June 13: Follow the rules...

Follow the rules...

Sir, – Regarding “Police probe two hit-and-run accidents” (June 10), I recently met an Israeli hi-tech engineer who spent several years working in Singapore, which has had great success in reducing road accidents to a bare minimum.

Here are a few examples of how they solved their problems:

• Driving without a valid license or insurance – Long mandatory prison sentences discourage this practice. According to media reports, over 200,000 such cases exist in Israel.

• Point system – Every driver is given 15 points and for each traffic offense he loses a point. When a driver has lost all 15 points his license is revoked for life.

• Pollution – The government published a regulation requiring all vehicles to be tested by a certain date and any defects attended to. On the proscribed date, checkpoints were set up and any car found to be faulty was taken off the road and placed in a large crushing machine standing by.

The news traveled fast.

These are just a few creative regulations that would drastically reduce our accident rate and return the discipline and respect for the law we here so desperately lack. Imagine how many police officers would be released to fight other crimes.

DAVID GOSHEN
Kiryat Ono


...but not the directions

Sir, – Readers may have been amused by a rather unorthodox driving technique recommended in an oft-repeated advertisement in the Post for a certain automobile.

The suggested procedure is first to hit the accelerator, thereby releasing 238 horsepower. The advice is then to look behind and view seven seats. One is finally advised to enter the vehicle.

I wonder how many potential drivers would pass their driving test while following this unusual procedure.

HAROLD LEWIN
Jerusalem

Stooping low

Sir, – Recently, I came across a book titled The Forgotten Palestinians by Ilan Pappe. I could not understand why in 2011, Yale University Press would publish a history of the Palestinians in Israel by such a blatantly anti-Zionist, albeit Jewish, former senior lecturer at the University of Haifa.

Then I read Caroline Glick’s “Yale, Jews and double-standards” (Column One, June 10) on the university’s decision to close down its Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA) after facing such a strong Arab backlash against the August 2010 conference on this theme.

No doubt Glick’s observation that “the subject of anti-Semitism is steeped in controversy” is correct, but still I am convinced that Yale University Press would not have stooped so low as to publish Pappe’s book were it not politically motivated to fulfill Arab wishes and accommodate the Arab cause against Israel.

LILY POLLIACK
Jerusalem

The doctors’ plight

Sir, – My 40 years of experience in eye surgery at hospitals in New York bears out Akiva Ehrlich’s plea for utilizing paramedical personnel as a way of alleviating the shortage of Israeli doctors (“I blame the physicians,” Comment & Features, June 9).

The lack of anesthesiologists is projected to be especially acute.

Many of my operations were performed with the help of competent nurse anesthetists. Since a board-certified anesthesiologist was always seconds away from my operating room, I never had to be concerned about my patients’ safety.

The Israeli medical establishment must heed the advice that Jethro gave to Moses (Exodus 18:17-22) and learn to delegate.

FRED GOTTLIEB
Jerusalem
The writer is a retired ophthalmologist

 Sir, – Akiva Ehrlich’s article about professional boundaries in medicine missed an opportunity.

Instead of asking where the boundaries of physician practice should be, and why, Ehrlich preferred a self-serving and frankly unfair attack on doctors, including hapless residents who are exhausted and underpaid. Blaming them for the failure of nurses to expand their professional status is ridiculous.

The fact is that the various add-on nursing professions that were mentioned are almost entirely the product of the US medical system, where the cost-per-hour of a nursing staff is far less than that of physicians. Here in Israel it is exactly the opposite, and in fact the chief opponent of nursing advancement is not physicians but the mandarins at the Treasury who know that physician time is cheap time.

The best way to advance nurses is to advance physicians, not attack them. Ehrlich has fallen into a time honored trap – divide and rule.

ANTHONY LUDER
Safed
The writer is head of pediatrics at Ziv Medical Center

Water and logic

Sir, – Regarding “Jordanian newspaper says Amman will purchase 10 million cubic meters of Israeli water this summer” (June 7), we are constantly being told how little water we have and how frugal the public must be, in addition to paying exorbitant water rates. This plan to sell more water to Jordan is as crazy as sending money to the Palestinian Authority and Gaza, which frees up their money for terrorist activities.

Of course, Israel must always be politically correct no matter what, so that at the end of the day it is we, the people, who suffer the most, often tragically.

EDITH OGNALL
Netanya

Sir, – We have been told all these years that there is a dreadful shortage of water in Israel and that we must use extraordinary measures to save water. The government even imposed a water tax. Moreover, we all look at the Kinneret and pray for rain assiduously.

The fact that we sell water to Jordan makes us hope that the Jordanians realize how good it is to have Israel as a neighbor.

We hope that King Abdullah has been busy telling his people that Israel has done what no other country has been willing to do for Jordan. If he keeps stressing the neighborliness of Israel, perhaps the people of the Middle East will better understand how we can ensure their vital needs and prosperity.

TOBY WILLIG
Jerusalem

Sir, – I’d just like to say to anyone who seriously believes he can follow the advice to “drink a large glass of water... before waking up each morning” (“Hydrate your life!,” Sports Medicine, June 10): In your dreams!

YONATAN SILVER
Jerusalem

Get some culture

Sir, – I read the critique of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa’s concert with mounting distaste (Classical review, Arts & Entertainment, June 6). You devoted a mere 182 words to a living legend among divas, and that is scandalous – particularly when you spent seven-eighths of the page on an actor recently dead and long-forgotten, and on a jazz bassist whose name escapes me.

Do you have an editorial policy that is anti-serious music of the classical kind?

MARK COHEN
Ra’anana

 Sir, – The Jerusalem Post’s lack of coverage of the recent Rubinstein piano contest (except for some social nonsense in Greer Fay Cashman’s Grapevine column) is unconscionable.

Every day we are greeted with sometimes full-page articles on jazz, less on dance and theater, and very little on classical music. I, for one, would have enjoyed knowing how many contestants came from all over the world, what the requirements were for both the solo and orchestral performances, who judged, who were the six finalists, what was their background, and last but not least, an article on the winners.

MIRIAM ROSENBLUM
Jerusalem