September 21: 'Victims' who rocket innocents

Lauren Booth's categorization offends the millions of Jews, Gypsies and Christians of conscience who died in Nazi concentration camps.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
letters to the editor 88 (photo credit: )
letters to the editor 88
(photo credit: )
'Victims' who rocket innocents Sir, - Re "Tony Blair's sister-in-law tells Iranian TV Gaza is 'world's largest concentration camp'" (September 18): Lauren Booth's categorization offends the millions of Jews, Gypsies and, indeed, Christians of conscience who died in Nazi concentration camps. The inmates of these typhus-infested camps, if not gassed immediately on arrival, were starved, beaten and worked to death. In their pitiful, overcrowded huts, sleeping on bare boards, they weren't secretly manufacturing bombs. They were not lobbing rockets at the kindergartens of their Nazi guards' children. They were not visited by the Red Cross, or given handsome donations by wealthy foreigners. Ms. Booth is free to leave the Gaza Strip, or she could ask to be smuggled out in one of the tunnels her "concentration camp victims" use for smuggling arms and drugs. Ms. Booth may claim that some of her best friends are Jewish - and, indeed, they include Prof. Jeff Halper and Angela Godfrey-Goldstein. But these are Jews with their own agenda, and in this case criticizing Israel does equal anti-Semitism. It isn't raining. It is this woman and her colleagues spitting on our memories and perverting history. YEHUDIT COLLINS Jerusalem Reticence factor Sir, - In "The wooden-headedness factor" (UpFront, September 12) Sarah Honig, quoting Barbara Tuchman's 1984 March of Folly on pursuing policies contrary to a nation's own interests, included the critical qualification "a feasible alternative course of action must have been available." Yet throughout Ms. Honig's piece, there is no hint of the policies she would advocate to alleviate, let alone resolve the current situation. This critical omission characterizes so much of her admittedly eloquent writing, leaving the reader to conclude that either she is satisfied with the status quo, or prefers to avoid, at least on record, publicizing her own views on how to deal with the Palestinians who legitimately live in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. RAYMOND CANNON Netanya Sarah Honig responds: Our existence sometimes is like a precarious house of cards. Not pulling cards from the bottom and bringing everything tumbling down is the first - indeed, the vital - alternative course of action. The most important caution must be not to behave rashly wooden-headed, but to learn from experience (unpleasant though it may be) and not indulge in self-deception (pleasant though it may be, for a brief fleeting moment in history). Telling the truth about Oslo Sir, - Where does one even begin to respond to David Forman's supercilious and totally wrongheaded claims in his defense of the Oslo Accords? ("The failure was our fault, too," UpFront, September 12.) I had to begin a second time to compose a response because, faced with this polemic's unbelievable inversion, misinformation and, yes, disinformation, my first attempt at rebuttal was fast turning into a full-blown op-ed. Actually, nothing less than a tome could adequately address Forman's distorted presentation of the Oslo reality that has cost so many Israeli lives and limbs. If I were David Forman, instead of claiming credit, I would be hiding my face for having had anything to do with convincing Yitzhak Rabin to go along with this nightmare. By evincing how misguided the "Land for Peace" policy turned out to be, perhaps the only useful service these ill-fated accords have rendered is to help Israel avoid the same mistake in the future. JEFF DAUBE, Director Israel Office, Zionist Organization of America Jerusalem Sir, - Rabbi Forman declared that Yitzhak Rabin told him: "You were right." I can only comment that when a person who says "You were right" proved so wrong himself, it only means that both of you were wrong - in this case, fatally wrong!! MARCHAL KAPLAN Jerusalem Sir, - One has to feel sorry for Rabbi Forman. As a bleeding-heart liberal he has to blame someone for the Oslo failure, so he blames Israel. One has to wonder in what world Rabbi Forman resides. The deaths - nay, murder - of 1,600 Israelis, Arabs included, is morally equivalent to roadblocks and settlement expansion? Has Rabbi Forman ever asked why the Palestinians rejected the Peel Commission of 1938, the UN Partition of 1947, the negotiations after Israel captured the territories in 1967, and the Barak peace offer of 2000? MATTY ROTENBERG Petah Tikva Sir, - David Forman wrote that by creating an antecedent to the Oslo Accords, Menachem Begin showed he "understood the need for a two-state solution," and that by following up on Oslo, Binyamin Netanyahu showed that he too anticipated a Palestinian state. Even if Begin somehow accepted Oslo "in advance," and even if Netanyahu accepted it retroactively, one must note that the Oslo Accords do not guarantee - or even mention - a future Palestinian state. They set rules for a limited trial period, after which all options would be open as the resulting lessons were weighed and applied. The biggest question, then, was whether the Palestinian Liberation Organization could be trusted to run a benign self-administration. Oslo was about finding out the answer; and we did. MARK L. LEVINSON Herzliya 'Breathing in the bank: NIS 9' Sir, - Supermarkets and retail stores are obliged by law to display the prices of their goods clearly. Surely this law should be amended to apply to the banks too, allowing customers to see, posted in a prominent place, a list of charges they will be debited for each transaction. Such a measure could bring about the true competition that is so sorely needed ("Gouge, ouch!" Letters, September 11). SAM LEVY Caesarea