I can appreciate that there are teachers who actively support the Palestinian people and who, in the case of the Teachers for Palestine group, want the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan to boycott Israeli companies and companies that do business with Israel. What I can’t understand is how teachers who are supposed to be educated can call Israel an apartheid state:

• 20 per cent of Israel’s population is Arab.

• There are Arab members of parliament, Arab foreign affairs officials, Arab doctors, nurses, policemen, judges, teachers and students.

• According to a recent poll, more than 70 per cent of Jerusalem’s Arabs stated that they would prefer to live in Israel rather than in a Palestinian state.

Israel is not an apartheid state as we understand it from the South African model that geographically separated the races.

Considering the 20 per cent Arab minority living in Israel, it is also ignorant to accuse Israel of being an ethnic cleansing state. I’ll tell you what would be an ethnic cleansing state. It would be Palestine, whose officials have stated time and again that they will not allow a single Jew to live within its borders.

I feel sorry for children forced to learn from such an uninformed lot as these Teachers for Palestine. What’s even worse, if these teachers really do know the facts but are prepared to replace them with hateful slogans, then our children are really being abused. If anyone should be boycotted it is these teachers who are clearly intellectually and morally deficient.
 
Larry Shapiro
Rancho Mirage, CA

• • •

What does it mean to ‘fill the earth’?

Rabbi Shafran’s essay The people problem (Jewish Tribune, Oct. 29) passionately presented arguments against the constraint of human procreation in the face of debated concerns over global warming and human activities that appear to be threatening the diversity of our world’s ecosystems.  

He notes that the pessimism of proponents of population control such as Paul Ehrlich (and of Thomas Malthus a century and a half earlier) have been shown to be based on erroneous reasoning or have been overcome by “human creativity and Divine guidance.”

Rabbi Shafran concludes his essay by writing “that when would-be parents and their progeny are fingered as threats to the planet the truly Jewish response is to recall that the Creator…commanded and blessed [Adam] and Eve, in no uncertain terms, to be fruitful, multiply and ‘fill the earth.’”  

Given Rabbi Shafran’s statement earlier in his essay that “…we… are forbidden to wantonly destroy nature…but we are also mandated per G-d’s command…to press the earth’s natural resources into the service of the human race,” I suggest that the truly Jewish response to Rabbi Shafran’s concern is to ask the question: what did the Creator mean by “fill the earth”?  It appears to me that “filling the earth” must be tempered by the commandment not to wantonly destroy nature.  This is our dilemma to solve.

Stuart Mestelman
Burlington, ON