1. Next Meeting – This Thursday; 2. Yasher Koach to Suki Halevi

Bill Stewart’s Understanding Your World column (“Middle East peace is in Kushner’s hands,” May 6), offers little about Jared Kushner and even less about peace. Stewart fills his column with classic anti-Israel propaganda, which leaves one wondering if there is a deeper animus below the surface.

Stewart claims to link the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the ongoing brutality of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. ISIS is anti-Israel, but its core motivation is its desire to build a global caliphate governed exclusively by fundamentalist interpretations of Islamic law. ISIS extremism — promoted by a small minority — drives the slaughter of innocent people in Iraq and Syria and terror attacks in places like Manchester, England.

Discussing terrorism directed against Israel, Stewart asserts that while it is not “justifiable,” it is certainly “understandable.” Evidently, Stewart sympathizes to some degree with the Palestinian terrorist who, in March 2016, murdered 28-year-old Taylor Force, a National Honor Society member at New Mexico Military Institute, West Point graduate and veteran of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, while Force was visiting Israel with his Vanderbilt University classmates. Stewart’s attempt to legitimize Palestinian terrorism is disgraceful and insults the memory of Force and thousands of Israeli terror victims and their families.

Stewart is no fan of the United States’ support for Israel, labeling it “foreign policy rubbish” and claiming that it undermines prospects for peace. However, during the past two decades, strong support for Israel helped move peace talks forward and encouraged Israel to take difficult but significant steps toward peace. This was true under President BIll Clinton in 2000 at Camp David and under President George W. Bush in 2005, when Israel unilaterally removed all Israeli military installations and Jewish settlements from Gaza.

Context and accuracy are in short supply throughout Stewart’s piece. He recalls George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as a “hard-line” Christian Palestinian. Stewart, a former reporter and bureau chief for Time magazine, does not mention that Time described Habash as the “godfather of Middle East terrorism” while The New York Times called Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine “a hard-line Marxist group that shocked the world with a campaign of airline hijackings and bombings. …”

Similarly, while Stewart accurately states that “Muslim religious leaders throughout the region preach that Jewish occupation of Jerusalem is unacceptable and must be rejected,” he fails to mention the deep-seated, virulent anti-Semitism behind these views or that the preferred method of “rejecting” Jews living in Jerusalem (as they have done for thousands of years) is often violence, expulsion and death. Sympathizing with terrorists and anti-Semites, Stewart ignores Palestinians such as Bassem Eid, who advocate for economic development and peace.

The bottom line is this: Stewart seems to believe that Israel’s existence and conflict with the Palestinians are the underlying causes for all of the Middle East’s problems. “It is the sheer unfairness of it all that infuriates so many people,” Stewart claims. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ended tomorrow, Stewart believes, ISIS would cease its brutality, fighting between all nations, factions and tribes in the Middle East would end, and regional peace would break out. This is not only a complete fantasy, it suggests something nefarious about Stewart’s polemic, which makes Israel — and only Israel — the cause of every tragedy in the Middle East.

We hope, pray and work for a resolution of the long struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, one that respects both peoples and provides a path toward the creation of a Palestinian state, living side by side in peace with a secure Jewish State of Israel. Biased diatribes such as Stewart’s do nothing to advance mutual understanding and reconciliation, and only serve to undermine the quest for peace.