Letters to the Editor: International law

By LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Letters (photo credit: REUTERS)
Letters
(photo credit: REUTERS)
International law
Regarding “Int’l law does not deal with attack tunnels, say experts” (November 30), there is international law, but there is also common sense and self-preservation.
Russia has dealt with tunnels, as did the US in Vietnam.
Today, Egypt has been sealing off Hamas’s tunnels.
No one asked or is asking questions. These countries did and are doing what had and has to be done, and the UN and world were and are quiet.
Prof. Daphne Richemond- Barak, of Herzliya’s IDC, wrote that tunnels might alternately be used by combatants or civilians trying to find refuge from aboveground fighting. Children are used to dig tunnels without being combatants, and she questions whether we are obliged to use military force to attack the tunnels.
What Israel is obliged to do is fight a war. In a war for life, we cannot worry about anything or anyone but our survival. Remember, the people in the Gaza Strip voted for Hamas and applaud every terror attack in Israel.
Israel is obliged to make certain that each and every tunnel is blown to shreds. If not, hundreds and most probably thousands of Israelis will be slaughtered – men, women, children and infants.
Israel knows the tunnels are being built. Hamas is proud and tells us it is getting ready to come into Israel and start slaughtering. It is just a matter of time. Are our defense minister and prime minister going to allow Jewish blood to flow as if we were back in Poland?
BARBARA GINSBERG
Ma’aleh Adumim
The Western Wall
In “‘Tzviut,’ not ‘tzniut’! (Hypocrisy, not modesty)” (Comment & Features, November 30), Uri Regev criticizes haredi hypocrisy.
Speaking of hypocrisy, I would ask Rabbi Regev: If the Women of the Wall are concerned about praying with their prayer shawls and tefillin (which is perfectly acceptable, even according to haredi law), do they pray with tefillin on the other days of the month, besides Rosh Hodesh at the Western Wall? Do their husbands, sons and daughters also pray regularly with tefillin? If these are important spiritual acts for the women, why not for the rest of their families?
AVIGDOR BONCHEK
Jerusalem
In the close to half a century that the Western Wall has been accessible for Jews, it has peacefully accommodated Jews from the world over, from Lithuania to the Carpathians, from Samarkand to Pernambuco, from Cochin to Chattanooga, from Gondar to Glendale, from Tbilisi to Toronto. What unites these variegated communities is a respect for tradition, perhaps foremost the separation of the sexes during prayer.
Into this small sea of peace we see the launching of a ship of cross-dressing, cross-expressing people cobbled from a couple of centuries of so-called reform and enlightenment. Its passengers are so evolved that they are impervious to the attraction and distraction of the opposite sex, and oblivious to the anguish they cause others, mobilized, as they are, by the impulse of tikkun olam, repairing the world, in the form of revolution against a tyrannical rabbinate.
I urge these purveyors of all things new to open their eyes. It is not the rabbinate that is setting the tone of the Kotel area; it is the will of the overwhelming majority. The rabbinate is administering to the needs of the visitors, including in this instance, unfortunately and perforce, the maintaining of order in the face of agitators.
I also urge them to distance themselves from the frequently-aired claim that they have been barred access to the Western Wall. The guards at the security gates do not measure the length of the fringes on visitors’ prayer shawls, nor do they ask their denomination or sexual orientation.
The Kotel even welcomes gentiles of all denominations, the bearers of good will and joy at the return of Israel to its precincts. It has been closed to no one.
SYDNEY L. KASTEN
Jerusalem