Dear Editor:

Where to start…

I wish to respond to David Christensen’s April 26 letter to the editor. The professor starts by linking between historical and current events and forgetting that Holocaust Memorial Day is about the 11 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. It’s not an excuse to talk about Israel — positively or negatively. As for Christensen’s accusations on Israel’s action, I must reject them under the claim that they are wrong and preposterous.

The “United States-dominated United Nations” offered a partition plan for two states — a Jewish one and an Arab one. The Soviet Union, a country that could not be accused of being “controlled” by the United States, approved the plan. So did the Jewish Agency, which was the active government for the Jewish community — even though 60 percent of the new Jewish state was composed of desert land. The Arab leadership rejected the plan, mainly because it refused to allow a Jewish state to exist.

As for the “food and travel blockade” Christensen refers to in his letter; hundreds of tons of food, medicine and other humanitarian aid are entering Gaza in trucks every day. I know this not because I’ve read it in the New York Times or watched it on CNN; I’ve been there and seen the trucks with my own eyes.

What happens to that food once it falls to the hands of Hamas is a different question, reminding everyone that Hamas has used every chance it had to bring rockets and explosives into the Gaza Strip to be used against Israeli civilians. Many Palestinians from the Gaza Strip are taken to Israeli hospitals for life-saving treatments.

For some reason, I never hear human rights activists raise their voice for the 1 million Israelis living under the daily fear of rocket attacks, many of whom are children. And again, I know this because three of those Israeli children living in fear are my nephew and nieces. They don’t raise their voice for more than 10,000 Syrians who have been butchered by President Assad’s army. For some reason, it’s easy to ignore the importance of a tragedy such as 1 million and a half children killed in the Holocaust to make up excuses to attack Israel.

Israelis don’t need to use their history of oppression to justify their actions; they have the truth behind them to do just that.

Assaf Grumberg

Israel emissary for the Jewish Federation of Southern Illinois