Senator Bob Packwood (R-OR), in a letter to his Jewish constituents, "felt so swept up in the legitimacy of Israel's cause" that he apparently forgot that he was not himself Jewish. In the January 1992 letter, he wrote: "You and I must help Israel resist pressure to trade our historic Jewish homeland for Arab promises... Only during the diaspora, when we were dispersed to other homelands, did the Jewish people become a minority in our own homeland. It was not our fault that we were kicked out by the Babylonians in the 6th Century B.C., or by the Romans shortly after the start of the Christian period... And don't ever say we left voluntarily."

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