(Johns Hopkins News-Letter) Shruti Mathur - Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer told students at Johns Hopkins University last week: The Land of Israel has always been the Jewish homeland. The Jews are the only people on the planet who live the same way as they did 3,000 years ago. When the Jews returned, they found a new people living in their house. And despite constant peace efforts on the side of the Israelis, partition, and compensation methods, the Arabs continued to fight them and to lose. It is a continuous story of offering and rejecting compromise. In 1967, Israel ended up with territory it never meant to claim or attempted to seize. But given the circumstances of its being attacked, there was no choice. The issue is that they want to eradicate the Jewish state, and a peace can never be reached if one side is not accepting of the other's claim to exist. If that had not been a central issue, the crisis would have ended in November 1947 when the borders were first being drawn up. Israel is doing what anyone would do, putting up a fence as a barrier to terrorism. It is a fact that it is protecting lives, and I feel it is a scandal and disgrace that that action, a response to terrorism that has killed more than 900 Jews in the past three and a half years, and not the terrorism itself is being tried at The Hague. And the fact that it is happening in Europe is twice the disgrace. As a line of defense, there is no question it is the moral thing to do. Having it on the "green line" would only encourage Hamas and distort the strategic situation. There has to be a price for rejection of peace and for terror.
2004-03-04 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive