Letters: Peace in the Mideast

Re “Diplomatic lessons,� Opinion, Feb. 28

Patrick Tyler suggests that Israel’s demand for recognition as the state of the Jewish people is merely a tactic to block negotiations.

Far from it. That recognition is as essential to peace as is the first step of declaration by an addict that he or she is addicted.

Long before Israel deflected the many attempts by its neighbors to annihilate it, the core issue was and remains the fact that neighboring Islamic leaders simply cannot tolerate a Jewish administration in the Middle East.

So the Palestinian leadership, not Israel, must undergo a complete change of attitude before a genuine peace can happen. Israel knows that anything less will be merely a smokescreen for the next attempt to annihilate it.

Gary Dalin

Santa Monica

Instead of demanding that any future state of Palestine recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which Tyler suggests is really a tactic to stall negotiations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be more reasonable and stop pandering to hard-liners.

Also, it is wrong to compare the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to the tensions between Taiwan and China that once prevented the U.S. from engaging with China. The Taiwanese and Chinese continued living within their territories with no physical land-grabs by either state, whereas

Palestinians are seeing more of their land confiscated by Israel.

A settlement will come only with pressure from the United States on Israeli leaders. If the world’s sole superpower does not have the courage to do that, it should stop playing games with the hapless Palestinians by staging these pointless negotiations.

S.R.H. Hashmi

Karachi, Pakistan

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