Your Oct. 30 editorial stated that, “As French President Emmanuel Macron put it after the Louvre robbery, this kind of crime is ‘an attack on a heritage that we cherish because it is our history.’”
I wonder how many members of the American Jewish community appreciate that Macron’s statement applies with even more significance to the Jewish people’s precious religious and cultural legacy in Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank), the heart and soul of our indigenous homeland. Yet, our national heritage sites which contain that precious legacy have been under attack by Palestinian Arabs for decades. Adding insult to injury, neither the Israeli government nor the American Jewish community have protected and defended those sites from Arab attack or even expressed due outrage.
For example, need I mention the vast archeological damage done on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem during the 1990s by Arabs digging a huge subterranean mosque without proper supervision by the Israel Antiquities Authority, or the extensive vandalism done at Joseph’s Tomb near the West Bank Arab town of Nablus (formerly the ancient Jewish city of Shechem)? And let’s not forget the destruction of countless synagogues in Jerusalem by the Jordanians in 1948, and the 1929 Arab massacre of dozens of members of the Jewish community of Hebron and in other Jewish cities in the West Bank even before Israel was established as a Jewish state in 1948.
As your editorial stated, we must treat our “national treasures not just as art, but as living repositories of collective memory.” And “unless we protect our cultural inheritance with the seriousness it deserves,” we will lose it forever.
Marc Caroff, Virginia Beach
