As registered Democrats and life-long supporters of the state of Israel, we write to express our disappointment with President’s Obama’s recent address on the Middle East.
While there was much that we found commendable in the President’s speech, particularly his embrace of popular democratic movements in Arab countries and his call for Muslims to respect the rights of both religious minorities and women, we take strong exception to President Obama’s position that peace negotiations between Israel and the Arabs should be premised on Israel returning to its 1967 lines.
It is unrealistic in the extreme to expect Israel to return to the indefensible armistice lines of 1949, and we are unaware of any prior U.S. president having publicly announced his own view as to what the borders of a hypothetical two-state solution should be rather than leaving the matter to be determined by the negotiating parties themselves.
Furthermore, Israeli peace negotiations are already burdened by fantastical demands which Israel cannot possibly satisfy, such as the so-called “right of return” of millions of Arabs into Israel proper; President Obama does no favors to either side when he encourages Arabs to pursue a similarly unrealizable territorial goal.
To make matters worse, the President’s speech failed to follow the usual practice of acknowledging that Israel is the ancient home of the Jewish people, not simply their current “homeland.”
This seemingly deliberate omission not only robs Israel of its historical claim to the land on which it sits, but also feeds into continuing Arab efforts to rewrite the Jews out of the history of the region.
Anna and Darren Kaplan
Great Neck
