Equal Rights for Palestinians

Mike Maxwell’s “Gaza fight ‘profoundly misread’ ”, (Aug. 17) shares with us his premise for understanding the problem of Israel/Palestine: “The Bible predicted that Israel would become a nation again one day, and it happened in 1948.” There you have it. By dint of biblical prediction, we see the dispossession, concentration and expulsion of the Palestinian peoples as right and just; every bit as just as if somebody’s scriptures had given away everything that you and I owned.

There will be some Americans, however, who operate with a different premise, one more like that of Marianne Torres “Equal rights in Gaza,” (Aug. 10). Many Americans, after all, believe in equal rights. They will notice that the Israelis have ruthlessly violated the rights of the Palestinian people. The crime is brazen no matter how cunning the alibi.

If we affirm that human rights adhere to human beings universally, then the Palestinian people ought to have enjoyed the right to keep their homes, their orchards, their village communities, mosques, schools and cemeteries. In that case, it would have been wrong for the Israelis to drive the Palestinian people from their homes and land and wrong to expropriate or destroy their property.

Wayne Kraft

Spokane