To the Editor:
The cartoon, "Talking about Israel," accompanying "On Being Jewish, American and a Writer," says more about the ignorance of the cartoonist than about Israel.
There's a significant difference between the difficulty of being Jewish and the difficulty of being a Palestinian Arab. The former is inflicted by the hatred of others; the latter is almost totally self-inflicted.
The Palestinians are the ones launching rockets at Israeli civilians. The Palestinians are the ones who popularized knifings and vehicular terrorism, attacking Israelis. The Palestinians are the ones who, time after time, have rejected generous proposals which would have given them another state in virtually all the disputed territory and who insist that any future state of theirs be judenrein.
It's time to stop with the morally bankrupt, artificial moral equivalence between a democracy and a Palestinian Authority which practices something even worse than apartheid.
Sincerely,
Alan Stein