Ms. Lillian Taiz, President
California Faculty Association
March 30, 2009
Dear Ms. Taiz,
In the California Faculty Association February 7, 2009 Resolution,“CFA Call for A Halt to Violence Against All Civilians in Palestine and Israel”, there were some misstatements of fact. The most obvious one is that there is no nation named “Palestine”. The reason for this is that when the United Nations created a partition plan that would have given Palestinian Jews their own state and Palestinian Arabs their own state, the Jewish Palestinians agreed while the Arabs did not. The result was the re-establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, which was respected by the United Nations, and followed by the immediate attack against Israel by 5 Arab countries. Several times since then, especially in the years 2000 and 2005, Israel made concessions so that the Palestinian Arabs would have an easier time creating their own state. Each time, Palestinian leaders responded to these gifts of friendship by escalating violence against the State of Israel. More CFA statements and our responses follow:
1. Resolution statement: …Whereas, neither the Israeli military nor Hamas is justified in attacking the civilian population of the other….
Fact: Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, has been purposely attacking Israeli civilians with rockets on a daily basis since 2005, after Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza without receiving anything in return. Rockets from Gaza have fallen on schools, homes and other civilian residential areas in Israel, causing death, maiming and destruction. In a belated response to these years of attacks, Israeli military forces targeted terrorist arms caches, tunnels where weapons are imported and stored and rocket launch pads. The IDF did not purposely target civilians; in fact, went out of its way to avoid harming civilians by giving them advance warning. On the other hand, Hamas, against International Law, has been launching rockets from residential areas, including schools and mosques, where they have also stockpiled armaments. Thus, when the IDF responded to rocket fire from a schoolyard, people within the school, most of them terrorists, died due to secondary explosions of the Hamas bombs stored within the basement of the school. Your statement which makes it appear as if Israeli attacks on military targets (rocket launch sites and weapons tunnels and caches) were equivalent to Hamas’ purposeful attacks on civilians, is incorrect and misleading.
2. Resolution statement: Whereas, as educators in California institutions of higher learning, we are horrified by the military destruction of educational sites, the student casualties, and the widespread violations of the right to education in the occupied territories….
Fact: The statement makes it appear as if the only destruction of educational sites and student casualties has been in Gaza and ignores the schools, including a kindergarten and a University that were among a number of educational institutions within Israel that were damaged by Hamas rockets. Your statement also ignores the rockets emanating from Hezbollah in the North which have, in the recent past, created havoc in Israeli Universities and caused families to live in bomb shelters for weeks at a time (with children unable to attend school) and other families to relocate temporarily to other cities within Israel. Again, educational sites in Gaza would not have been damaged, had not Hamas used those sites for rocket launchings and for storage of armaments.
3. Resolution statement several times throughout the resolution: in the occupied territories…..
Facts:
When Arabs speak of “occupied territory” they mean the entire State of Israel, a country which has just as much a right to exist in peace and safety as any other member country of the United Nations.
Gaza is not an “occupied territory”. Gaza has not been “occupied” since 2005 and has had its own government since then. In fact, Gaza was under the control of Egypt from 1948 to 1967, and before that, was under the control of Britain. (In 1979, Israel attempted to cede Gaza back to Egypt, but Egypt refused.) Neither Britain nor Egypt gave the people of Gaza what Israel did in 2005: complete control over the land and the opportunity to build their own nationhood. The government and people of Gaza, instead of peacefully working to build up their land, chose to allocate all of their resources to the purchase of weapons with the stated goal of destroying Israel and killing Jews everywhere.
Also, in 2005, Israel was willing to yield over 90% of Judea/Samaria (the West Bank) to Palestinian Arabs following the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, but the plan became derailed due to the violence that emanated from Gaza immediately thereafter.
Israel withdrew completely from Southern Lebanon in 2000, which was followed by attacks against Israel by Hezbollah. That area is not “occupied” unless you want to consider that it’s been occupied by Hezbollah, a proxy of Syria, which has not lived up to the ceasefire agreement of 2006.
Israel has not threatened the existence of any other country. Her wars have been defensive ones. Every nation has both the right and responsibility to protect its civilian population from attack. At the same time, the charters of both Fatah and Hamas threaten to annihilate Israel and Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel with an atomic bomb. Iran and Syria continue to provide terrorist Palestinian organizations with more and more highly sophisticated weapons.
4. The effect on education and on labor … of which the Resolution speaks, has been especially felt by the people of Southern Israel, whose homes, schools and businesses have suffered drastically for years and whose children suffer from post traumatic stress disorder due to the daily rockets and danger of death and destruction. The policies of Hamas, in continually putting at risk civilian populations in both Gaza and Israel, are the cause of suffering on both sides.
While it appears that there was an attempt to be somewhat “even-handed” in the resolution, it is neither balanced nor accurate. Please create a document that reflects the true facts in the Middle East.
Sincerely,
Sandor and Bunny Shuch
Sandor Shuch is a retired attorney and teacher. Bunny Shuch is a retired social worker and teacher. They live in Phoenix, Arizona.
