has become an instrument of Hamas’ efforts to dismantle the nation-state of the Jews. BREAKING: UNRWA EXPOSED with support for Hamas; IDF’s Relentless Operations | TBN Israel (youtube.com)

Hamas has threatened to inflict more October 7 atrocities on Israel’s people. The only way Israel can prevent that from happening is by destroying Hamas. True seekers of peace should be calling on Hamas to free the hostages and surrender. Only then can the rebuilding of Gaza begin.

Toby F. Block
Atlanta, GA