Hiram Cohen's response ("Jews deserve to live in homeland," June 3) to the recent billboard against military aid to Israel is sadly predictable. His talking points represent the worst of the Jewish right.
The most extreme example of this in Mr. Cohen's letter is his clinging to what is the most thoroughly debunked propaganda: A land without a people for a people without a land.
He writes, "Israel was pretty much empty." It's now essentially an accepted fact that through 1890-1920, the beginning decades of Zionism and their drive to colonize Palestine, the population there was roughly 10 percent Jewish, with the majority of the remaining population being the indigenous Arabs, approximately 700,000 of them. This has been long confirmed by many respected and historians and academics such as Benny Morris or Noam Chomsky.
Worse, Mr. Cohen implies that Arabs in this part of the world want "the extermination of the Jews," and that U.S. aid is needed to "prevent another holocaust." This type of broad-stroke fear-mongering mirrors Israel's style of military force; it is wildly disproportionate rhetoric that shuts down most responses due to fear of such vicious and offensive reprisals.
Tony Judt recalled the response of an early Israeli ambassador to the question, "What do you regard as your greatest achievement here in Washington?" The ambassador's response, "Convincing American Jews that anti-Zionism is the same as anti-Semitism."
John Dworkin
Albany