Usually three sides to every situation
I SAW FIVE items in Shannon Ebrahim’s article (“Resistance is all that’s left for Palestinians”, The Star Opinion and Analysis, October 16) and 29 in Janet Smith’s article (“We’re outraged at the helplessness of the west”, The Star, October 16) that were open to question or correction. Dealing with them adequately would require an oped, and that I leave to the experts.
I would like to start with some quotations for your consideration:
How do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read. (Karl Kraus)
Lies repeated often enough will eventually be believed. (Joseph Goebbels)
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools… (Rudyard Kipling)
I believe that there are usually three sides to every situation – yours, mine and the truth, which is why we need lawyers and judges. I also think that anyone who states the opposite may be lying.
The arguments advanced by Ebrahim and Khalid Mish’al are not new. What strikes one immediately is how totally one-sided they are.
Once again the sheep are bleating: “Four legs good, two legs bad.”
Ebrahim complains of the attitude of Israelis to Palestinians and writes of all the children who have been killed by Israelis. Mish’al also mentions killings.
Yet neither of these two nor for that matter any of their predecessors have admitted to the thousands of Israelis who have been killed by Palestinians and their Arab neighbours. According to the internet’s unverified statistics, 3 817 Jews have been killed and 25 000 wounded in terrorist attacks since 1948 alone. This figure does not include the Israeli fallen in all the wars forced on the country. During the totally unprovoked and declared genocidal attack in 1948, 6 000 Israelis died and 30 000 were wounded according to the British Encyclopedia, 1 percent out of a population of some 600 000.
Much has been made of the wars involving Gaza and the subsequent destruction and “disproportionate” death toll. And where and when have these righteous souls admitted to the more than 14 000 missiles and mortar bombs that they manufactured and imported in order to launch them into Israeli residential areas? It was when the numbers of these missiles reached 80 a day that Israel counterattacked. The casualty rate of these armaments is one matter; each and every one was fired with the intention to kill and maim.
Mish’al speaks of “our land”. By 1880 the entire population of Palestine was probably about 500 000 and was part of southern Syria, governed by the Ottomans. The Jewish state partitioned by the UN in 1947 contained between 100 000 and 150 000 Jews living on land purchased from absentee Arab landlords. Historians have concluded that only “several thousand Arab families were displaced by land sales between 1880 and the late 1930s”.
Let Mish’al prove otherwise from census reports, land transfer records, or demographic reports.
The 1980s and ’90s witnessed massive airlifts of black Jews from Ethiopia and Eritrea. They have the same civic rights as any other Israelis. Not bad for an apartheid country.
Arguments by Ebrahim and Meshaal not new
Killarney, Joburg