Homeland for Jews is fundamental
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IN “NETANYAHU’S juggling act’’ (Editorial, June 17), you dismiss the need for Palestinian recognition of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people with the analogy that “France can have peace with Germany without having first to recognize Germany as the state of the German people.’’ Unlike the Palestinians, however, France has not continuously denied this reality.
Palestinians do comprise about 20 percent of the citizens of Israel, but enjoy the full panoply of rights of their Jewish neighbors. Non-Germans comprise a comparable percentage of the population of Germany, but few have German citizenship, even if born in Germany.
Yet Israel’s existence as the Jewish homeland is as axiomatic as the existence of Germany, France, Denmark, Japan, and other nations as the homelands of their people. Despite the Diaspora, Jews have lived continuously in the land of Israel for nearly three millennia, but if history tells us anything, no ethnic group has a greater manifest need for a safe, unqualified harbor in its historical birthplace.
How will the peace that we yearn for ever take place if Palestinians cannot accept what Netanyahu terms the “fundamental condition’’ of Israel’s right to exist? There is no compromise position between existence and nonexistence.
Kenneth Appelbaum
Shrewsbury
