Letter to the Editor: Toby F. Block

Egypt, Jordan and Israel all benefited somewhat from the bilateral peace treaties they signed. But those treaties did not produce warm relations between the signatories, nor did they have any effect on the Israel-Palestinian impasse. The problem is what it has always been. The Palestinian leaders are more interested in destroying the world’s only Jewish state than in building a state in which the people they govern could become productive citizens. The difference between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority is strictly tactical. Hamas makes no pretense of being willing to negotiate and stages attacks against Israeli population centers. The PA talks of peace but urges its people to “violently resist the Occupation (sic),” rewarding those who answer the call by granting generous stipends to the murderers (and/or their families). Both Hamas and the PA insist that Israel must take in millions of Palestine refugees and give them the homes they claim their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents … lost when Arab violence failed to prevent Israel’s rebirth in the Jews’ ancestral homeland.

Talk of a Two State Solution is meaningless, unless it is specified that the states will be a Palestinian state willing to co-exist, peacefully, with the nation-state of the Jews. The Palestinian leadership needs to take concrete steps to prove that they are sincere in this aspiration. They need to work to stop the attacks (whether by “state actors” or “lone wolves”), negotiate on borders (realizing that Palestinians, not only Israel, will need to make concessions), actively work to reverse the anti-Jewish rhetoric they’ve been spewing for generations, and start building the infrastructure needed by a viable state.

Toby F. Block, Atlanta