DEAR SIR, WHILST I have given up responding to Ray Fleming's anti-Israeli/Semitic ramblings, I cannot let pass a comment made in your Monitor' leader article (MDB June 17th).
You described the following quotation of ex-President Carter as wise words'. The quotation was Palestine statehood could not come at the expense of Israeli security, while Israeli security could not come at the expense of Palestinian statehood.
Sir, these are glib words, but they are not wise words. In fact they are rather stupid and ill-informed words.
Palestine was first created with legally delineated frontiers in 1920 by the League of Nations. The documents regarding its creation clearly and unequivocally state that it was for no other reason than providing a homeland for the Jewish people. There has never in all history been a Muslim Palestine. So in fact, it is the Jewish people who have been robbed of their legal homeland by the Arabs, (together with the aid of a conniving British government), not the other way round. Further, as the League's ruling regarding the frontiers of Palestine have never been officially repealed, all of Israel and Jordan are within its borders. Both King Hussein of Jordan and Yasser Arafat are on record several times as having said that the Jordanians and the Palestinians are one people. This post 1967 idea of a new Palestine' is both legally and morally at fault.
Israel voluntarily handed over Gaza to the Palestinian Arabs as a gesture of goodwill. It was a thriving industrial area when they did so. Now it has been turned into a depressed area for the ordinary civilian population and a terrorist base for Hamas who have indiscriminately fired over 7'000 rockets into Israeli civilian areas, together with hundreds of suicide bombers who have caused many deaths. Hamas, which is far more popular with the West Bank Palestinians than Abu Abass's PLO, has stated a hundred times or more that their over-riding determination is the total elimination of the Zionist Entity' which they will never recognize as the state of Israel.
Thus for Israel to allow the creation of a Hamas-stan' along its borders, putting Tel Aviv and its only international airport within rocket range is too ludicrous for serious thought. Israel will never sacrifice its security and allow such a state regardless of what former President Carter or current President Obama of anyone else may wish. That will have to wait until Hamas and all Israel's surrounding neighbour states recognize its legal existence and start to act in a civilized manner towards it.
Yours truly, David Lee