‘TV as Servant of Prejudice’

In his whining and irrelevant column (“TV as Servant of Prejudice,” Editorial Page, July 9), Chaim Herzog, president of Israel, declares that world media coverage of the West Bank reflects a “subconscious” anti-Semitism. Alone among the world’s nations, he declares, Israel is not granted the right to exist.

I disagree. The issue, Mr. Herzog, is not your country’s right to exist. The issue is whether that right is to be purchased at the cost of oppression meted out to the conquered Palestinian people.

The question before the world, moreover, is not whether Israel is to be singled out due to anti-Semitism. The question is whether Israel, alone among the world’s nations, is to claim the right to conquer and rule a subject people, reducing them to second-class status.

All the whimpering over past wrongs, Mr. Herzog, all the complaints over anti-Jewish acts of the Middle Ages will not obscure the essential point: The Palestinians are a people with rights that you are bound to respect. And in systematically violating those rights, you--not dead Nazis, or the medieval Christians--are the oppressors of whom the world must now take note.

T.A. HEPPENHEIMER

Fountain Valley