But where I differ strongly with some of my political comrades is on the issue of the Shoah (I refuse to use the word holocaust).

A small minority in my political community are Shoah revisionists who don’t deny that it happened, they just question the numbers of dead and documentation.

What is particularly disturbing is that many revisionists are Jewish.

I’ve argued that how can you question the archived news footage, pictures, falsified death records and the relics the Nazi’s had no time to destroy.

Six million people, over one million in Auschwitz alone, don’t all die from natvral causes.

Revisionists have argued with me about the accuracy of the number count.

Of course it cannot be an exact figure as this event happened in the paper and typewriter age before computers, but that doesn’t mean the numbers aren’t a close estimate.

My great grandparents came to America from Germany 20 years before Hitler.

I am proud of my maternal Jewish lineage. I’ve known Auschwitz survivors.

They are my people. I try to imagine what it must’ve been like to be sent to the chambers or be starved and worked to death.

To try to survive the brutal winters in Poland dressed in clothing as thin as pajamas. Or to freeze to death or die by typhus.

The horror. Every shabbes when I kindle the sabbath lights, I watch the dancing flames and think about the six million.

Never forget.

Historically, the U.S. backed Israel’s view that UN Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967 does not require a full withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines (the 1967 lines). Indeed, the resolution was co-authored by both the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Arthur Goldberg, and the British Ambassador Lord Caradon. This was specifically true of the withdrawal clause in the resolution, which called on Israeli armed forces to withdraw “from territories” not “from the territories,” as the Soviet Union had demanded. The exclusion of the definite article “the” was authorized by President Johnson, who rejected Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin’s pressure to include stricter additional language requiring a full Israel withdrawal. To be sure, Resolution 242 also emphasized the “inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war.” Yet at the same time, it also affirmed the right of every state in the area to live within “secure and recognized boundaries.”

President Johnson’s insistence on upholding the territorial flexibility of 242 could be traced to a statement he made on June 19, 1967, in the immediate wake of the Six-Day War. In this statement, he declared that the old “truce lines” had been “fragile and violated,” and that what was needed were “recognized boundaries” that would provide “security against terror, destruction and war.”

Thirteen years later, in March 1980, the U.S. voted in favor of UN Security Council Resolution 465, which determined, inter alia, that:

…all measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity and that Israel’s policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War and also constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East…

Although the main focus of the resolution was Israel’s settlement policy, the provision that all measures taken by Israel in the occupied territories “have no legal validity” implied that those measures could not serve as a basis for territorial claims in the future. (Contrary to the concept stipulated in President’s George W. Bush letter to Prime Minister Sharon 24 years later that the final status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians should reflect the “new realities on the ground.”). (IMPORTANT) However, the Carter administration later explained that it had intended to abstain in the vote and that its support for the resolution was due to a “breakdown in communication” between the White House and the U.S. mission to the UN.

On September 1, 1982, President Reagan, in an address that came to be known as the “Reagan Plan,” stated: “In the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely ten miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel’s population lived within artillery range of hostile armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again.” Secretary of State George Shultz was even more explicit in a 1988 address: “Israel will never negotiate from or return to the 1967 borders.”

In 1997, in a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote: “I would like to reiterate our position that Israel is entitled to secure and defensible borders which should be directly negotiated and agreed with its neighbors.”

About three weeks before he completed his second term in January 2001, President Clinton presented his own plan for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

According to the plan, Israel would have retained the main settlement blocs in exchange for a “land swaps,” by which Israel would concede territory it held before the 1967 war in return for any new West Bank land. The “land swap” was not required by Resolution 242, but was an Israeli concession at the 2000 Camp David Summit that Clinton embraced. However, the Clinton parameters did not explicitly mention the 1967 borders and were officially withdrawn before he left office. After George W. Bush came into office, U.S. officials informed the newly elected Sharon government that it would not be bound by proposals made the Barak team at Camp David, which became the basis for the Clinton proposals.

In a letter dated April 14, 2004, President Bush wrote to Prime Minster Sharon that he remained committed to his “vision of two states living side by side in peace and security as the key to peace, and to the roadmap as the route to get there.” The President further stated:

As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.

thanks

jim

The families of those who lost loved ones because of OBL and his organization deserved to learn the news of his death. His passing will not bring their loved ones back – but it is information they are entitled to. Our soldiers and their families who have given so much in this mission deserved to know of his death.

Certainly his death will have repercussions. We can only pray that our government is prepared for these. But these repercussions will have nothing to do with how we react to OBL’s death.

Does OBL’s death make a difference? It doesn’t end terror. It doesn’t stop the wars. It won’t stop the intense security at the airports. But, it does send a loud message: kill thousands of innocent Americans and you will, eventually, be punished.