Letter: On “Seeking Peace with a Dysfunctional ‘Family’”

Dear editor:

Mostafa Rajael, Sylvia Santana, and Najla el-Mangoush are certainly deserving of our praise and our prayers. (Seeking Peace with a Dysfunctional ‘Family’ Boulder Jewish News September 7, 2023.) Each of them deserves our praise for treating Israel as a regular country (whose athletes are worthy contestants in international competition, which is a place worthy of a visit by Congressional delegations from the US, and which is a country happy to offer aid to its neighbor states in the Middle East and North Africa, and which can benefit from having friendly neighbors). These individuals deserve our prayers that they should not suffer for their courageous defiance of anti-Israel dictates proclaiming that Zionism is so despicable that no decent person should have any contact whatsoever with Israelis.

Israel is not perfect (what country is?). But, in the brief seventy-five years of the existence of the modern State of Israel, the country has gone from food rationing to being the Start-Up Nation, developing very effective means of protecting its people from enemies who seek to annihilate them, and sharing its advances in water management, agriculture, communication, and disaster response with the world. Like Bruce Ticker, I hope more people will reject the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda spewed by Israel’s enemies and start advocating for full acceptance of the nation-state of the Jews by all other nations on this Earth.

Toby F. Block
Atlanta, GA