July 14, 2017: Misplaced sympathy

"Is there no end to extolling the Palestinians’ victimhood, even in my Jerusalem Post?"

By LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Updated: JULY 14, 2017 00:04
Letters (photo credit: REUTERS)
Letters
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Misplaced sympathy
With regard to the photo accompanying “UN report: Gaza will be unlivable in three years” (July 12), you could only find a picture of a boy crying in the Khan Yunis refugee camp? Do the local children not play and have fun? Such a photo would generate more empathy and be far less preposterous.
Is there no end to extolling the Palestinians’ victimhood, even in my Jerusalem Post?
MOSHE-MORDECHAI VAN ZUIDEN
Jerusalem
Wanting victory?
In “Israelis want victory” (Comment & Features, July 12), Daniel Pipes talks of the need for Palestinian defeat.
But how can a non-people be defeated, especially when our prime minister and president have legitimized it to rights to the Jewish land? Pipes believes that it will be possible to have a peace agreement with the Palestinians (that word again) only once their leadership recognizes the fact that it has been defeated in its struggle against Israel. I would ask why we want a peace agreement with terrorists that have been murdering our people and destroying our land even from before we declared Independence and before the first “settlement” was built? One has only to take into account the religion of the vast majority of Palestinians.
That religion advocates making “peace” with an infidel solely in order to further the infidel’s destruction.
It is very hard to be convinced that the Israeli people actually want to win when they continue to support a prime minister who refuses to destroy Hamas because he is afraid to rule over the whole of the Jewish land and its holy sites, particularly the Temple Mount.
Instead of being a Jewish state, it seems to me that we are nothing but interim occupiers strengthening our enemies to enable our takeover.
Though I lack credentials, I came to the conclusion long ago that only with a full military win that will bring about the total defeat, unconditional surrender and exit of our enemies can we hope to live in peace.
I got the impression that after the Obama era, things would be different. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking to believe that we might actually act like a sovereign state.
PHYLLIS STERN
Netanya
Daniel Pipes asks what Israelis think about convincing Palestinians that they have lost their war against Israel. Yet he gives no reason why they should think they have lost.
They did not consider this when the Egyptian army was surrounded in 1949, nor when the IDF was on the road to Damascus in 1973. They believe they are supported by 1.5 billion Arabs while there are only 8 million Israelis. With these odds, they think they must eventually win.
Yet the Koran states in Surah 5:21 and 7:137 that Allah allocated this land to the Jews. No mortal can go against the will of Allah! These are the odds.
The Palestinians have to accept the word of the Koran and understand that it is useless to fight against the will of Allah.
CHARLES OREN
Herzliya
Boy, is it hot!!
As he often does, your excellent cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen provides an important lesson with his July 12 cartoon. In it, he has one sweltering man exclaiming to another: “Boy is it hot!! Boy is it hot!! I can’t remember when it was this hot!! When was it last this hot?” The other man responds: “Yesterday.”
Unfortunately, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet, as the world’s temperature is rapidly rising.
Every decade since the 1970s has been warmer than the previous one, and the past three years have successively broken global temperature records. If present trends continue, 2017 is likely to follow the same pattern. As a result, deserts are expanding, seas are rising, icecaps and glaciers are rapidly melting, and droughts, wildfires, storms and floods are becoming increasingly severe.
It is time to recognize that climate change is an existential threat to the entire world. We in Israel should make averting a climate catastrophe a major focus.
BATZION SHLOMI
Afula