February 8, 2009

Re: “Letter to the Editor” (Jerry Ortiz Y Pino, February 5-11)

In defending the remarks of Council President Benton regarding Israel’s Operation Cast Lead – remarks which Councilman Benton has since apologized for — Mr. Ortiz y Pino unfortunately reiterates a host of disproven accusations against the Jewish State.

First, the genocide charge against Israel is particularly odious: if Israel truly has such designs, how has the population of the West Bank and Gaza managed to grow from 950,000 in 1967 to approximately 2.6 million today? Contra Mr. Ortiz y Pino it is totally appropriate to make a big deal out of a false accusation of Genocide.  That term — coined by a Jewish survivor of Nazism — has no equivalence to Israel’s policies, which two years ago saw Israel unconditionally withdraw from Gaza to allow the Palestinian population self-determination.

Sadly, instead of the lives of Gazans improving, the region became a terror base for Hamas. Behind the tragedy of dead children are Hamas terrorists who choose to launch mortars from schoolyards, and hide rockets in apartment buildings, callously imperiling their own people.

As for Mr. Ortiz y Pino’s Apartheid charge, it’s worth noting that despite the mendacious title of his 2006 book, former President Carter actually never claimed that Israel engages in the racist policies of pre-1994 South Africa, which legislated a vision of racial superiority completely absent from Israeli governmental rule. “Apartheid” and “Genocide” are no less offensive than “Ethnic Cleansing” when misapplied to the most religiously and ethnically diverse nation in the Middle East.

While reciting a litany of pejoratives to condemn Israel, Mr. Ortiz y Pino manages to overlook the basic motivation behind Israel’s recent military actions: to halt the thousands of rockets that have been fired from Gaza into Israel, with more than 500,000 Israelis in the direct range of these weapons. Thus, Mr. Ortiz y Pino ignores the most truthful phrase to convey Israeli policy: a country’s simple right to self-defense.

Sincerely,

Robert Efroymson                                                              

President, Jewish Federation of New Mexico