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Letters to the Editor

Issue date: 3/21/07 Section: KSG News
To the Editor:

In The Citizen's last issue, Naomi Krieger's op-ed "A Glorious Day for Israel/Palestine?" referred to the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, yet did not mention that Israel retains control and has since repeatedly attacked the population there. The Israeli and American press used the withdrawal as a diversion from growing Israeli encroachment upon the West Bank.

Krieger also repeated the Israeli/American narrative of Camp David's failure: Arafat is the scapegoat and inflated figures make the Israeli offer appear "generous." Arafat was not alone; the Palestinian "state" he and his negotiators were offered was
noncontiguous and unviable. The US, instead of acting as a neutral mediator between the two sides, was Israel's attorney, coercing Palestinians to concede self-determination.

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pape, an Israeli professor, documents how the 1948 creation of Israel led to ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population. 4.5 million Palestinians still live in refugee camps, waiting to return home.

After the Holocaust, Jews were "a people without land," and Palestine, "a land without people." This colonial myth renders Palestinians - Christian or Muslim - as a "demographic threat" for Israel, while Jerusalem remains under Israeli/Jewish control.

In the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in South Africa, Israel and the U.S. pulled out after a resolution passed equating Zionism with racism. Israel remains the largest recipient of US aid in the world, receiving billions each year in unconditional support.

In the name of security, Israel is building a wall within the West
Bank, not along the 1967 border. It zigzags, encircling villages,
confiscating land and separating Palestinian from Palestinian. In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled this illegal.

Israel also builds illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. I
remember summers when Israel cut our water off, and Israeli
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