I think it is wonderful that you decided to share your thoughts and convictions with your neighbours in Gaza in your open letter, and still, I have some difficulties with what you wrote.

Please let me state my doubts one by one. I am open to discussion and will happily admit to mistakes if I make any, as long as the argument is based on the assumption that all people are equal, and that reason, not religious fanaticism, governs the discussion.

You wrote to your Gazan neighbour, “There really was a Holocaust … You’ve been told that the Holocaust is something the Jews fabricated to justify taking your land.”
The taking of somebody’s land and house, uprooting his olive trees, denying him the right to live in dignity, and eventually killing him, and her, and their young children and their babies, has nothing to do with the question of whether one denies or not what the Germans did to the Jews more than sixty years ago. Savagery is savagery, crime is crime, and barbarism is barbarism, in 1943, in 1948 or 2009.

You wrote, ‘We do not want your land… Our eternal capital, Jerusalem, is open to all faiths to love and to worship”
But dear Dr. Rosenblatt, these few Palestinians who are allowed to come to their eternal capital, Jerusalem, are not allowed to stay after 5 PM, even if their ancestral homes are there. And if you make the effort of trying to access the “Temple Mount” in the way regular people do, you will very, indeed very clearly see yourself that it is not “open…to love and to worship”. What you are saying is simply untrue.

You wrote, “Now we have our own country. Now we have the bombs … Jews are a peaceful people.”
This is a rather strange contradiction: ‘we have the bombs…a peaceful people’. By “the bombs” you probably mean Israel’s nuclear weapons. Indeed, there have been opinions voiced in Israel that a global, or a regional nuclear war (which Israel now has real means to start, unlike Iran or North Korea) would be a happy chance for Israel to settle the “Palestinian question” once and for good. I live not far away from where the conflict is unraveling, and I wouldn’t like to be annihilated along with the rest of my family when Israel uses “the bombs”.

You wrote, “a terrorist is a terrorist” and extol against terrorism. But is not the origin of the state of Israel founded on terrorism? In the Jerusalem History Museum, a picture of the King David Hotel ripped open by a terrorist bomb (with close to a hundred people killed, Jews amongst them) is captioned “Fight Against the British”. And you know perfectly well that the political establishment in Israel today are sons and daughters of professed terrorists, and this is what gives them the legitimacy to rule.

You wrote, Doctor, “We will destroy your homes and your cities. We will make your miserable lives even more miserable” (“Jews are a peaceful people”, you wrote, too)
No matter how many homes and cities are destroyed, no matter how many people are killed, the country is, and will remain, Palestine, as it has been –however troubled— for millennia, with a legitimate place for the Jews in it.

I hope you are peacefully enjoying the calmness and prosperity of your house by the woods and I expect you have some truly good time there while men, women, children, and babies are being blown into pieces or maimed for the rest of their lives by Israeli army’s ammunition, have their flesh burnt through to their bones with Israeli army’s white phosphorus, and have their land planted with land mines from cluster bombs. I hear you are a doctor: does it mean a Medical Doctor? If so, are you as little bound by the Hippocratic Oath as the state of Israel is by international law?

The colonial enterprise of the state of Israel is temporary. Israel has been here in the Middle East for 60 years now, ushered in by Irgun’s terrorism. A similar colonial enterprise of the Crusaders in Palestine lasted for about a hundred years. It took another 150 years more to get the Middle East finally rid of them.

Neither of us, Doctor Rosenblatt, is likely to live long enough to see a peaceful, happy Palestine free of religious fanaticism, where children can play free of fear of being maimed or killed by shrapnel at any moment (which some of the Israeli children share with the children of Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon now), or being buried alive under the rubble of their bulldozed house (the fear of which the Israeli children are free).

But the time of peace will come, David, and I wish that your descendants will enjoy their home by the woods as much as mine will enjoy theirs so close by, because by that time, the culture of violence and oppression will be gone from the Middle East (only to be then supplanted by some equally repulsive one– but that one will pass, too).

All the best, David,
Jaroslaw

I used to favour Israel but the more I see the same mistakes made, the more I’m determined to sit on the fence. Both sides are crazy, as far as I’m concerned.

David Rosenblatt’ letter reminded me that even though Jews from Egypt suffered mainly financial losses ( Nasser took all we had) , we lived with Arabs, Moslem and Christian, side by side. We were friends, neighbours and business partners…sort of what the Arabs and the Jews have in Israel. We did so for decades.

So you see my ashab ( friends in Arabic) we can do it again. Talk to your leaders. Tell them we are cousins as the Bible teaches us, and lets stop hurting each other.
Lets stop fighting. Redirect your efforts to building your country for your children.

Lets start mending the road to peace, the alternatives are not options any more
My son just enlisted in the Israel defence forces and will be there shooting at your sons soon.
WHY??