Re: Tannenwald Op Ed (March 27) 1

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After reading the Op Ed “Elections in Israel: Is Racism a Jewish Value,” by Nina Tannenwald, I am left to wonder at her complete, and no doubt willful, blindness to the reason that the conflict between Israel and the so-called Palestinians cannot be settled. Here is the reason: The Palestinians do not want to live peacefully side-by-side with Israel in their own state. Instead, their goal is to destroy Israel, exterminate its Jews, and create their own Islamic terror-state on its ruins.

The charter of Hamas, the elected ruler of Gaza, overtly and proudly calls for the liquidation of all Jews, wherever they may live, and for the destruction of the State of Israel. It indoctrinates its population, and in particular its children, in its culture of Jew hatred and glorification of death. Is that not racism?

The President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is in the 10th year of his four-year term. He dares not call an election, since Hamas would surely win. Even if he had any real inclination to sign a settlement with Israel, he knows it would amount to signing his own death warrant, since he and his kleptocratic cronies have thoroughly indoctrinated the West Bank population to violently reject any normalization of relations with Israel. What’s more, he is a Holocaust denier who has declared that no Israeli (read: Jew) will be allowed to live in “Palestine.”  Is that not racism?

This situation, and not the recent Israeli elections, is the truly “troubling trend” that should lead the Obama administration to chart a “new course of action.” It should begin by making it clear to Hamas and the Palestinian authority that until they are willing to recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, cease their genocidal incitement of hatred of Jews and renounce their advocacy of the destruction of the State of Israel, there will be no possibility of gaining the support of the United States for the establishment of a State of Palestine.

Michael Mellion

Pawtucket, R.I.