To the Editor:
Ilya Feoktistov '06 ("Loving the Bomb: How Palestinian Society Glorifies Extremism," Jan. 25) asks his critics to "find anything within mainstream Israeli society even remotely approaching the level of hatred and blood-thirst in mainstream Palestinian culture." Funny he should ask. Just today, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported that "some 46 percent of Israel's Jewish citizens favor transferring Palestinians out of the territories, while 31 percent favor transferring Israeli Arabs out of the country, according to the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies' poll. When the question of transfer was posed in a more roundabout way, 60 percent of respondents said that they were in favor of encouraging Israeli Arabs to leave the country."
Let us step back and ask ourselves what this poll means. In other words, 41 percent of Israeli Jews favor the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank, expelling them to Jordan or elsewhere, and as many as 60 percent want to "encourage" Israeli Arabs to flee Israel. Israeli Arabs are Palestinian citizens of Israel -- Christian, Druze and Muslim -- who comprise almost 20 percent of Israel's population. They have been mostly peaceful throughout, although some have been convicted of aiding Palestinian terrorists and many Israeli Jews consider them a "fifth column." Although allowed to vote and run for office, they are discriminated against in all areas of life, from housing and employment to land ownership and political activities. Most of all, by their very existence, they threaten to upset the exclusively Jewish character of the state, and are thus marginalized and sometimes even murdered. For example, a deserter from the Israeli army sprayed a bus with gunfire in an Israeli Arab town on Aug. 5, 2005, killing four Palestinian citizens and wounding a dozen before being killed himself. Moreover, the second intifada was sparked in large part by the murder of 13 Israeli Arabs who were protesting against Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in Sept. 2000.
It should put grave doubt in people's minds as to Feoktistov's credibility when the society he so righteously defends wants a minority of its own citizens, albeit of a different race, to disappear, and for its neighbors next door to flee in terror of expulsion. Israel Shahak, an Israeli professor and himself a survivor of the Belsen concentration camp, did not stutter when he observed calmly that "By any standard, the state of Israel is a racist state."
