Letter to the editor
To the editor:
Much of the world has apparently forgotten why the state of Israel was created and what it represented to decent world opinion. Despite all the efforts of the Zionist movement to settle people in the ancestral homeland, no Jewish state would have been possible if the European Jews had not been abandoned to their fate at the hands of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.
There was no serious effort to prevent the destruction of European Jewry during the second World War. But concern for their fate was a moral issue and remained so after 1945, when the extent of the genocide, and the racist-eugenic pseudo-science that was used to justify it, became more publicly known.
While 6 million Jews were murdered, other Jews fought in every Allied army, in special units organized in Palestine and in partisan bands all over Europe. Meanwhile, Arab leaders collaborated with Hitler, whose "final solution" would solve their own Jewish problem.
In 1947-48 the spirit of the Jewish people triumphed over those who had destroyed two-fifths of their worldwide population. The urgency of a Jewish homeland was now on the world’s moral and political agenda. When the United Nations sanctioned the creation of two states in Palestine, the Jews accepted the settlement, although it gave them only a tiny area of coastal land. But the armies of the surrounding Arab states launched a war of annihilation against the Jews, who had only a small civil defense force.
The war led to the flight of thousands of Arabs from their homes to refugee camps, where their neighbors, with all their land and oil wealth, have left them and their descendants. Since then a comparable number of Jewish refugees fleeing Arab countries were settled in Israel. Half a century later a new generation seems ignorant of all this and a strange coalition of left and right in Europe and America has adopted the Arab cause as a struggle for liberation from Israeli oppression. They are united against the only nation in the Middle East with truly democratic institutions.
The Arabs of Palestine have been offered a state on realistic terms that their leaders rejected. They need only stop terrorist attacks and threats to drive the Jews into the sea. They need only acknowledge that Jerusalem is the historical capital of the Jews and has never been a Muslim capital or holy city. They need only accept the reality that millions of refugees and their descendants on both sides of conflicts all over the world have been resettled elsewhere.
On television we see David and Goliath images of Arab civilians fighting Israeli soldiers and tanks. Before deciding who is David and who is Goliath, look at the map and remember that many of the nations in the vast Arab lands have strong military forces. They may be off-screen, but they are there just as they were in 1948, 1967 and 1973, when all that stood between the Jewish state and destruction was its armed forces and the decency of American policy.
Bernard Bush
East Windsor
The writer is a member of the Twin Rivers Homeowners Association board of directors.