Letters

Varying statistics

Journalist Marie Brenner needs to go back to journalism school. In Dan Pine's April 22 report on Brenner's speech to the Women's Philanthropy Division of the East Bay JCF, he quotes her citing "recent statistics showing a 90 percent rise in physical attacks on Jews in France, with a total of 3,000 such crimes reported there since 2002," and comparing the situation of Jews in France to that in 1932 Germany.

If the numbers were correct, she might be right, but they're not. They're simply the latest effort to convince American Jews another Holocaust is around the corner.

As of Aug. 24, 2004, the Web site of the American Jewish Congress, which took such a proactive interest in the issue that leaders of the French Jewish community told them to go back home, reported "there have been 135 attacks on Jews in 2004 as compared with 95 against Arabs and other ethnic groups," and that that total represented "more physical attacks against Jews in the first half of this year as compared to the last half of 2003." Not good, but nowhere near the numbers cited, and if Israel ended its occupation of Palestinian land, there'd be no story.

Jeff Blankfort | San Francisco




The Mandate redux

I write to clarify the terminology "Palestinian land." The last legal owner of the land then known as "Palestine" was the British government, which was given a "mandate" in 1920 at the San Remo conference to administer the territory in accord with the Balfour Declaration, which was to create "a Jewish homeland" in that area.

The British Mandate was confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922. When the British ended it in 1948, it did so in accord with the United Nations decision of November 1947 to partition the area between the Jews and the Arabs.

In 1948, six neighboring Arab armies then invaded the land in violation of the U.N. agreement. In 1948-49, Jordan conquered the area known biblically as Judea and Samaria, and renamed the area as the "West Bank" (of the Jordan River).

The Arabs rejected the term "Palestine" until Yasser Arafat came along in 1965 and forced the name "Palestine" upon the Arabs.

Yehuda Sherman | Lafayette




'Another obstacle'

Israel has decided to permit construction of hundreds of new apartments in Jewish neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem, and Washington has acquiesced.

The New York Times was representative of the media and liberal response when it recently editorialized that the new apartments violate the Bush administration's "road map" and will be "another obstacle to peace."

Spokesmen for the Palestinian Authority have repeatedly made it clear they do not accept the road map. They also have not complied with any of its provisions. The road map requires the authority to stop its own terrorist murders of Israelis, and to disarm the other Palestinian terrorist groups. The authority announced early on that they have no intention of doing that.

Yet the media and liberal position is that Israeli unwillingness to comply with the road map while the Palestinians do not is somehow "another obstacle to peace." There's no suggestion from them that Palestinian terrorism and refusal to negotiate in good faith might be an obstacle.

Just as it's hard to find good faith in the position of the Palestinians, it's also difficult to find good faith in the position of their friends in the media and among liberals.

Jack Kessler | Point Richmond




Not spontaneous

Yehuda Sherman (April 22 letters) is correct that the ongoing Palestinian terror campaign against Israel — the "second intifada" — did not begin as a spontaneous response to Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Imad Faluji, Yasser Arafat's communications minister, confirmed in an interview published in the March 3, 2001, Lebanon Daily Star that the second intifada "had been planned since Chairman Arafat's return from Camp David, when he turned the tables in the face of the former U.S. president [Bill Clinton] and rejected" Clinton's proposal of a Palestinian state born in peace on virtually all of the land in dispute.

As for Sharon's visit, it was coordinated in advance between Ehud Barak's security minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, and Palestinian security chief Jabril Rajoub and initially passed without incident, despite the murder of 19-year-old Israeli David Biri the day before.

From the 1996 Kotel Tunnel riots to the Mohammed al-Dura incident to the 2002 "Jenin massacre" blood libel, the Palestinians have used lies as effectively as any bomb as a weapon of terror against Israel. Justifying blowing up Israeli children in school buses and pizzerias because Sharon visited a Jewish holy site is but one more example.

Stephen Silver | Walnut Creek




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