Madam, - Only a fool would expect the State of Israel meekly to accept the steady fall of rockets on its citizens. In Israeli eyes, the threat is clear, the action indefensible: any responsible government would feel obliged to take measures to end the situation, if only because those people to whom they owe a duty of care demand it.
Only a fool would expect the people of Palestine and their elected authority to watch death and terror rain down on them, and meekly stand by. No nation can endure terror from state or non-state sources, whether sporadic or systematic, and be expected not to respond.
In the short-term perspective of retaliation answering to retaliation, the dynamic is as brutally obvious as it is repetitive and counter-productive. We all understand that only a shift to a more continuous, considered, deeper and broader ground of engagement between the sides can break this deadly micro-cycle.
In that context, therefore, the brute stupidity of the current blockade of Gaza city, the collective, undifferentiated punishment of both those presumed engaged in armed actions and the mass of the disengaged is not only shortsighted, wrong and counterproductive; it is positively evil. A strong word, to be sure, but what else to call it when a state, in order to curb or contain low-level if continual military attacks on its people, cuts off power to homes, schools, hospitals, bakeries and other life-essential services?
How many will die for want of surgery and medicine in Gaza until this blockade is lifted? How many blameless people must suffer, and how many of those are of that vast number who, like the majority of human beings, want only to live their day-to-day lives in peace?
Collective punishment is not only a clear and self-evident wrong, it is the generator of new hatreds and a clear statement of the most dangerous political proposition of all: that a people deserve to be punished as a whole, for the deeds of a few.
The murder of Israeli citizens by non-state actors is evil, not only in itself, in terms of each such action, but because it is founded in a general proposition that all Israelis, because they are Israelis, are legitimate targets. The evil lies not just in each individual act but in the general proposition which underlies each such act.
Surely it is obvious to us all that a belief in the rightness of collective punishment is both evil in itself, and a mandate for specific evils? How, then, should we view the prospective and actual murder of Palestinians carried through by means of collective punishment?
There is a bitter irony in this action by the Israeli state, and a very dangerous precedent. Israel believes itself under siege when political forces outside its borders call for the destruction of the State of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish people - what one might describe as a call for collective punishment on a mass, total scale.
By embracing the doctrine of collective punishment now, Israel - one hopes unwittingly - creates a moral equivalence for the proposition that it is right and morally permissible to punish the many for the deeds of the few. From whatever quarter such an obscene proposition emerges, we have an urgent duty to condemn acts of collective punishment, and the individual acts which such a doctrine mandates, with all the power at our disposal. - Yours, etc,
THEO DORGAN, Dublin 13.