Letters to the editor

Editor,

Let’s take heart in President Obama’s hope for peace and wish for change in the ongoing war between Arabs and Israel. I just wonder if the Palestinian people, a people who voted for the Hamas regime that not only calls for the destruction of Israel but the murder of Jews everywhere, are ready to hear that hope and able to consider that change.

Scott Abramson

San Mateo

Obama’s missed opportunity

Editor,

President Obama’s recent Cairo address to the Muslim world was premised on a fundamental untruth — that the Jewish people have no legal, historic or moral rights to the land of Israel and that it was created as a result of the Nazi Holocaust. It is beyond any serious dispute that the right to a Jewish homeland was recognized by the international community long before Adolf Hitler obscenely burst upon the world stage.

In 1922, the League of Nations ordered the "reconstitution,” not the "creation,” of a Jewish homeland on both sides of the River Jordan. What Israel got in the 1947 partition was a much smaller land. But this language clearly shows international approval of Israel’s existence before many present-day Arab countries became independent themselves at the close of the colonial age and new nations emerged.

In demanding a two-state solution, President Obama equated the self-inflicted miseries of Palestinian Arabs resulting directly from the 1948 war — a war that the Arabs started, and which killed 1 percent of the entire Jewish population of Israel — with the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust. This is legally, morally and factually wrong.

The United States’ highest moral interest is in promoting democracy, human rights and freedom in the Middle East. Only one country, Israel, does that, for now, under trying conditions. Obama’s pandering to tyrannical Arab leaders such as the Saudi king isn’t going to fool anyone.

Desmond Tuck

San Mateo

Recognize Palestinians too

Editor,

As Sheree Roth said in her letter "Recognize Israel” from the June 8 edition of the Daily Journal, Jews were driven from their historic homeland 2,000 years ago. However, the Palestinians were driven out only 60 years ago, after a long sojourn there. As Benny Morris and other Israeli new historians have shown from Israeli archives, 700,000 of them were driven out by force.

Incidentally, Morris is no liberal. In an interview in Haaretz after the second Intifada, he said not enough "ethnic cleansing” was done (he actually used that term). While there are many countries in which Palestinians could live, remember that the majority of Jews choose to live in countries other than Israel. Would she argue the same for Israelis?

Alfred Lerner

San Carlos