Dear Editor,

An article that appeared in the October 2002 issue of National Geographic on the current state of Israel brought home how one-sided our government has been in the application of United Nations resolutions and mandates.

We are currently castigating Iraq for its complete disregard of U.N. resolutions requiring it to destroy its chemical and biological weapons and to submit to unobstructed U.N. inspections as a condition for the cease-fire, which ended the 1991 war that pushed Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Despite claims by Iraq that it had dismantled its chemical and biological weapons capabilities, its interference with the inspection process ultimately terminated the U.N. inspection program, in direct violation of the terms of the U.N. cease-fire agreement. The present administration is rightfully calling Iraq on the carpet for violating the terms of the U.N. cease-fire agreement and challenging the U.N. to force Iraq to comply.

However, when it comes to Israel, it is an entirely different story. In 1947, when the U.N. established the state of Israel, it adopted a plan which called for the partition of Palestine into two states, one Palestinian and one Jewish. In the 1948 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Jordan occupied the Palestinian West Bank, which Israel took back in the 1967 Six-Day War. Israel immediately adopted a policy of promoting Israeli settlements in the West Bank with the goal of making it impossible for any future government to reverse the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

In 1977 the Israeli government unilaterally declared that any Palestinian landowner who could not produce a legal title – a document foreign to Palestinian tradition – could have their property seized as state land, no matter how many generations of Palestinians had lived on it. The stolen land was then given to Israeli “settlers,” along with a generous subsidy to encourage its occupation.

All of this was in direct violation of the U.N. resolution establishing separate Israeli and Palestinian states, and illegal under international law. This unlawful occupation has now been going on for 25 years, and neither the U.N. nor the United States has raised a finger to stop it and force Israel to evacuate the settlements and return the properties to their rightful owners.

So the United States is now ready to go to war with Iraq to force it to comply with U.N. resolutions, but does absolutely nothing to make Israel do the same. It is this one-sided stance in the Middle East that has earned us the hatred of the Arab world and precipitated the war of terror against the United States and its people.

Hal Sundin

Glenwood Springs