Sir, - As a young Irish office worker in London in 1967, I volunteered for the Israeli army. My application was taken seriously (I had some military training) and I was asked to be ready for imminent departure. Israel then appeared to be very much the underdog, on the brink of being swept into the sea by "Arab hordes". The Six-Day War changed everything.
It was thrilling at the time and seemed only justice that Israel should triumph. I was not called up but I received a letter of gratitude from the Israeli Embassy. I was proud of that letter and of my own informed and active idealism, as I saw it thin. As years went by I was less and less eager to relate this exploit or show the letter. "The situation is complex," I would argue. "There are rights and wrongs on both sides." My feeling, however, was that Israel was a fundamentally just society mostly composed of the good guys. It had to be; a people so wronged must be right, I thought. I wept at Dachau in 1969 (and will visit again next month). In time, I hoped, there would surely be peace between Jew and Arab in the Midddle East.
I am ashamed that it has taken the images of the 45-minute-long murder of the child, Mohammed al-Durrah and his father, last week, to lift the scales finally from my eyes. Good is not triumphing over evil in Israel today - to a large extent, because so many of us who are decent and humane did nothing. I can't do much now except to express my horror here at the personal brutality of that psychopathic soldier who targeted, taunted and then killed the innocent child and his father as if they were rats in a barrel. Sickeningly, that soldier is not alone. He and others are the extreme products of a society unbalanced by over-militarisation, racism, paranoia and brutal policing.
I urge Israelis to stop this barbarism that corrodes, corrupts and destroys their humanity and their country, and strive for a new peace. Otherwise evil will have triumphed and the once victims of fascism will have become fascists themselves. High-tech, high-velocity weapons against stone-throwers is not a contest. Belatedly, I too am moved to pick up a stone and tomorrow in protest and sadness I will burn the embassy letter. - Yours, etc.,
Jim O'Connor, Hungry Hill, Beara Peninsula, Co Cork.