Letters to the Editor: Gas pains

With regard to “Israel checking possibility of conveying natural gas to Gaza” (September 16).

By LETTERS TO THE EDITOR, LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Letters (photo credit: REUTERS)
Letters
(photo credit: REUTERS)
With regard to “Israel checking possibility of conveying natural gas to Gaza” (September 16), I would first have COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories) or our government itself tell the Qataris to pay the tens of millions of shekels owed by the Palestinian Authority to the Israel Electric Corporation for power to Gaza, Judea and Samaria. If they refuse, Israel should stop transferring the monthly excise taxes to the PA and deduct a certain percentage to be put toward paying off that debt.
Our government needs to start showing some backbone.
Otherwise, the PA will never take us seriously and will continue to blame us for all its self-induced problems.
MURRAY JOSEPH Kiryat Motzkin In reference to “What’s keeping our gas under the sea?” (Politics, September 11), I cannot comprehend how our debauched government has been able to stymie and waste potential revenues from our vast and valuable natural gas field under the Mediterranean. It is quite apparent that it has not done its homework.
Our track record of trust and the honesty of our politicians have been abysmal.
In recent years, we have incarcerated a host of public figures responsible for our well-being on charges of fraud, graft or general corruption. The irony is that due to our decadent political system, we have ended up with a convicted felon as economy minister who, together with his faceless ultra-Orthodox colleagues, could be crucial in making a financial decision of momentous proportions.
Let us not squander the opportunity to enhance this massive natural resource. Let us provide the strong leadership and rational management that will benefit generations to come.
JACK DAVIS Jerusalem A rejiggering American college students Abe Silberstein and Josh Freedman would like to see J Street rejigger its rhetoric in order to make its anti-Israel agenda more palatable to the mainstream Jewish community (“J Street must make peace with the establishment,” Comment & Features, September 16).
They write that “the language of the Left... is the only political discourse that matters on the contemporary campus.” This is not so. The language of the Left is the only language permitted on the American campus.
The fascism of leftist- driven political correctness has all but silenced any dissenting opinion.
The two students furthermore declare that J Street should be active in “pushing for improved security cooperation between the United States and Israel” because it is “one of the few Jewish organizations to publicly side with the administration on Iran [and therefore] is in a unique position to put to rest the widespread anxiety that Israel is losing its friends in the Democratic Party.”
In saying this, they are either supremely naïve or think we are supremely stupid.
If anything, J Street has been instrumental in Israel’s losing support in the Democratic Party, and there is zero daylight between its views on Israel and those of the Obama White House.
Indeed, there is no possibility of J Street ever disagreeing with any position that the current White House might take – unless such a position is less hostile to Israel than that of J Street itself.
J.J. GROSS Jerusalem CLARIFICATION The SifTech accelerator, which has been helping young entrepreneurs launch startups in Jerusalem (“Women of worth,” Rosh Hashana supplement, September 13), is located in the capital’s JVP Media Quarter, but otherwise is unaffiliated with Jerusalem Venture Partners.