To the Editor:Barry has expressed what I have told, for the past three decades (!), successive American Consulate-Generals, political officers here, visiting State Department visitors from Washington, division heads at the Near East Unit at State in Washington, Senators and Congressmen and in this blog (see here; here; here; for recent posts).
We find it strange that Secretary of State John Kerry visits “us” so often. After all, we know that there isn’t going to be a grand peace agreement because there are irreconcilable differences between the parties (no satisfactory compromise is possible).What we do need is encouragement to continue building the interconnections between peoples and lower level government employees that have led to several years of relative peace with the West Bank Palestinians, and even several months of quiet between Gaza and us. This is where the hard work should be done, and this has the greatest chance of success.BARRY LYNN
Efrat, West Bank, July 2, 2013
The US Consulate policy here of discriminating by ignoring the Jewish/Israeli population of now 360,000 residents in Judea and Samaria as to joint events of culture, art, music, theater, sport, etc., equal opportunity programs of democracy workshops, leadership seminars, etc., is not only, I think, illegal and anti-constitutional, but simply quite un-American.
And also a futile and counter-peace effort.
Peace is between peoples and if the US accepts the Arab viewpoint that Jews shouldn't even live in Judea and Samaria, that is, in the end, an apartheid approach, besides accepting the Arab intransigency as normative in politics.
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