Madam, - Up until Israel's current attacks on Gaza, rockets fired from Gaza killed two or three Israelis a year. At that rate, it would have taken more than a century's worth of rockets to match the death toll from less than a week of Israel's latest bombardment, around a quarter of which is civilian.
Faced with this fact, Tom Carew (December 30th) casts around for other numbers to trade off against Palestinian lives, telling us variously that 250,000 Israelis live within range of the rockets and that 5,600 rockets have been fired since 2005. Instead of supporting his contention that Israel's operations are "proportionate", such figures merely emphasise how ineffective these improvised weapons are in comparison with Israel's high-tech killing machines.
In spite of this, Desmond FitzGerald (also December 30th) believes Hamas is easily sourcing materials and technology from outside Gaza to build rockets. If this is so, then the siege is failing in any putative military purpose - besides being morally wrong, illegal, and a recruiting sergeant for rocketeers. Yet Mr FitzGerald does not conclude that Israel should allow the free movement of essential goods for either moral or pragmatic reasons; instead he seems to think that the people of Gaza are not yet suffering enough, or perhaps that Hamas can be expected to be equally successful in smuggling in food, medical aid and other supplies.
He then informs us that "there are no refugee camps in any land controlled by Israel". If this were true, it would in no way mitigate Israel's responsibility for those refugees it has driven beyond the territory it controls and for continuing to deny those refugees' right of return. And, of course, it is not true: apart from the many refugee camps in the illegally-colonised West Bank, half the population of Gaza are refugees. Indeed, the rockets fired from the Gaza Strip are landing in areas from which many of the Palestinians crammed into Gaza were ethnically cleansed.
FitzGerald's advocacy of non-violence is laudable, but if it is to be usefully directed at Palestinian armed groups (rather than at a far more powerful and violent Israeli regime), then he and the rest of us in the West also need to acknowledge the enormous injustice done to the people of Palestine and commit to helping them right that wrong in an alternative, peaceful way. Our record in this respect is shameful.
Until we begin to exert real pressure on Israel to end its violations of international law and its defiance of UN resolutions, we give Palestinians little reason not to despair. - Yours, etc,
Madam, - With regard to the ongoing Israeli assaults on Gaza, let us get the following things straight:
1. Mosques, hospitals and children in Gaza are "targets".
2. Israelis who attack such targets with big, sophisticated rockets are "security forces".
3. Palestinians who use smaller rockets to attack Israelis are "terrorists".
4. Palestinians who support their elected (Hamas) government are "militants".
5. The destruction of Gaza by Israeli warplanes is "Arab-Israeli violence".
We need to understand and embrace each of the above terms. Otherwise we might fail to appreciate fully the "balanced" news coverage that many media sources provide at the present time. - Yours, etc,
Madam, - Your Editorial of December 31st, headlined "Talking to Hamas essential", contains a curious logical inconsistency. On the one hand you criticise Israel's military action against Hamas as "quite disproportionate", yet the non-military measures previously taken by Israel to counter the Hamas terrorist campaign - the restrictions on movement of goods and people in and out of Gaza - are also dismissed as "heavy-handed and indiscriminate". What measures remain to Israel to defend its citizens that would meet with The Irish Times'sapproval?
This brings us to the panacea of "talking to Hamas". Your Editorial admonishes Israel for disregarding "the evidence that Hamas leaders are willing to deal directly with Israel". Where is the evidence? When Hamas won the election in Gaza in 2006, it was offered a place at the negotiating table under three conditions with the approval of the Quartet (the US, UN, EU and Russia) and the UN Security Council.
These conditions remain: recognition of Israel's right to exist, renunciation of violence, and acceptance of past agreements reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Hamas refused these conditions, choosing to remain outside the process and to leave the negotiating to the leader of the legitimate Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. At the same time it escalated its rocket and mortar fire against southern Israeli civilian communities, even though Israel had already withdrawn all its troops and 9,000 Israeli civilian residents from Gaza. After its violent takeover of Gaza from 2006 onwards, it further escalated the attacks against Israel .
Clearly your Editorial writer underestimates the nature of Hamas. Let us be clear about the scale of its attacks. In the 39 months from Israel's August 2005 withdrawal up to the ending of the ceasefire by Hamas, more than 5,200 rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza by Hamas into civilian areas in Israel, compared with 2,400 in the 56 months preceding the withdrawal.
We should also be clear about the ideology and goals of Hamas. Its 1988 Charter sets out a radical Islamist view of the region that is incompatible with all ideas of compromise or negotiation. Article 11 states that the land of Israel is "an Islamic Waqf [trust territory] throughout the generations, and until the Day of Resurrection no one can renounce it or part of it. . ." Its preface states that "Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors". Article 13 labels all "initiatives, proposals and international conferences. . . a waste of time, an exercise in futility", before concluding: "There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad."
You state that "the political option was there to renew the ceasefire". Again, the facts tell otherwise. Israel made it known that it was interested in continuing the "calm", while Hamas seriously breached the ceasefire in November by attempting to blow up the Gaza border fence and by building a tunnel under it with the intention of abducting Israeli soldiers. When Israel's military took limited action, Hamas returned to full-scale attacks on Israel, launching 213 rockets and 126 mortars across the border from November 4th until it formally ended the ceasefire on December 19th. From that date onwards, hundreds more such attacks have struck ever deeper into Israel, leaving military action against Hamas as the only option. - Yours, etc,
Madam, - I am amazed at the naivety of Lorraine Kerrigan (December 30th), who seeks to justify the present slaughter of the people in Gaza with an analysis of the past wrongs done to Israel. "Whataboutery" is a bit of a luxury when you're sitting in peaceful Donegal as the imprisoned people of Gaza have no escape from the state-inflicted warfare of their neighbour.
One fact speaks loudly over everything else. The Israel elections are three weeks away. - Yours, etc,
Madam, - Does David Finegan (December 31st) not see the contradiction in having his letter published while asking that the Israeli Ambassador's article be denied space? Perhaps he thinks Hamas, which would deny Israel's right to even exist, let alone be heard, has the higher moral ground in human rights. - Yours, etc,