To be read in a vacuum

Anyone reading Gershon Baskin’s “November 29 – a national holiday” (Encountering Peace, November 30) in a vacuum would perforce conclude that Israel is the only thing preventing the Palestinians from establishing their long-denied independent state. Any objective observer familiar with the region’s history knows better.

Had the establishment of their state been of paramount importance, the Palestinians would have accepted the 1947 partition plan or any of the offers subsequently made to them by Israeli leaders. Instead, they and their brother Arabs repeatedly sought to eradicate the “Zionist entity.” Indeed, the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, cited with approval by Baskin, notes “the historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinian Arab people” by the partitioning of Palestine into two states; calls Israel a “fascist, racist, colonialist state built on the usurpation of the Palestinian land”; and expressly promises “to provide all means and capabilities needed to escalate our people’s intifada.”

Baskin outrageously concludes that, just as the 1947 partition plan required a painful compromise in order to allow Israel to exist, “the same need for compromise is necessary today.” Put another way, because the Jews were willing to accept much less area than previously promised in order to fulfill our national dreams, the State of Israel must now compromise further on its historical rights and critical security interests in order to help birth a potentially hostile state on its borders. Nowhere does he mention the need for Palestinian compromise.

International law does not provide for do-overs when attempts to destroy one’s neighbor fail. Palestinians will have a much better claim to their own state when they finally recognize the legal and moral rights of Jews to live in their historical homeland and honestly decide to live in peace. EFRAIM A. COHEN Zichron Ya’acov