Telephone: 429 9100
14 April 1999
The Editor
The Halifax Herald
Dear Editor:
Mr. Moshe Renon, National President Canadian Jewish Congress writes{
April 13}eloquently about the horrors of the holocaust and the Nazi crimes against the Jewish and other peoples. He also observes rightly
that " our thoughts today turn to the horrors of Kosovo and the catastrophe and ethnic cleansing inflicted upon ethnic Albanians".
Interestingly, he has no recollection for the massacres and the brutal ethnic cleansing inflicted upon the Palestinian people,by his friends in
Israel who,in 1948, in a deliberate calculated plan, brought about the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and demolished 418
of their towns and villages. The horrors we see in Kosovo today I saw with my own eyes in Palestine in 1948. Those Palestinians remain to this
day,51 years later, huddled in refugee camps waiting to return to their homes, and are not allowed to do so by Israel , in defiance of
international law and repeated U.N. resolutions. Mr. Ronen states correctly that "the world is a poor student". He omits
to note that the majority of the Jewish people in Israel,and outside, are amongst the poop students of history. This was best highlighted by
the renowned British historian, Professor Arnold Toynbee, who,in 1961, in a lecture at McGill University, told his mostly Jewish audience:
" The Jewish people's treatment of the Arabs {in Palestine}in 1948 was as morally indefensible as the slaughter by the
Nazis of six million Jews". He went on to say : " The most tragic thing in human life is when people who have suffered impose suffering in their turn"....
Yours sincerely
Ismail Zayid, M.D.,
Prsident,Canada Palestine Association.