Posted by middleeast on 26th May 2010
Saturday, May 8, 2010 24 Iyar, 5770
Reply to Arab ‘peace’
Sir, – Thanks to Barry Eisenberg, who is correct that the Arab League Peace plan would need some renegotiation first (“The Arab ‘peace’ plan…,” Letters, May 3). I apologize for not having reiterated this. But Israel did not actively try, either in 2002 or 2007, proactively to engage with the peace offer.
Consider the threats Israel faces – from Iran and Ahmadinejad and nuclear weapons; Hamas and Hizbullah and other even more extremist radicals; from the BDS (boycott-divestment-sanctions) movement, worldwide anti-Israelism and Israel’s world isolation; from the new anti-Semitism; and internally from the occupation demographics and settlement movement blurring political boundaries and pushing us toward an unwanted binationalism.
Most of these overwhelming problems– which rightly deeply worry us and preoccupy the Post’s news pages – would probably have disappeared by now if Israel had proactively and positively engaged the offer. They still could, if we haven’t already missed the opportunity, which we may have.
Just as one example, a comprehensive Arab League Peace (Syria included) would have served as a counterweight to Iran and given them little choice but to go along with the achieved consensus, and peace and sea change in the regional and worldwide climate this would have generated.
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Posted by middleeast on 26th May 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010 18 Iyar, 5770
…to spite one’s face?
Sir, – Thanks for publishing Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit’s hopes that we will go “back to the little Israel that we knew and loved” (“Avishai Margalit: Lift the siege!,” Independence Day Supplement, April 20).
“Ending the occupation is a moral and Zionist imperative,” he says. And that’s just what the Arab League Peace proposal of 2002 (re-endorsed in 2007) proposes for comprehensive security and peace.
And yet a recent Jerusalem Post editorial, “62, under a US cloud” (April 19) says that we are “rejected by most of the Arab world because of the very fact of our existence here.” Why such denial about the Arab world’s peace offer, as it does indeed accept our existence here? It’s been on the table for nearly eight years, and we’re the ones who have been the “rejectionists.” It is rightly said that we cannot afford to lose even one war. And we worry about annihilation.
Meanwhile our defense minister warns us that the continued settlement-building is turning us slowly into an irreversible binational state. But then why do we reject the Arab League offer of complete and total peace and security, as well as demographicallyJewish permanent borders?
How could it fail to look to the world that we prefer our conquests and settlements over comprehensive peace and security? And how can it fail to look that way even to us in our honest moments?
Larry Derfner courageously tells us truths about ourselves that it would make us more comfortable not to see (“Wanna buy a bridge, Mr. Mitchell?,” April 29).
Why does the Post soft-peddle the settlement-building and say that Israel’s mistake with the Biden visit was only over timing of the expansion announcement – rather than with the 40-year policy itself? The Right, ironically, has become Zionism’s worst enemy.
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