By Aaron Biterman, Arlington
(File Photo)
To the editor:
This is in response a letter that appeared in the Alexandria Times on July 3 by Timothy Conway (“Anti-Semitism is not the reason why organizations choose to divest from Israel”). The author asserts that Israel has occupied the land of others for “almost half a century” and receives a large amount of foreign aid from the United States.
Conway then concludes that because he lived in Israel for a short time, your readers should believe him.
Sadly, everything Conway said is factually incorrect. His campaign against the only Jewish-majority nation in the world is no different from Adolf Hitler’s campaign of the 1930s to boycott Jewish businesses in Germany. The only difference now is that Conway and his friends can more quickly spread lies with the help of social media and the Internet.
Israel receives foreign aid, as does Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and as do many other Muslim or Arab majority states throughout the Middle East. Conway singles out Israel because his problem is not aid to these other countries, but aid to Jews in particular.
There’s a big difference between not wanting to help Jews and lying about the Jewish state. Israel was attacked in 1967 by five Arab states and won that war. In doing so it recaptured Jerusalem, which had been in control of Jordan previously, as well as Judea and Samaria, which Americans refer to as the West Bank.
“Jew” comes from the word “Judea.” These places are the ancient homelands of the Jewish people.
There is no occupied land now that all Muslims, Christians and Jews can pray at their holy sites in Jerusalem. That only happened because Jews opened up Jerusalem to the world.
Seventy years removed from the Holocaust — the destruction of one-third of world’s Jews — the campaign against the Jewish people continues.