Madam, - Proinsias De Rossa's article on the Israeli security barrier (Opinion, March 9th) is shocking in its tone and content. He compares the restrictions imposed on the Palestinians in Qalquilya to the incarceration of the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto during the second World War and suggests a psychological link with the subsequent mass murder in the concentration gas chambers. He accuses the Israelis of punishing women and children for the "crime of being Palestinian". He suggests that there is a deliberate attempt to "dehumanise. . .victims".
It is an abominable distortion to read the unspeakable depths of evil revealed in the Holocaust into the inconveniences regrettably visited on some Palestinians by some security measures. It is a staggering insensitivity tritely to use the cold-blooded murder of six million people in a flight of infantile and irresponsible pop social psychology.
If Mr De Rossa had conducted a more complete study of the Arab-Israeli conflict he would have discovered that there is a systematic dehumanising of Israelis in the Palestinian media and education system and a glorification of "Jew killing" which, if anything, surpasses that of the Nazis. The Israelis, in fact, continue to defend themselves against the "final solution".
Mr De Rossa's personal survey of Palestinian attitudes to suicide bombings ("all Palestinians I met unreservedly condemn such atrocities") is also strangely at variance with other surveys which show that the majority of Palestinians support the bombers and over 75 per cent of their children want to become "martyrs". - Yours, etc.,
PAT O'SULLIVAN, Knocknacurra, Bandon, Co Cork.