Sir, - As a woman who was born of a Jewish mother and who has given birth to four sons (which means they also can claim the Jewish inheritance), I must express my strong condemnation and revulsion, as well as the shame brought upon women like myself, at the state of Israel's ruthless and horrifying slaughter of women and children at Qana in the Lebanon.
My uncle was assassinated in Tel Aviv in the early 1930s. He was one of the idealistic breed of young Jews who went to Palestine with a vision of a land where Arab and Jew could live in a fair and just society. He believed that the kibbutz would be a beacon to demonstrate in a practical way the path to the future. My aunt helped in the liberation of Palestine from the British. She died in Israel.
Their idealism has in part influenced my own vision that a harmonious and better world is possible; but not while oppressors continue to compel the oppressed to take up the methods of oppression.
Let President Robinson go to Qana with an all party delegation to show the Israeli government where we stand. Let President Clinton be lobbied as strongly as he has been over the process of "taking the gun out of Irish politics". But any settlement must be fair and just. If guns are to be taken out of politics, let governments first remove their own guns and let real politics take over. Banish all manufacture, sale and promotion of weapons. The slaughter industry must be dismantled.
Let governments at last listen to our voices so blatantly ignored at the Beijing women's conference, when the US and Europe turned their ears from the rest of the world, from its demand for the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction. The spokesperson for Europe (including Ireland) stated, with complacence, that "this section should be deleted as too simplistic".
I believe all lethal weapons are weapons of mass destruction, whether they kill one person, or a classroom of primary school children, or 100 civilian refugees. - Yours, etc.,
St Bridget's Place Lower,
Galway.