‘The Trouble With the Settlement Boycott’ (Editorial, Sept. 17)
Your Sept. 17 editorial aptly points out that “once governments create legal and administrative systems for identifying and excluding settlement commerce, the target can easily expand.” Indeed, the offending, mostly European, nations had previously imposed limited sanctions on a few individual Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria for allegedly violently attacking Palestinian Arabs.
It is highly questionable whether most of those relatively rare incidents of violence were actually initiated by so-called Jewish settlers or, instead, matters of self-defense. In any event, my concern is that the unwarranted boycotts and sanctions by many Western governments against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria can easily, and most likely will, mushroom into more harmful sanctions against Israel and all its citizens unless immediate action is taken to counter this dangerous threat from seriously misguided Western nations.
In my opinion, the myopic and obsessive focus on a relatively few instances of settler vigilantism by a plethora of Western governments is deliberate and calculated to delegitimize the Jewish people’s 4,000-year-old biblical, historical and legal connection to Judea and Samaria, territories that are fundamental parts of the Jewish people’s sacred homeland and essential to Israel’s national security.
Because of the deliberate and calculated nature of the slander and lies promoted by a vast array of nations (such as Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Denmark), they should all be held accountable for inciting more antisemitism and anti-Zionism on the world stage.
And for Jewish people and Zionists everywhere, holding those backward-marching Western nations to account should include boycotting their products and cancelling travel plans to those countries.
Marc Caroff, Virginia Beach
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