Appeasement not the answer
Zena Hartung’s letter in the Daily News on Nov. 14 speaks for legions of people in her call for Israel to end its counterattack on Hamas in Gaza.
Sadly, they haven’t learned the most important lesson of World War II: Appeasement of aggressors leads to larger wars and ever more deaths, both civilian and military.
They don’t intend to, but they are opposing Israel’s very right to exist.
Hamas drew the first blood in the 2023 War, the latest in a decades-long opposition to Israelis’ right to live in the nation of Israel, which was founded in 1948 by an international council that negotiated an equitable division of the land.
Claims to the land now encompassing Israel, the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, have been disputed and a source of martial conflict for thousands of years.
Today’s occupants are culturally and linguistically Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Twenty percent — about 1.6 million — of Palestinians live in modern Israel. The deaths of civilians, and especially of children and babies, are tragic. Tragic for both sides in any war.
Word War II began with the German invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, Korea and Vietnam.
The United States, Great Britain and other countries tried appeasing Hitler. Hopefully, we all know how that turned out. Just in case: 75 million people died in World War II, including at least 40 million civilians, many of them babies and children.
These all were territorial wars, as is the Hamas-Israeli War, and it will not, and cannot be won by soft hearts.
Terence L. Day
Pullman
