Your July 31 editorial “Can peace survive these blows” should have read “Can Israel survive the peace” in view of the most recent deadly Arab terrorist attack.
After your opening expressions of sympathy for Israel, you then go on to accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of not doing his part, that his “provocative and irresponsible positions” on such “volatile” issues as housing construction in East Jerusalem cause Arafat to act the way he does.
How you can attribute a moral equivalency of housing construction in one’s own municipal boundaries to murderous attacks on innocent people is totally incomprehensible.
But, more to the point, the fact is that, as long as Israel breathes, the Arabs will be “provoked” and a “volatile” situation will be created. In spite of this, Israel consistently complied with the Oslo accords, while Arafat has consistently and blatantly violated nearly all of them. And yet it is Israel that the world condemns, not Arafat.
Israel has an obligation to protect its citizens and, although she saw the fallacies in Oslo, moved ahead with the peace process in the hope that somehow things would work out because peace was truly desired.
But in four years since Oslo, with 154 Israeli residents killed and nearly 700 wounded, it’s time to say the famous Passover word “dayenu” (enough) to the peace process as it exists in its present form.
