Letter: Witness the propagandists’s trick

EDITOR,
Our local government has enough difficulty balancing budgets, negotiating contracts and delivering services without taking on the conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Jews. It has no business meddling there with boycotts.
Aneelah Zafar’s astonishing letter (“Why drop Israeli divestment idea?” June 4), like the Muslim Students Associations that dot California State University and University of California campuses, speaks of “occupied Palestinian lands,” without mention of the United Nation’s recognition of the Jewish state in 1949 or the Six-Day War in 1967 that resulted in Israel’s territory gains.
Witness the propagandist’s trick: subtle use of the language (“43-year occupation of Palestinian land”) to plant a big lie in the public consciousness, repeated until it becomes conventional wisdom. If Israel’s recognition as a state means nothing, then whither the Jewish state? The answer, spoken this week by former White House correspondent Helen Thomas, is, as Iran’s Ahmadinejad has often said: back to Germany and Poland. These folks would have you believe that prior to 1948, there was never a Jew in Palestine.
Zafar claims that Israel “is unprepared to comply with international law and meet the minimum demands of Palestinian negotiations.” Yet the “governing body” of Gaza — Hamas — has never agreed to the minimal proposition that Israel has a right to exist within its original borders. When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak put a fine on this by proposing a two-state solution at the 2000 Camp David Summit, Yasser Arafat — the governing body of the Palestinians at the time — said no. And since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2000, Hamas has responded with rocket attacks into Israeli towns.
Until the posture of Iran and Syria and their proxy warriors change, “people of conscience” should support Israel’s right defend itself against missiles, terror strikes and propaganda, like the boycotts.
International law does not compel national suicide.
David deMilo, Scotts Valley