Mr. Sanford J. Kowan takes me to task (Feb. 17) for defending Israel’s right to build homes on Israeli land, homes which leftists like him snidely and erroneously continue to call “illegal settlements.”
In fact, it is land that Israel won in the 1967 Six-Day War against the ancient regimes of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, with the Arab states going down to thundering defeat to a state not yet 20 years old.
The history of Jewish sovereignty over Israeli land –– including Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) –– is too lengthy for a letter to the editor, but suffice it to say it has been uninterrupted since before the Common Era.
It is useful to remember that when the Arabs controlled Judea and Samaria from 1948 to 1967, not one person on earth suggested that the land belonged to the people who arch-terrorist Yasir Arafat called Palestinians.
In fact, Arab pogroms and the wanton slaughter of Jews in Judea and Samaria were routine.
I’m sure Mr. Kowan knows of, but chooses to ignore, the 89-page Levy Report of 2012, authored by a three-member committee headed by former Israeli Supreme Court justice Edmund Levy, on the legal status of building in Judea and Samaria, which concluded that the Israeli settlements are legal under international law.
Mr. Kowan then recites the tired talking points and buzzwords that animate leftist circles: Israeli “religious extremists,” “hard-right Prime Minister,” the specter of Israeli “apartheid,” and what I hope is the dead-in-the-water fantasy of a “two-state solution,” and of course a de rigueur screed against President Trump.
Not one single Israeli nor one single room in one single apartment in Judea and Samaria account for the failure of peace initiatives since 1948.
That failure belongs both to cowardly, kick-the-can-down-the-road American and Israeli politicians who have consistently failed to identify the most glaring obstacle to peace, and the obstacle itself.
That obstacle is the Arabs who to this day refuse to remove the “mission statements” from their charters that vow to remove (i.e., kill) all Jews from the entire Middle East, who state almost daily that they will never accept a Jewish state in their midst, who reward suicide bombers with streets named after them and generous stipends for their families, and who depend on apologists like Mr. Kowan to plead their case and defend the indefensible.
Pathetic.
Joan Swirsky
Great Neck
