The Jerusalem Post
Letters

Teeth, not truth

Sir, – “Moderate” Daoud Kuttab’s “Support the Mecca agreement” (February 26) will earn him a new image as one who promotes falsehoods while issuing subtle threats.

Kuttab claims that there is now a “clear shift in Hamas alignment.” Yet Hamas still refuses to recognize Israel or fight terrorism. Kuttab claims Hamas has agreed to “honor” previous agreements.

Not only has Hamas not fulfilled previous agreements such as ending incitement and terror, neither did Yasser Arafat or, today, has Mahmoud Abbas.

Kuttab criticizes the US for its unhappiness with the Hamas victory and the Hamas/Fatah unity government. But should the US be happy with a terrorist group’s election victory, or with a unity government that makes no pro-peace changes?

Kuttab then condemns the US for making “demands” of the Palestinian Authority that the US doesn’t make even of other Arab sovereign states. But the PA gave written agreements to these “demands” in 1993, 1994, 1995 and in the road map, in return for Israeli concessions, most of which Israel has already fulfilled.

Kuttab then boasts of the PA (sans Hamas) supporting an Israeli state along the ‘67 border. But this would require the near-impossibility of removing 400,000 Israelis from their homes beyond the Green Line and the loss of half of Jerusalem.

When prime minister Barak offered almost all of that, the PA said no, and went to war.

Finally comes Kuttab’s less-than-subtle threat: that the US had better not “anger” the Sunnis and had better be “careful… about how [it] deal[s] with the accord produced and signed in the shadow of Islam’s holiest mosque.”

Shame on you, Daoud Kuttab, for ignoring truth and showing your teeth.

MORTON A. KLEIN
President, Zionist Organization of America
New York