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Peace Process

'Israel's right to exist not based on our suffering'


By Stan Goodenough
June 16, 2009

US President Barack Obama received a stinging slap on the wrist Sunday when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointedly corrected a remark the American made in Cairo earlier this month.

Pandering to the Muslim world, which has long argued that Israel was a foreign, colonial implant in the Arab Middle East by nations wishing to assuage the guilt for not preventing the Holocaust, Obama stated that "the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied."

Netanyahu's refutation was ringing:

"The right of the Jewish People to a state in the Land of Israel does not arise from the series of disasters that befell the Jewish People over 2,000 years -- persecutions, expulsions, pogroms, blood libels, murders, which reached its climax in the Holocaust, an unprecedented tragedy in the history of nations," he said emphatically.

"There are those who say that without the Holocaust the State would not have been established, but I say that if the State of Israel had been established in time, the Holocaust would not have taken place."

The right of the Jews "to establish our sovereign state here, in the Land of Israel, arises from one simple fact: Eretz Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish People."

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