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Thank you for publishing the thoughtful Opinion Exchange piece in Saturday's paper by John Peacock ("Minnesota, 1862: a 'distant mirror' for Gaza, 2023," Dec. 2). Although no one historical event can capture all the nuances of another, I found the analogy helpful and insightful. It is disheartening, though, and bodes ill for the Palestinians, that over a century and a half later, we Americans still haven't resolved the issues regarding American Indians, who suffer economic and health deprivation disproportional to their fellow Americans.
That said, I do take issue with one statement by the author: "In the wake of the Dakota and Hamas attacks, many more Dakota and Palestinians died than did Americans and Israelis." By calling the civilian settlers "Americans," he — inadvertently, I presume — implies that the Dakota are non-Americans. This "othering" of non-European-extracted Americans underlies much of the problems they face in our country, and a similar dynamic may operate in the Israeli/Palestinian arena as well.
Timothy R. Church, St. Paul
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Peacock misrepresents Israel's history in his commentary "Minnesota, 1862: a 'distant mirror' for Gaza, 2023." He says that the Palestinians were "forced off most of their land ... ." This makes it seem as if Arabs owned all the land in Palestine and Jews took most of the land away from them. That...
A Mays Landing woman who stole from the senior community in Waretown where she worked and then falsely claimed her child was undergoing cancer treatments to win adjournments in her case has been s...