Letter from James R. Dean

Wriley Nelson Got It Right

I completely agree with “The Partial Observer” article by Wriley Nelson in last week’s issue of “The Freeman’s Journal” and “Hometown Oneonta” regarding the killing of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli government [“Israel’s Grip on the U.S. is the End of International Law,” Thursday, October 2, 2025].

It has gone far beyond self-defense to mass murder to eliminate the Palestinian people, in my view.

I was five years old when Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945. We did not get a television until about 1949, and so I listened to the radio programs my parents had on and heard about the Nazi atrocities committed against the Jewish people and others on the news between other programs.

In the 1950s, I would take out books from our high-school library about the Holocaust that also contained many photos about the years of Germany’s campaigns of unchecked mass death and destruction, and the concentration camps, as they invaded one country after another with the mass murder of millions of people on an industrial scale, all in the name of white supremacy, with their lunatic leader Adolf Hitler.

I struggled to try to understand how that could have happened. I carried the Holocaust, and the struggle to understand, around in my head for over 70 years. How could that happen? I know more about the Holocaust than I care to remember. I was sure that the Jewish people, if they survived, would be a model of how a deeply tortured people would rise above their almost total annihilation and set the example for civilized societies going forward. Unfortunately, and sadly, I was wrong.

Before 1948, the land that is now Israel was called Palestine, and the people who lived there were the Palestinian people. That same land also has historical connections to the Jewish people as well.

The ongoing mass murder of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, who have been basically prisoners of the Israelis since 1948, is for one primary reason only. It is a war to take the remaining Palestinian occupied land. The far right lunatic government of Israel wants the Palestinian land for the Jewish people only, and they want the Palestinian people either gone or dead, with no possibility of a separate homeland for the Palestinian people within Israel.

Not all Israelis are against the Palestinian people, and some support a two-state solution. Unfortunately, ordinary Israelis, due to compulsory military service, are the people killing the Palestinian people with American guns, American tanks, American fighters/bombers, and Ameri-can bombs.

The United States of America had, and has, the power to help the Palestinian people, but it will not do anything because Donald Trump, the president of the United States, also wants the Gaza Strip, to possibly develop as a resort on the Mediterranean Sea.

The current Trump “peace plan” will be the final betrayal of the Palestinian people.

James R. Dean
Cooperstown