Palestinians have thwarted Rabin’s vision of peace
Thank you for your articles “Bay Area memories of Yitzhak Rabin, ‘warrior of peace,’ 20 years later” and “Rabin as the ultimate peacemaker is a fantasy” (Oct. 30).
Rabin genuinely wanted peace between Israelis and Palestinians. However, he had no illusions that the Palestinians shared his vision. To the contrary, as the former article notes, before he died he had become deeply disillusioned with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians.
Rabin envisioned a land transformed, where Israelis and Palestinians would “live side by side … in dignity, in empathy, as human beings, as free men.”
Sadly, the Palestinians have failed to reciprocate by showing empathy for Israelis as fellow human beings. To the contrary, they have responded to Israel’s peace proposals with rejection and a succession of terror campaigns and are now attacking Jewish men, women and children with knives. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Israel’s purported peace partner, has further exacerbated tensions by refusing to negotiate with Israel, by inciting acts of terror through his false accusations that Israel is threatening mosques, and by insisting that the Palestinians are no longer bound by the Oslo accords.
Rabin deserves to be remembered as a brave warrior for peace who wanted an end to blood and tears. But while it was an Israeli extremist who tragically ended his life, it is the Palestinians who have betrayed and thwarted his vision of peace.
Stephen A. Silver | San Francisco
Abbas’ ‘dangerous hypocrisy’ on display in Geneva
In a special Oct. 28 session at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on the violence in Israel, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whose term expired years ago, accused Israel of killing unarmed Palestinians. He referred to the killing of Arabs who stabbed defenseless Jews as “extrajudicial killings,” despite the fact that all such Arabs have been killed on the spot to prevent them from carrying out additional murders.
Abbas also said: “Our people’s angry upheaval and the recent successive events are the inevitable outcome of what we had previously warned of.” So the murder of innocent Jewish women and children with knives is “inevitable” while the killing of the murderers in action is objectionable. What kind of a warped mind is needed to take that position?
The UNHRC doesn’t need any persuasion to join the bandwagon of persecutors of Jews. But anyone who doesn’t see through Abbas’ dangerous hypocrisy is as guilty of genocidal thoughts as he is.
Desmond Tuck | San Mateo
‘Inconvenient truth’ on land for peace
Will someone please explain to me how sweetness, light, love and peace will suddenly break out if only Israel unilaterally, with no reciprocal guarantees from the Arabs, withdraws from the so-called “West Bank” (Judea and Samaria)? Does anyone really doubt that Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas (now in his 12th year of a five-year term as Palestinian Authority president) would be overthrown by Hamas, as would probably Jordan’s King Abdullah?
Or is it an inconvenient truth to remember what happened in Gaza in 2005 after Israel withdrew? Land for what peace?
The “occupation” is intolerable, but would the alternative be worse? As George Santayana so aptly said, those who do not remember the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
Marvin Engel | Piedmont