Several Russian immigrant intellectuals sent an urgent letter to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Israel’s Independence Day, urging him “to do everything possible to prevent establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria”. An aide at the Foreign Minister’s office called  initiator Prof. Nina Fogel, a Technion retiree residing in Haifa the next morning, thanked the signatories and assured Prof. Fogel that Minister Liberman would be discussing the contents of the letter with his staff “very promptly”.

 

Prof. Fogel  said that most immigrants from Russia, constituting Mr. Lieberman’s most loyal voter base, are strongly opposed to Palestinian state.

 

The letter sent by the Russian immigrant intellectuals read: “We the undersigned, academics and others from the Russian speaking community in Israel, urge you to do everything possible to prevent establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria.

 

“A Palestinian state means a total, permanent and irreversible sovereign power, which is foreign to and hostile to the Jewish people, and which exists inside its historical borders and adjacent its largest cities.

 

“While the American administration may currently tend toward establishment of a Palestinian state, this can be excused because many in the American Administration are unfamiliar with tides of anti-Semitic feeling and their manifestations and terrible damage. On the other hand, we who lived in the former Soviet Union are no strangers to the traditional hostility toward the Jewish people over the aeons of history and in our day.

 

“It is therefore unconscionable for one of us, for the most senior ranking emigre among us, to condone in any way the current American ambition to establish a Palestinian state which we know perfectly well, will culminate in anti-Semitic elements in Palestinian and other Islamist societies working to imperil the sole and tiny Jewish state  and its millions of Jewish inhabitants….We call on you to loudly and resolutely proclaim the establishment of a Palestinian state as an impossibility — by virtue of the need to protect the Jewish people within its tiny homeland.”    

 

For particulars: Prof. Nina Fogel 04-822 08 96

Submitting: Susie Dym, 089471273, 0528301999 sddym@bezeqint.net