Defending Israel

[Re: “Israel’s false friends,” Letters, Feb. 12] The two letters printed on Feb. 12 are once again proof that some people never change. Blame Israel! Blame Israel’s supporters! Blame Egypt! Blame the Christian Right! Never try to think of solutions, it’s so much more fun to play the BLAME GAME! 

Shirley Groves calls herself “average,” does that mean that the average person doesn’t think rationally about politics? Does it mean that the average person will force details to fit into their preconceived worldview? Once again, Israel is attacked for defending itself, for “incinerating children with phosphorous bombs,” while the political circumstances that might lead to the death of these innocents is white-washed as being the inevitable direct result of “Israel’s 40-year policy of West Bank settlement expansion.”

First of all, the West Bank is not very big. If Israel was as single-minded and simplistic as these “highly rational thinkers” suggest, you’d think that, by now, they would have simply taken it, killed all the Palestinians (since they apparently have no regard for Palestinian life, according to people like Shirley Groves, this shouldn’t be a problem) and set up shop. Yet this has not happened, the West Bank is a crisis zone, but it still contains more than two million Palestinians. Explain that one.

Next, I read Edward Abramic’s weak justification of Hamas. He says their rockets are crude and shitty. Does this mean that they are not a threat? If they’re so ineffective (and counterintuitive since they lead to air strikes), why would Hamas use them? Here’s why: they want Israel to attack them. They hide behind civilians, attack Israel and wait for the retribution, which they use to justify their continued attacks on Israel.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, do these people want these rockets to start being accurate before Israel is allowed to defend itself? If someone came into your house with a gun and pointed it at your family, would you wait for them to kill your whole family before you took action? Would you wait until they fired their first shot, even if it misses? Why does Israel have to wait for Hamas to improve its capabilities to attack? It is part of the charter, one of the fundamental principles of Hamas, that Israel must be destroyed.

It’s the anti-Israeli faction that gives Hamas the moral justification it so desperately needs to keep up its pointless and futile war. Maybe if you people condemned them once, they would take a different approach to getting what they want, which according to you is peace, but no, that’s impossible because they want destruction, and so you must apologize for them.

There are Palestinians who just want an end to violence, just like there are Jews who do, Israelis who do, people who just want an end to violence. Let’s give them some moral justification and support, let’s promote them in the news media. Hey Mirror, why don’t you write a couple articles on Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives?

>> Rodney Johnson

[Re: “Israel’s false friends,” Letters, Feb. 12] I’ve always admired the Mirror’s fair coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. But on Feb. 12, I was a little dismayed to find two letters hating on Israel. So here I am writing in to answer Shirley Groves’s question about armchair Zionists and the reasons why I myself am not in the holy land hefting an M-16 in defence of my convictions.

Well, whenever Israel has had the luxury of existing, it has been under threat and in fact it has been destroyed and rebuilt three times. First came the Babylonians, then the Romans and lately Islamic fundamentalists supported by misled factions of the left. A country so prone to being destroyed needs an insurance policy.

So it’s important that not all supporters of Zionism act on their convictions and make aliyah (that is, move to Israel). This way, if the country is destroyed a third time, the Diaspora will endure and the hope of rebuilding Israel will remain. But I’m willing to make a personal exception: the day Shirley Groves goes to the Qassam College of rocketry in Gaza is the day I move to Israel.

>>Barry Loxman

Battles a part of life

[Re: “Why re-enact battle?” Letters, Feb. 19] There’s no reason for why, it’s just what people do. Battles become history and then get re-enacted, over and over and over again. They get re-enacted by the winners, they get re-enacted by the losers. Go to the cinema at any given time of the month and you’ll see that they get re-enacted by Hollywood too. I can’t tell you why, this is just the way life goes. And it’s thinkers like you that maintain this entire ridiculous situation as being a Quebec-based phenomenon. 

>> M.Giuliani

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