Editor’s Note: The Daily Reveille ran a column Oct. 8 by Carrie Fillipetti from the University of Virginia. Fillipetti argued that people around the world should be concerned with Israeli history, but a reader contends the column contained several factual errors.
 
In her column last week, Carrie Fillipetti stated Israel unilaterally returned 93 percent of the land Israel ever won in a war.
 
What she left out was that most of that land (the Sinai) was from one country (Egypt) and was only returned after Egypt demonstrated that it was a real military threat (Yom-Kippur war). 
 
Weaker groups like the Palestinians still haven’t gotten their land back.
 
Fillipetti included “…China, which has been terrorizing illegally occupied Tibet for years.” 
 
But she failed to note that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands is also illegal — what a hypocritical omission.
 
Fillipetti said Fatah’s charter promises to destroy Israel.  That is factually incorrect. 
 
Only Hamas’s charter says that.  Fatah got rid of that long ago.  Get your Arab political groups straight.
 
Even then, those are just words.  Israel, on the other hand, is actually destroying Palestine through settlement building. 
 
Furthermore, Hamas has repeatedly accepted the international consensus on the two-state solution forwarded by the U.N.,  which falls in line with international law (like the Geneva convention). 
 
Israel and the U.S. have continually blocked this consensus.  So who is blocking peace?
 
Furthermore, Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 because it was suicide to keep Jewish settlers near enraged Palestinians — not “as a gesture of peace.” 
 
When Israel withdrew from Gaza, Israel simultaneously expanded it’s settlement project in the West Bank, thus expanding its overall colonization project, not decreasing it.
 
 
David McLaughlin
Medical physics graduate student