LETTERS
Plight of Palestinians has a complex history
In her letter to The News, Ruth Zweifler was justifiably anguished over the plight of the Palestinian people, applauding those protesters who march in front of the synagogue each Sabbath to proclaim their views.
Unfortunately, in the process of sympathizing with this new set of victims, she and they conveniently ignore or dismiss the background in which these tragedies are rooted. By limiting their views of history to just the last several decades they dismiss the centuries of deadly discrimination preceding and provoking the settlement of Israel.
Zweifler traces her conversion to comments made by her Zionist teacher when she was 12 years old in 1941, a year when the annihilation of the millions of Jews of Germany was at its peak. And for decades before that it was the Cossacks of Russia whose diversion was destroying Jewish villages and massacring its people, a sport routinely ignored by all the nations of the world. Even our own nation failed to meet its moral obligation, turning back to the concentration camps a boatload of refugees seeking asylum.
The only hope of survival for this entire population, the eternal target for all the world's despots, was a country of their own, and the realities of history and guarantees by the League of Nations determined that it had to be in the ancient land of Israel.
For the Palestinians, much of that relocation was unfair and must be addressed, but ignoring the past in order to redress problems of the moment leads not to solution but to increasing and endless chaos.
Robert G. Faber, Ann Arbor