To the Editor:
When the Suburbanite published my letter in the Jan 14 issue a line was
edited out, and this line was extremely important to the integrity of the
letter:
“The Suburbanite might also consider that publishing such an
article at all at a time when Israel is committing mass murder in Gaza is in
extremely bad taste.”
I think it’s time to stop tip-toeing around Zionist sensibilities. I think
that now as people of conscience everywhere are watching helplessly as the
survivors of the holocaust are perpetrating a holocaust on another
population it is time to stop worrying about offending those who support
this slaughter. Three years ago Jewish Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe wrote a
book entitled “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”. In it he carefully
documented the Palestinian nakba- the catastrophe- of 1948. He, and other
historians like him, many of them Jews, have put to rest forever the
hallucination of Israeli innocence that we Jews like to cling to. And yet,
unable to admit our original sins, we compound them with crime after crime,
year after year, decade after decade, and now we are incinerating babies in
Gaza with chemical weapons.
And while this is going on, The Suburbanite publishes an article about women
who meet to contribute to the Jewish “victims” who were removed from illegal
Gaza settlements by the Israeli government. There is something about this
that is more than just bad taste. I would call it obscene.
-Rich Siegel
