In a recent Maine Voices column (“Years of inhumanity to Palestinians have inhuman consequences,” Oct. 14, 2023), the moral equivalency implied between Hamas’ actions and those of Israel was sickening.
Hamas is no different than Isis or al-Qaeda in its terroristic barbarism and brutality. The Hamas charter openly calls for killing Jews. A revision to the charter in 2017 called for a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, seemingly recognizing Israel. However, Hamas said this would be a transitional step for the “liberation of all of Palestine.”
Hamas does not accept the existence of a Jewish state in any form between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. According to the Oct. 14 column, the state of Israel was born of “a small group of European Jews” after the Dreyfus Affair and numerous pogroms. Jews have had a continuous presence in their ancestral homeland for more than 3,000 years based on historical record and archaeological fact. Sometimes they have been the majority; other times, when conquered by invading peoples and driven into exile, the minority.
Throughout the centuries, Jews never gave up hope of returning to their sovereign homeland. Israel fully withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Just think what might have happened had the rulers of Gaza used their humanitarian aid to build hospitals, schools that teach tolerance instead of martyrdom, water treatment facilities and other peaceful enterprises, instead of investing in rockets, tunnels and other instruments of terror.
Peter Lewis
Portland
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