Published in Washington Jewish Week


Friday, May 02, 2008


Not about settlements

M.J. Rosenberg ("Settlements the key to Mideast peace," WJW, April 17) is "amazed" that there is a single person who believes that "West Bank settlements are not at the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

For Rosenberg, history apparently begins in 1967. Before then, there were no settlements, and yet the Arabs brought war upon Israel.

Currently, there are no settlements in the Gaza Strip and the rockets keep flying. Israel's total withdrawal from southern Lebanon, where it had no settlements, hardly prevented Hezbollah from launching thousands of rockets at Israeli cities and towns in the 2006 war, targets it called "settlements."

Of course, to Hezbollah, as well as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees in the Gaza Strip, Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, etc., Jewish towns and villages in the West Bank and the Galilee; Netanya; Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv; and the Jewish neighborhoods of Western Jerusalem are all "settlements," too.

Rosenberg, editor of Near East Report in the early 1980s, knew this then and wasn't afraid to say so.

His belief now that "Jews should be able to live in the West Bank exactly as Arabs live in Israel" -- just not in settlements -- is equally strange. How long does he think these Jews would survive?

The difference between acceptance, in safety, by Israel's Jewish majority of Arab Israeli villages and towns and the Palestinian Arab insistence that the West Bank be judenrein illustrates the underlying bigotry that fuels the conflict.

The real "root" of Palestinian hostility, as it has been since the Arab massacres of Jews in the 1920s, is the fact that Palestinian Arabs, especially the Muslim majority, don't want even a single Jew living among them, certainly not as equals.

MICHAEL BERENHAUS
Potomac