PRIONSIAS Ó
Sir, - I feel most uncomfortable with the confident assurances made by E. Menton (April 19th) about the present actions of the Israeli government.
I am also troubled by the frequent, high-handed, Israeli government dismissals of humanitarian expressions of concern with the admonition that the authors of such criticisms should be ashamed of themselves.
We have yet to have a satisfactory explanation of the invasion and occupation by a national army of a territory which is not theirs, destroying property, murdering or terrorising all in their path, all the while ignoring urgent requests from the most respected international institutions of the planet to withdraw.
The final straw is that the Israeli government feels free to deny UN investigation teams access to the sites that its army has occupied and destroyed - in non-Israeli territory. By what right?
If, as David Sowby suggests (April 22nd) the Palestinians did it to themselves, there should be no hesitation in admitting investigators. The images of heavy armour rolling uncontrolled and unchecked into foreign cities necessarily bring the worst precedents to mind - and it appears to be non-PC to identify the analogies. If the rock of Masada can become a shrine to the heroic resistance of a people, as was the ghetto of Warsaw for their suffering, why not Shatila, Sabra, Jenin, Ramallah, or, God forbid, Bethlehem for the Palestinians?
In the present climate of secrecy and recrimination, it should be pointed out that there is more than one point of view in Israel about the government action. The views of the apologists for mechanised barbarism (including Barbara Amiel in the British press) come from the website of the Israeli Defence Forces, whereas the lucid, informed views of Israeli advocates of another way can be read on the website of the national newspaper Ha'aretz.
These contrasting perceptions of necessary action do not necessarily fall along the neat line of Ashkenazic and Sephardic ethnic differences: they are political and historical.
Those who perpetuated the deadly example of the Stern Gang under the slogan "a land without people for a people without land" were clearly never preoccupied by the fate of those who happened to be living in Palestine before the arrival of the Exodus ships, nor would they have given much time to Brit Shalom, the Union for Peace, founded by Martin Buber in 1920 with a view to creating amicable co-government in the area.
And against the example of the brutal recidivist Ariel Sharon , one can mention not only the heroic sacrifice of Yitzhak Rabin, a truly great Israeli statesmen, but also that of another Israeli army general, Ami Ayalon, who advocates unilateral, unconditional withdrawal from the provocative (because illegal) occupation of the West bank settlements (and who is not yet, like many dissidents, in jail).
It is surely because the intellectual and humanitarian legacy of the Jewish people contributed so much to hopes for a better world at the end of the 20th century that we can now expect that the present murderous ineptitude will cease and the right people start talking to each other.
At the dawn of the 21st century it must be clearly identified as wrong, wrong, wrong, a fundamental crime against humanity, for women and children to be butchered indiscriminately, and for their families to be denied the right of identification and burial of their own.
It would manifestly be an insult to the Israeli people at large to assert that this is an anti-Semitic position; as Gerald Kaufman himself argued in the House of Commons, Jewish people themselves protest at the way in which the proud Star of David has been soiled. - Yours, etc.
C.E.J. CALDICOTT,
Shrewsbury Road,
Shankill,
Co Dublin.
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Sir, - Your Letters page frequently carries condemnations of the Israelis for defending their country against their enemies. Yet very few criticise the Palestinian Authority for its terrorist attacks on Israel - in particular, suicide bombings of civilian targets.
I say fair play to Ariel Sharon and the Israeli army for having the courage to meet fire with fire - a courage sadly lacking in every EU government. - Yours, etc.,
PRIONSIAS Ó DUIBHLEANN,
Wilderness Grove,
Clonmel,
Co Tipperary.
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Sir, - Michael Coady (April 23rd) suggests that there is an urgent need for dissenting American and Jewish voices to be heard on US foreign policy, towards Israel in particular.
In fact, such voices have long been speaking in these terms, in the very countries concerned and in their most prestigious journals.
For example, the New York Review of Books has consistently deplored American foreign policy in general and, in pieces by American-Jewish and Israeli commentators, the stance of right-wing Israeli governments.
The quality Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz, available in an English edition on the web, is as disapproving of Ariel Sharon and his policy as any Western liberal organ.
The problem is not the absence of dissenting voices, but the deafness of the powers that be. - Yours, etc.,
LOUIS MARCUS,
Dublin 6W.