Israel’s illegal occupation Palestine: fact or fiction?

In his letter from Nov. 14, Donovan Fisk described what he calls the illegal Israeli occupation of a place called Palestine [“Celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Opinion, Northwest Voices].

Occupation, as defined in the Fourth Geneva Convention, involves one nation taking over the territory belonging to another sovereign nation.

I was 24 in 1967 and remember it well. Israel captured the West Bank, which had been annexed by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip, which had been taken over by Egypt. Both of those nations were illegally occupying that land, according to the almost unanimous vote of the United Nations.

I would challenge Fisk to find one news report from June of that year claiming “Israel invades Palestine.” No such nation existed there.

The Palestine Liberation Organization, in its 1964 Charter, declared that the Palestinians had no claim on these territories. All their efforts were directed at destroying Israel inside the 1949 armistice lines. The U.N. agreement between Israel and Jordan clearly stated that the Green Line was not a border, and that a final settlement would be between the parties. In July of 1988, Jordan abandoned any claim it had to the West Bank.

So who had the best claim?

The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, in 1922, granted all land west of the Jordan River to the Jewish people, who had helped to liberate it, and who had identified with that land for 3,000 years. About a million Jews lived in the Middle East at that time. The land that was offered to the Palestinian Arabs by the U.N. partition plan, which they rejected, was Jewish land according to international law.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion. Nobody is entitled to his own facts.

— Robert G. Kaufman, Seattle

Krauthammer on Islam: an inconvenient truth

Please drop Charles Krauthammer as a columnist on the Opinion pages, except in those rare moments when he is talking about economic policy — a subject on which he has something of value to contribute.

Krauthammer’s latest nonsense takes facts upon which no sentient entity can disagree — the slaughter at Fort Hood and the cultural and religious background of the perpetrator [“A dangerous delicacy about Islam,” Opinion, syndicated column, Nov. 14] — and then aims his arrow at a predefined target.

His most telling, and egregiously, inaccuracy being that “Allahu Akbar” is a jihadist battle cry. Well it is in a sense, but only in the same sense that most Americans say the same thing in English under similar circumstances.

The inconvenient truth Krauthammer does not wish to acknowledge is that fanatics of any stripe are going to do bad things. Islamic fanatics, Christian fanatics, Jewish fanatics, Hindu fanatics, Agnostic fanatics. Krauthammer is not being intellectually honest when he chooses one brand of fanatic over another, and The Times should stop giving him a soapbox on which to do so.

There is no brand of fanatic that should make anyone feel safe.

— Daniel A. Morgan, Seattle