Madam, - Theo Dorgan gives (to Israel) with one hand, and takes away with the other (February 12th). He begins with an assertion of Israel's right to self-defence, but soon lapses into an intellectual game of moral equivalence between the proactive violence of Israel's enemies and the reactive violence of Israel. Hypnotised by the phrase "collective punishment", he prefers to strike a pose above the conflict while casting about impartially with the epithet "evil".
The issues of the conflict - the right of Israel to exist, the refusal of successive Palestinian leaderships over 60 years to accept a state living alongside and in peace with Israel, the consequent suffering of ordinary Palestinians - do not seem to interest him. The dynamic of "retaliation answering to retaliation" is all. No practical suggestion is offered that Israel might follow as an alternative to present policies - only the woolliest of exhortations to "engagement between the sides". (Tell that to Hamas, whose charter defines the land of Israel as "an Islamic Waqf [ religious trust] throughout the generations. . .similar to all lands conquered by Islam by force. . .until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it. . .")
On the logic of Mr. Dorgan's purer-than-pure principles, nobody anywhere could fight a just war of self-defence. The second World War Allies should have airlifted food supplies to the populations of Germany and Japan. The use of blockades on these countries was "collective punishment" and must be condemned. Mr Dorgan's neutralist-pacifist nirvana is an attractive enough dream, but is a planet or two away from the Palestinian reality in which children as young as three are indoctrinated as Jew-haters, dressed up in suicide bomb vests and inducted as trainee "martyrs" for the jihad.
A few facts are always useful in a discussion like this, especially since he seems to have swallowed whole the Hamas propaganda blaming Israel for a humanitarian crisis. About 75 per cent of Gaza's electricity is supplied by power plants in Israel and Egypt. This supply has not been interrupted by Israel, even though power workers at the Ashkelon plant daily risk exposure to rocket fire from Gaza to maintain it. What Israel did cut were supplies of liquid fuel, but the Hamas regime had the choice of using this to continue powering essential domestic generators or to power rocket and other armament production in order to attack Israel. Can Mr Dorgan say by what law a country is obliged to maintain supplies to a territory from which it is repeatedly attacked?
Given a two-year rocket barrage on the scale of that suffered by the town of Sderot in southern Israel, many countries would have responded by carpet-bombing the offending territory. Instead, Israel's response has been marked by a concern to minimise loss of civilian life on the other side. No matter, it is still condemned. Targeted assassination of terrorists? They're illegal "extrajudicial executions". Build a security fence? That's "apartheid". Cut fuel supplies? That's "collective punishment". Any other suggestions? - Yours etc,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.