Dhimmi prospects

A sentence in the editorial “Vaccine cooperation” (June 20) brought back a flood of memories: “…it is also in Israel’s interest to see the quality of life improve [for Palestinians] in the West Bank and Gaza and for there to be greater economic prosperity among the Palestinian people. This can be done by building joint industrial zones, creating employment opportunities, etc.”

I remembered stopping at a Jewish bookstore in Toronto with two books on display in the window. One was A Place among the Nations by Binyamin Netanyahu, priced down to $4.00 CDN, and next to it, Shimon Peres’s The New Middle East selling for $2.99 CDN. I went in and asked for the Peres book since I already had the Netanyahu one. The storekeeper told me, “If you’re going to New York, the Peres book is selling there for just 99 cents.” Peres was going to make peace building joint industrial zones, etc. The public was quite emphatic about the value of the book and its contents. I asked the proprietor, “Please don’t drop the price of the Netanyahu book.”

The ideas expressed in the editorial have appeared in other articles in the past few weeks. It didn’t work in the past and won’t work now. Some years ago I read a few of Dr. Bernard Lewis’s books. He was the preeminent scholar of Islam and he makes it exceedingly clear that Muslims can never cede land that they once lived on. They can therefore never recognize Israel’s right to even an inch of what they consider Palestinian lands – ever. Abba Eban was mistaken when he said, “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” because if the opportunity means ceding even an inch of land to dhimmis and infidels, it’s not an opportunity but a grave sin.

I once asked Dr. Lewis, since it’s so clear that they can’t ever make peace, why all the feverish activity about the “fictional peace process?”

He replied, “They have eyes but they see not, they have ears but they hear not.”

SHOLOM GOLD

Jerusalem