J Street’s Hadar Susskind is reported as saying that only those who wish to stall and make concessions “don’t want to see a serious U.S. plan” (‘Buzz Over U.S. Peace Plan Sparking Jitters,’ April 16).
If that is the only conclusion Susskind can draw about the motives of those with whom he disagrees, then it’s no surprise that Susskind ignores Arab hostility to Israel’s existence and prefers to substitute the fiction that conflict persists because Israel doesn’t make still more concessions to the Palestinians.
Since 1993, Israel has handed over half of Judea and Samaria and all of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority (PA), as well as assets, funds and even weapons, only to receive more terror in return. PA President Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad and other senior Fatah leaders explicitly reject Israel as a Jewish state, say they will never recognize it and admit that Fatah has never recognized Israel (only the PLO did so).
Additionally, they glorify terrorists like Dalal Mughrabi, who commanded the terrorists that perpetrated the 1978 coastal road bus hijacking, in which 37 Israelis, including 12 children, were slaughtered. Fayyad and other senior PA officials recently paid condolence calls on the families of three terrorists who murdered an Israeli.
Somehow Susskind and J Street haven’t noticed any of this. But ZOA and others have, for which reason we oppose a U.S. imposed peace plan that would inevitably involve further, one-sided Israeli concessions to non-peaceful Palestinian partners.
National President
Zionist Organization of America
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