Madam, – Leonard Abrahamson and Stephen Molins (January 27th) are correct in saying the Jewish Representative Council does not speak for me, a co-signatory of the letter of January 22nd which they condemn. Nor do they speak for an increasing number of Jews in Ireland who have been shocked and repelled by Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Their response to our letter reads like a transcript of the talking points put out by the Israeli embassy. It is not in any way a representation of how deeply troubled many Irish Jews are by Israel’s actions. I and other signatories have been surprised and heartened at the positive responses to our letter from some of our Jewish friends and acquaintances.
Openly supporting the war on Gaza – more a massacre that has killed over a thousand people and hundreds of children – is simply shameful.
What disturbs me, as a Jew, is most certainly not the many good people who have spoken out against this war but the development in Ireland of a right-wing Christian Zionist support of Israel’s actions.
Messrs Abrahamson and Molins are silent about these people, who believe that Jews are somehow “special”; who believe that our proper place is in Israel, not Ireland; who at their extreme believe that once all the Jews go away to Israel, then the awaited apocalypse can happen. After all, these people support the war on Gaza – what’s to worry about?
By claiming to represent the Jewish community in cheerleading this war, Messrs Abrahamson and Molins wish to prevent the wide diversity of opinions among Irish Jews from being recognised. More importantly, they wish to prevent us all from taking the necessary actions to ensure that Israel never again commits such atrocities. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – As an ex-Dubliner, I frequently read The Irish Times. Distance enhances perception. What I perceive as the frequent demonisation of Israel, both in the media and perhaps the Irish psyche, is that Israel and Israeli seem to be code words for “damned Jew” – the same damned Jew excluded from Ireland during the Holocaust years.
War is not a chivalrous undertaking. It is a frightful brutality and an expression of mankind’s self-destructiveness. It may have explanation but little justification. One of the codes of combat has been that fighting forces remain clearly demarcated from non-combatant civilian populations. When fighters merge with the general population, discharging rockets from schools and houses of worship, and retaliation occurs, they are siding with their enemy in causing injury to the civilians with whom they have melded.
The Americans call this “collateral damage”. This phrase distances and minimises the tragedy. It is a scenario that is both grotesque and an unavoidable reality. Were Hamas or other combatants to clearly separate themselves from the civilian population, then and only then could Israel be viewed as morally incompetent and guilty of war crimes.
Israel could have taken the high moral road. It could have endured increased rockets salvoes penetrating deeper and further until its security and tenure were totally undermined. It could have become so morally superior that it would have been overpowered by its own superego. In such a process, it would have become so rarefied that it no longer existed, except as a memory.
A proportionate response will not disarm Hamas nor remove a casus belli. Peace must be superimposed by those external forces capable of imposing it. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – How sad but typical to see that Israeli prime minister Edud Olmert is refusing to countenance any investigations of wrongdoing by the IDF during the recent Gaza demolition job (The Irish Times, January 26th). The Orwellian language peppering his outbursts claiming the moral high ground are straight out of the handbook of avoiding responsibility to international law beloved of the previous US administration.
Despite independent accounts of the use of white phosphorous weapons, the indiscriminate targeting of densely populated areas, the obstruction of the Red Cross and the reluctant admission that there were no militants in the UN school in which 42 civilians were killed, the Israelis prefer to redefine the moral high ground as one from which they can view international law and the Geneva convention with contempt. – Yours, etc,