Mazin Qumsiyeh's Sept. 11 letter charges columnist William Safire with writing "misinformation and outright lies" about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet seldom have I seen writing as riddled with untruths and misrepresentations as Qumsiyeh's letter is.
Most offensive among these falsehoods is Qumsiyeh's claim that Israeli treatment of Palestinians "is very similar to the ghettos of Europe during the worst of the Nazi atrocities." Do the Israelis force hard labor upon the Palestinians? Arbitrarily execute Arab civilians? Send them to death camps? The only hardships imposed on Palestinians are security measures implemented in response to terrorist attacks against innocent Israeli civilians. The comparison of the Israeli government to the inhuman regime of Nazi Germany is an affront to the memories of 12 million individuals who suffered and died in Hitler's Holocaust. This inappropriate analogy mocks the intelligence of the readership of this newspaper.
Another untruth reported by Qumsiyeh is that Jerusalem is a "city reserved for control by one religious group." Israel does not interfere with Muslim or Christian shrines in Jerusalem; sites such as the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher are controlled entirely by the religious groups who hold them sacred. Qumsiyeh's charge that "Muslims and Christians who are merely two miles away in the West Bank cannot even go to pray there now" is misleading: West Bank residents are restricted now only because of the current border closure, a temporary measure implemented for security reasons in the wake of the latest terror attack. If Palestinian Authority Chairman Yassar Arafat would uphold the security commitments he made at Oslo and dismantle the West Bank terrorist infrastructure, closures wouldn't be necessary.
Qumsiyeh is correct that peace "can succeed only if there is justice." I do not claim that Israel is always a perfect peace partner. But justice means that Arafat's security commitments are as important as Israel's handover of land; without cooperation, there cannot be peace, nor any measure of Palestinian self-determination. Certainly Qumsiyeh's offensive analogies, misrepresentations and lies do not foster peace either.
Scott Michelman
Trinity '00
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