Editor:
A recent letter, (“https://alamedasun.com/letters/16547,” Jan. 19) braids three, seemingly immiscible, threads together to gussy up an anti-Israel bias.

Referencing the Alameda Sun’s Dec. 22, 2022, editorial cartoon of Mary and Joseph at our southern border, just before Christmas day, she immediately lunges for the Israeli jugular. Dredging up the usual tropes, she conjures up a Palestine that never was, “the Palestinian people in historic Palestine.”

The area identified as Palestine became Israel in 1300 b.c.e. and was successively conquered by Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Ottomans. When the Ottoman Empire mistakenly aligned with the Central Powers, who lost World War I, Syria and Lebanon were placed under French Mandate, while Jordan and Israel were placed under British Mandate.

Jordan, which was and is 70 percent Palestinian, was ceded to the Hashemites, and Israel morphed into a sovereign Jewish democratic state in 1948. It remains the only democratic state in the Middle East; Israel has had five elections in five years to select its Prime Minister.

While it may be true that “Our State Department voices moral opposition to the ongoing state violence in Palestine,” that opprobrium is directed at Hamas, al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Authority, all of which call for the liquidation of Israel. Nothing is more difficult to dislodge than a false hypothesis; furthermore, living in California, it is doubtful that anyone has heard a balanced debate on the Middle East.

The letter suggests that the “The parallels between today’s Israel-Palestine conflict and the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border are undeniable,” when in fact there is no comparison.

The huddled masses at our southern border are not trying to dismantle nor terrorize the U.S. — they recognize it as a superior place to live for many reasons. Border crossings into Israel have entirely different objectives. The letter displayed an obsessive bias and consorts with dissemblers who aim to make Israel “a pariah state.”

In California and elsewhere, college administrators and newspaper editors turn a blind eye to a pervasive campaign of calumny against Israel as an “apartheid” state. The Anti-Defamation League recognizes the apartheid gambit as “a classic anti-Semitic stereotype.” The apartheid narrative is the recasting and modernization of the blood libel; an abuse of legal and historical fact; it is a myth designed to place Israel beyond the pale, to serve as a preliminary to its destruction.

Raine speaks of parallels; the “apartheid” fable ladled out to the uninformed and misinformed, is a stepping-stone to Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s demand that Israel be “wiped off the map.”

Antizionism is not advocacy; it is an incitement and a continuation of the antisemitism that has been endemic to western civilization since the fall of Judea in 70 c.e. And finally, speaking of “parallels” the antizionist, anti-Semitic and BDS movements have “parallels” within the darkest chapters of the 2,000 years of western history.