David Ronquillo claimed to have written an article “more consistent with the facts” (“Terror Has Its Own Rules,” Daily Nexus, Oct. 9) than Joey Tartakovsky’s. In fact, Ronquillo made several historical errors in his piece on Israel’s so-called “history of aggression.”

Firstly, citing Israel as the aggressor of the 1967 Six Day War is preposterous. Anyone who knows Middle Eastern history recognizes that the war in ’67 was not initiated by Israel but by all of its surrounding Arab neighbors: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, in an effort to succeed in “pushing Israel into the sea” where they failed in 1948.

In the months preceding the Six Day War, it was clear that it was Israel’s neighbors who were escalating activities against her. More and more Israeli civilians were killed in the Syrian and Jordanian borders. The Syrians, from atop the Golan Heights, shelled Israeli towns indiscriminately. On May 18, 1967 Egypt expelled the U.N. peacekeeping forces from Israel’s borders. On the 22nd, the Egyptians closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. On the 25th, encouraged by Egypt and Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia moved their troops to Israel’s borders. Two days later, on the 26th of May, President Nasser of Egypt declared, “Our basic goal is the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight.”

Ronquillo’s flawed view of Israel’s history does not stop there. His reference to the Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel in 1936 neglected to mention that prior to the bombing Irgun delivered a warning to the hotel that a bomb had been planted, and advising them to evacuate the building. Ronquillo mentioned only the fatalities, indeed a terrible tragedy that could have been avoided had the warning been appropriately heeded.

In the future I would hope that someone choosing to write about an issue as complex as the conflict in the Middle East would choose to include all the facts, not just fragments of history skewed to demonstrate their particular bias.

Jason Kanel is a freshman mechanical engineering major.