Madam, – Ruth Zakh of the Israeli embassy (Letters, January 16th) writes that “no cause and no motivation justify deliberate, systematic use of terror against civilians”. How true that is, and how nice it would be if the state of Israel followed that maxim.
In its attempt to expand its borders at the Palestinians’ expense since the war of 1967, Israel has used various techniques of terror to cow the Palestinians and to squeeze them into an ever decreasing space.
These include martial law in the West Bank, the blockade of Gaza, trial in military courts in the West Bank and military detention for adults and minors. And of course then there is its main weapon of terror, the use of overwhelming military force as implemented in Gaza last year. Her contention that Israel did not target civilians is hard to accept when one considers that 400 of the dead were children, and that among the infrastructure destroyed were more than 200 schools. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Lara Marlowe’s excellent Opinion piece (“US just doesn’t get it about motivation for suicide attacks”, January 13th) and some responses to it reminded me of a question one of my daughter’s students asked in her Middle East school shortly after 9/11: “Miss, do you think the men who flew the planes were brave?”
Over the years since 9/11, I have asked many colleagues this question. The response, like that to Lara Marlowe’s question about motivation, usually provokes the most vitriolic and fulminating responses.
It is telling that the schoolgirl could see beyond our western cultural arrogance, where all outsiders are defined by a variety of subhuman traits. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – History shows that suicide has been an ingredient of war from time immemorial.
In the first World War, Allied soldiers were ordered to certain death – often at the point of a gun – in a suicidal confrontation with steel. The Kamikaze pilots of the second World War were a formidable weapon for the Japanese. The brave American soldiers who stormed the impossible Omaha beach did so in the knowledge that a disproportionate number of them would die (19,000 of them were killed in the first few hours). - Yours, etc,
Madam, – Ruth Zakh of the embassy of Israel is obviously well informed. Would she tell us why Israel needs 300 nuclear weapons and in what circumstances they would be used? – Yours, etc,