To the editor:
Recent letters in these pages, including “Free speech and historical truths about Israelis and Palestinians” and the earlier statement from Berkshires in Solidarity with Palestine, offer a selective and misleading account of the history and realities of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Their narratives omit essential facts—legal, historical, and moral—that are necessary for any honest discussion.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the claim that in 1920 Britain “assigned political power” to a Jewish minority in violation of the League of Nations principle of self-determination. That assertion is historically and legally incorrect. The mandate for Palestine, adopted unanimously by the League of Nations in 1922, did not assign political power to anyone. Britain, not the Jewish community, governed the territory. What the mandate did do was recognize the historical connection of the Jewish people to Palestine and call for the establishment of a Jewish National Home, while explicitly protecting the civil and religious rights of all existing non-Jewish communities.
This framework reflected the Jews’ indigenous status in the land, not a demographic snapshot of 1920, and the League’s judgment that the Jewish people, like the Arab peoples in neighboring mandates, were entitled to national development. Nor did the mandate system require demographic majorities: If it had, neither Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, nor Transjordan could have been created in their post-Ottoman forms. Mandates were designed to prepare peoples for self-governance after centuries of empire, not to freeze political futures based on Ottoman-era population distributions. To portray the mandate for Palestine as an undemocratic imposition is to misrepresent both its text and its historical purpose.
Equally absent from these letters is the fact that Israel was established in 1947 by a United Nations partition resolution, fully consistent with international law, following the legal termination of the British Mandate. The Jewish leadership accepted that plan; the Arab states rejected it and launched a war to destroy the newborn state. Historical consequences flowed from that decision.
These accounts also ignore the long and painful history of nearly 1 million Jews expelled or forced to flee from Arab countries around 1948, communities in Baghdad, Cairo, Tripoli, and elsewhere uprooted after centuries of continuous presence. Their property was confiscated, their citizenship stripped, and Israel absorbed them without international assistance. The refusal of Arab states to integrate Palestinian refugees, by contrast, preserved their statelessness for political leverage.
Just as striking is what these letters choose not to mention about the present. There is no acknowledgment of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 civilians (including Americans), raped women, burned families alive, and abducted over 250 hostages, events that precipitated the current war. Nor is there mention that posters calling for the release of those hostages were torn down repeatedly even here in Great Barrington, a grim contradiction to professed concern about “suppressed voices.”
Nor do these narratives acknowledge that more than 2 million Arab citizens live in Israel today, voting in elections, serving in the Knesset, the judiciary, the medical system, and even the military, where Druze service is mandatory. Bedouins serve in elite reconnaissance units, and increasing numbers of Muslim and Christian Arabs volunteer. This pluralistic reality bears no resemblance to the simplistic and inflammatory charge of “apartheid.”
Israel’s actions, however one chooses to spin the debate, are not the acts of a genocidal state but of a democracy responding to a movement that openly declares its goal to annihilate it. To assign Israel sole moral responsibility for a century-long conflict, while erasing context, rejecting documented history, and ignoring terrorism, is not advocacy. It is distortion.
None of this denies the real suffering of Palestinians or the urgent need for a just political resolution. But no lasting peace can be built on selective fragments of history or one-sided accusations. Real dialogue requires honesty, not propaganda dressed up as compassion.
And let’s be honest about one final point.
The relentless denial of Israel’s legitimacy and refusal to acknowledge any Israeli suffering reveal the essential premise behind both letters: not a desire for peace or coexistence, but for Israel itself to cease to exist. When critics reject even the concept of a Jewish state, they are not advocating justice; they are advocating erasure.
Barry R. Shapiro
New Marlborough
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