Madam, - Eamon Delaney (December 12th) clearly should stick to writing fiction. The upshot of Mr Delaney's essay on Ireland, the EU and Israel is that Ireland should lead the way in Europe in being nicer to Israel. Along the way he comes up with a number of undergraduate analogies and linkages that, he seems to believe, support his case:
1. Foreign Minister Brian Cowen met "the marginalised Palestinian President Yasser Arafat ... precluding himself from meeting Israeli ministers": it is only Israel and the United States that consider Mr Arafat to be "marginalised", principally because they are trying to marginalise him. It was entirely correct that Mr Cowen should meet a democratically elected leader, and that he should not accept the attempts of other countries to dictate whom he should meet.
2. Delaney refers to the Palestinian right to "self-determination"; to place this term in parentheses is cynical and biased: he naturally and rightly believes that Israelis have the same right, and forgets that this right of all peoples is enshrined in the UN Charter.
3. The "strong parallels" that Delaney says older Israelis see between Irish and Israeli history are dubious, to say the least; Ireland fought for independence from Britain; the Zionist movement depended, in large measure, on Britain to facilitate its insertion into Palestine.
4. Yitzhak Shamir may have taken the nom de guerre of Michael Collins, but of course what Delaney forgets is that Shamir also was a leading member of the Stern Gang, a group which treated with the Nazis and offered to enter the war on the German side.
5. Oddly, for a novelist and critic, Delaney seems to think that pulp fiction - the drivel, whether about Ireland or about Israel, that has flowed from the pen of Leon Uris - "cements" links between two cultures and two societies.
This also leaves aside the fact that Uris was an American, not an Israeli.
6. Delaney ascribes "soured" relations between Ireland and Israel during Chaim Herzog's presidency to "tensions" with Irish peacekeepers in Lebanon: anyone who reads accounts of the Lebanon war, initiated by Israel in 1982, will know that the IDF fired on Irish peacekeepers on numerous occasions, and that Israeli-armed, equipped and trained proxies, the vicious "South Lebanon Army" led by Saad Haddad, murdered a number of Irish soldiers.
Is Mr Delaney really the kind of "commentator" ¨ with which The Irish Times wishes to endow its pages? - Yours, etc.,
CONOR MCCARTHY, Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign, PO Box 9124, Dublin 1.