Dear Editorial Board,
My name is Logan Fraigun (He/Him). I am a third year political science student. I am associated with Hillel, the largest Jewish campus organization in the world, AEPi, the largest Jewish fraternity, and Chabad, one of the largest Jewish religious organizations in the world.
As a UCR student and an educated reader, I find your recent article “Timeline: A Brief History of Palestine and Israel” full of mistakes. I understand that the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is complex and it is not easy to summarize it in one article, but many key facts that impacted the lives of millions in that region were left out or distorted. I hope that in the future you would use more reliable sources which could help to refute the incorrect narrative.
Here are a few corrections:
The Israeli War of Independence is described as “a series of conflicts in which Arabs attacked Jewish settlements and institutions, and Jewish people attacked Palestinians.” In fact, Israel was invaded by the armies of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. According to the Department of State, the war was fought between the Israel arm forces and the armies of surrounding Arab countries, not by Palestinian civilians.
Additionally, when the article addresses the Six-Day War of 1967, it complains that as a result of the war, Israel “got control of the whole of Palestine,” but it completely ignores why the war was fought in the first place. The Six-Day War was forced on Israel by Egypt’s President Nasser, who mined the port of Eilat and required the UN to remove its peacekeepers from the borders of Israel, all in preparation for an imminent attack on Israel by the United Arab Republic.
According to the CIA, Office of Political Research, in 1973, the USSR provided weapons to Egypt and Syria and not the other way around.
The article ignored the peace offers by Prime Minister Barak in 2000 and Prime Minister Olmert in 2008 that were declined by the Palestinian leadership. Abu Mazen admitted that it was a mistake in an article by Elliot Abrams. In President Bill Clinton’s autobiography, especially the chapter about the 2000 talks, you could have understood how Arafat failed to establish an independent state for his people.
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