Madam, - Your readers have recently had a useful opportunity to compare, on successive days, opinion pieces by prominent spokespersons for the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.
Ehud Olmert (Opinion, June 17th), Israel's deputy prime minister, is a former Likud mayor of Jerusalem under whose despotic regime the Palestinian residents of that city sank ever further into the ranks of second-class citizens. When he writes that "four Israeli soldiers. . . were killed by terrorists" we understand that his definition of terrorism, normally confined to the targeting of civilians, extends to anyone who resists Israel's brutal and illegal occupation.
In return for the entirely spurious "goodwill gestures" of his government, such as the release of a handful of illegally detained prisoners who were due for release anyway and the dismantling of unoccupied "outposts" that were immediately re-established, he expects the Palestinians to "reciprocate" by engaging in full-scale civil war, thus completing the destruction of their civil society that Israel hasn't yet accomplished.
Hanan Ashrawi, on the other hand (Opinion, June 16th), sees both sides: "Sharon and Hamas and other Palestinian opposition factions are conducting their own type of lethal dialogue over the heads of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians - who, ultimately, are the real targets."
The only alternative to the "lethal dynamic of military occupation and armed resistance" of which she writes is an internationally supervised end to the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, an occupation to which Ehud Olmert never once refers in his cynical article. - Yours, etc.,
RAYMOND DEANE,
Chairman,
Ireland Palestine
Solidarity Campaign,
Dame Street,
Dublin 2.