The Letters in Response To Cohen's Op-ed

You'll recall the recent Roger Cohen op-ed I deconstructed?

Here are the letters-to-the-editor:-

Dimming Prospects for Mideast Peace?
Published: November 19, 2009

To the Editor:

“A Mideast Truce,” by Roger Cohen (column, The New York Times on the Web, Nov. 17), could leave readers with the impression that the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, is a supporter of peace and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is an evasive hard-liner. But the facts suggest that the opposite is true.

Mr. Netanyahu has made clear that he is ready to begin negotiations immediately, anywhere, without any preconditions. By contrast, Mr. Abbas stood with Yasir Arafat in rejecting peace in 2000 at Camp David, he rejected an even more generous peace offer from Ehud Olmert last year, he rejected Mr. Netanyahu’s offer to resume peace talks earlier this year, and Mr. Abbas’s vile doctoral dissertation mocked the Holocaust as “the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed” — hardly the résumé of a true peacemaker.

Moreover, Mr. Abbas’s rejection of Israel’s demand for recognition as a Jewish state and his insistence on a “right of return” suggest that his idea of a two-state solution is one resulting in two majority-Arab states, with no Jewish state.

Between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas, who is the real moderate and who is the real hard-liner?

One is reminded of the Ogden Nash verse “The Tale of Custard the Dragon,” in which characters renowned for their purported bravery cower in fear when an actual crisis occurs, while Custard, the “cowardly dragon” who “cried for a nice safe cage,” in fact proves to be a courageous hero.

Stephen A. Silver
San Francisco

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To the Editor:

Roger Cohen’s column recounts an amalgam of Israeli-Palestinian missed opportunities and frustrations. No one is more frustrated than those of us in the Israeli public, who so often thought we were on the verge of a settlement with the Palestinians only to have our hopes dashed.

While the missteps and blunders are indeed plentiful enough to go around, Israelis ask themselves: “I’ll continue hoping for a resolution to the conflict even with a Palestinian Authority plagued by internal conflicts and I’ll even offer up more land, settlements and some peace of mind, but why do the Palestinians continue teaching anti-Semitism as part of their educational curriculum? Why do they deny a Holocaust that wiped out a third of my people about 70 years ago? Why can’t they admit my historical rights to biblical lands?”

Stuart Pilichowski
Mevaseret Zion, Israel

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To the Editor:

When Roger Cohen points out that the wall helps Israelis who just do not want to be mixed with Arabs, he puts his finger on the reason that a perpetuation of the status quo is a bad idea. Children on both sides who grow up without knowledge of “the other” will be more, rather than less, sensitive to the needs, hopes and desires of their neighbors.

Mr. Cohen’s Band-Aid prescription is nothing but a plan to let Israelis keep on with their prosperous and separate lives while the stateless Palestinians — who tend to prefer togetherness to separation — struggle on for yet another generation in isolated and desperate misery and degradation.

An agreement has to have something in it for both sides.

Susan Hussein
Upper Montclair, N.J.

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To the Editor:

Roger Cohen writes: “A peace of the brave must yield to a truce of the mediocre — at best. At least until Intifada-traumatized Israeli psychology shifts.”

He’s correct, but it is not because we can’t perceive ourselves as anything but victims, as he implies. Rather, we know that the fence protects us — so we can’t take it down.

The Palestinians will have to learn to live with the new situation they created with their suicide-bomber war of attrition. We don’t want to be victims again.

Barry Lynn
Efrat, West Bank