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Outsiders Fuelling Propaganda War Against Israel Are Not Helping to Bring Peace
(Irish Times) Ze'ev Boker - In an article in the Irish Times of Aug. 16 on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the writer blithely ignores the deep historic connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel going back 3,000 years. While noting the 700,000 Muslim Arabs who fled the fighting in 1948, he says nothing about the expulsion of nearly a million Jews at the same time from Arab countries and that whereas Israel absorbed Jewish refugees and gave them equal rights, Arab countries kept Palestinian refugees in camps to be used as political fodder against Israel. It is wrong to say the security barrier built along the West Bank border was designed to seize Palestinian land. The barrier was a response to the murder of 1,100 Israeli civilians by terrorists who easily crossed from the West Bank into Israel during the Second Intifada. The purpose of the barrier is entirely to protect the lives of Israeli civilians. In the 1990s and later, Israel was desperate to find a partner for peace on the Palestinian side. Time and again Israel made concessions on land, giving up parts of the West Bank and in 2005 the whole of Gaza, but every concession made by Israel resulted only in more terrorism from the other side. The writer says Gaza is undergoing a "siege," but apart from the fact that Israel directly supplies Gaza with civilian goods, he barely mentions that Gaza has been controlled by Hamas since 2007, which has fired about 15,000 rockets into Israel over the years. The only reason relatively few Israeli civilians have been killed is because about a million Israelis live with bomb shelters and the Iron Dome anti-missile defense system. Peace can only come with mutual compromise, and outsiders fuelling the propaganda war against Israel are not helping. The writer is the Israeli ambassador to the Republic of Ireland.