Peace for Israel?

[Re: “Back to Israel,” Letters, Sept. 13] Ken Frankel makes the specious argument that Israel cannot be guilty of ethnic cleansing because today there are so many Arabs living in Israel. Isn’t that like a Holocaust-denier saying the extermination project couldn’t have happened because there are so many Jews in this world?

Surely Mr. Frankel is aware that the declared goal of Zionism was to turn a predominantly Arab Palestine into a Jewish state and that the Palestinian inhabitants were thus brutally driven out while Jews from elsewhere took their place. Surely he remembers that to “encourage” Jewish emigration from Arab lands the early Zionists planted bombs in Jewish neighbourhoods of Egypt and Iraq, as documented by Israeli historians. Surely he knows that for 1,000 years before the creation of Israel, countless Jewish communities co-existed peacefully alongside their Muslim brethren.

Israel’s creation changed all that. The Arabs of Palestine—who were promised independence by the British and even fought alongside them against the Ottoman empire—naturally rejected the partition of their homeland proposed in 1947 by the United Nations. They were rightly outraged at the breathless hypocrisy of the West—Canada included—that callously closed its borders to Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich while magnanimously voting to dismember Palestine to create a Jewish state.

Today, the complicity of corrupt Arab regimes coupled with the support of Washington enables Israel to continue the ethnic cleansing and colonization of Palestine. But this process cannot continue forever. Palestinians will not disappear, nor will they accept to always live as animals in the open-air prison of Gaza or as third-class citizens in the Bantustans of the West Bank. One day, Jews, Christians, Muslims and atheists there will live peacefully alongside each other as equals, just like they do here in Canada. Is that such a terrible thing, Mr. Frankel?

>> Shirley Groves

I was recently reading a yearbook about the events of 1952 and I discovered an interesting article about a United Nations report of that year. It reads as follows: “The Israeli government made an agreement with the United Nations Palestine Conciliation Commission to pay Arab refugees an initial $2,800,000 out of accounts frozen in Israel. This step was not conditioned by any similar act on the part of any Arab nation which had frozen and confiscated the property of Jewish subjects who were forced to take up residence in Israel.”

Fifty-five years later, not much has changed.

>> Barry Merson

Yo, John Dirlik and Ken Frankel, you’ve both got good points. But check it. Things you should know when talking to people about the Palestine-Israeli conflict at parties:

1. It’s a touchy subject around some people so after unleashing this, pro or anti-abortion jokes are fair game!

2. There are at least six major political views on this one. Imagine this: you got some big-ass political building, inside there are these evenly matched conservative and liberal Israelis and occasional Palestinian arguing it out tooth-and-nail. Outside, angry at both sides of the Israeli government, you got the anti-war peace protesters asking for peace at whatever price their lives will fetch.

Outside of them, you got the anti-Zionist protesters, having it up to here with whole thing; they want Israel to stop being a theocracy of any kind, and they want the government to start ignoring the black-clad men from the Zionist church, which is extremely unlikely considering their political and religious influence is a big part of modern Israel.

And then you have a small but loud group of protesters circling the building and making their presence known—the Disband Israel Movement—which wants Israel moved to Morocco, Zanzibar, Madagascar, Alaska, Spain, someplace in Europe. Anywhere Israelis can live in peace and not have to worry about people blowing themselves up on the bus or their daughter doing mandatory military service. And then you have the anti-Israel anti-Palestine people who just don’t like anybody from that part of the world and are sitting at home watching Billy Graham reruns and polishing their double-barrel shotguns.

Some say this, some say that, but what you should say should be informed if you’re coming to bat.

>> John Coy

Greenland not real?

[Re: “Groanland,” Raf Katigbak, Sept. 13] Great stuff. I think Greenland is fake too. The only kind of evidence I’ve seen are drunk Japanese lookalike people in the streets of Copenhagen. They talk weird, look strange and drink a lot. I personally believe that they are leftovers from some kind of government experiment that went wrong in the ’70s and ’80s.

P.S. Every Canadian I’ve met sees him or herself as kind of Danish/European in culture. They are all just a bunch of closet-Europeans (or Danish wannabes), still speaking French to keep up a snazzy fancy-pantsy appearance. Culture?! Pffft. Canadians are in fact just Americans with 10 points more on their I.Q. How much is that?

>> Kristian von Bengtson,
Copenhagen, Denmark

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