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By demonizing pleasure, we set ourselves up for unfulfilling sex lives.
Opinion: Let’s talk about sex
Published March 27, 2024

The Middle Eastern conflict: fact and fiction

It’s very disturbing to me, as well as to all people who carry a brain on their shoulders, to read what Dreytser wrote about Israel in the Oct. 6 Daily, and take it without comment. Although I understand where he comes from and why he wrote that, under no circumstances does evil become good and vice versa.
To those who live in the present and don’t know or don’t want to know about the past, I am writing these lines. The state of Israel, in its very first days, was based on violence and aggression. Starting by expelling about a million Palestinians from their villages and cities in 1948, Israel has committed a nonstop series of massacres against Palestinians.
Since then, with all humanity witnessing, Israel has been carrying out a continuous and relentless aggression against the Palestinian people. To be more specific, from 1955 to 1992, Israel refused to implement 69 resolutions issued by the U.N. Security Council against Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. At the same time that the United States joined or acquiesced to these 69 resolutions, it used its veto 29 separate times from 1972 to 1990 to prevent the Security Council from passing resolutions against Israel.
Talking about the start of the violence in Jerusalem, Dreytser mentioned the visit that Ariel Sharon made to the Haram Al Sharif. Instead of calling Sharon the opposition leader, Dreytser should have given some facts about who Sharon is. Sharon is an ex-army general responsible for taking the lives of 3,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, not to mention other crimes he committed against humanity for which he should be brought to justice.
I agree with Dreytser that Sharon’s visit wasn’t the reason for the violence; in fact, it was well-planned to be the starter spark for violence. Sharon had the blessings of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who sent along with him thousands of heavily armed police and special army units in the most provocative and arrogant military show off. No surprise there, since Barak, who is supposedly the dove for peace, has had his own share of terrorizing and killing Palestinians during the Palestinian Uprising, Intifadah (1987-1993) and also in assassinating Palestinian key figures in Lebanon in the 1970s and in Tunisia in 1988.
Regarding the “done deal” that Dreytser talked about, the negotiations were all in Israel’s favor. Israel has always negotiated the Palestinians, while actively and consistently confiscating the Palestinian land to make it even harder for them to lead a normal life afterward. By stealing the land and demolishing Palestinian homes, Israel aimed at creating a group of geographically, politically and economically isolated islands of Palestinian residential areas to prevent the future establishment of a Palestinian state.
The so-called concessions in giving up large parts of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem is an obvious untruth that Dreytser is trying to insert here. The fact is that Israel would have kept the Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, which dissects the Palestinian land and renders it far less intact to build any geographical and political continuity.
The claim that Barak was ready to agree on United Nations control over Jerusalem is another untruth by Dreytser, who knows that Barak and all Israel’s leaders are playing on the chord of keeping Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel in order to gain votes in the elections. The only major achievement and concession in Barak’s proposal was granting the Palestinian Authority the right to some municipal authority, such as collecting the garbage in Jerusalem.
The conflict on Jerusalem has been raging since the first days of the Zionist movement in Palestine. No one can deny the fact that since its occupation to East Jerusalem, Israel has been conducting excavations underneath Al Aqsa mosque and Al Haram Al Sharif in a desperate hope of finding Jewish ruins and artifacts. So far, it has found nothing to support its claim that the Temple was originally there. Consequently, Israel has no right to deny the Muslims and Christians the right to access the holy places. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 (the document that gave the Jews the right to build a home land in Palestine) by the British mandate required the Jews to respect the indigenous people’s rights to political and religious practices in their land. Instead, Israel has behaved totally the opposite, practicing ethnic cleansing and trying consistently to erase the identity of the Palestinian people. Presently, there are more than five million Palestinian refugees around the world who are denied their basic rights to return to their homeland and their properties that Israel took away forcefully and violently.
The conflict over Jerusalem was under investigation by the international community represented by the League of the Nations in the 1930s. The league sent an investigation committee after a fight that erupted over the Western Wall between Palestinians and Jews. The committee decided that the site belonged to Muslims, and the Jews had nothing to do with it. This decision, of course, was not respected, mainly because the British mandate was completely slanted toward the Jews. Now it’s “absurd” to think that Ariel Sharon visited that purely Muslim site only to instigate and provoke violence and kill the peace process. That’s simply the nature of such an enemy of humanity and a war criminal who must be brought to justice in front of an international war-crime court.
Dreytser’s story about what happened that Friday is completely biased and out of touch with reality. The Israeli soldiers attacked the Muslim worshipers before they finished their prayers and left the mosque. There had been no rock-throwing on the Jewish worshiper at the Wailing Wall because all the injuries on that day were almost exclusively Palestinians. Also, Friday is the Muslim’s praying day, not the Jewish, so I doubt if there were any Jewish worshipers on site that day, unless they came to provoke the situation
The entire world watched how the Israeli soldiers intentionally and cold-bloodedly killed the child Al Dura. He was not caught in a cross fire nor he was used as a shield because his unarmed father tried to shield him with his body. The ambulance driver who tried to rescue them was mercilessly shot dead instantly by the very same soldiers that prevented ambulances from arriving for about an hour to the action area.
I wonder why Dreytser is consistently falsifying the crystal clear facts just for the cheap purpose of gaining false sympathy of the readers. The killing of the 18-month-old child by an armed Jewish settler on the West Bank is further evidence of who exactly conducts systematic war against humanity. In an unprecedented wave of violence and aggressiveness, Israel has used heavy machine guns, anti-tank missiles, tanks and helicopter warships to target unarmed Palestinian protesters, homes and Palestinian policemen who, at the most, carry light arms. I’d like to urge Dreytser to review his math if he already has forgotten it, which I highly doubt because he is a chemical engineering senior. Dreytser, look at the statistics of the dead and injured, and you will see for yourself who the victims and who the criminals are.
I wish I had more space to defy all the untruths with which Dreytser has been feeding readers. I encourage Dreytser to read history carefully and keep in mind that yesterday is not less important than today or tomorrow. The Holocaust of Palestinians must stop.

Jehad Adwan is a Ph.D. nursing student and welcomes comments to [email protected] Send letters to editor to [email protected]

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