Peace Prospects Between Israel and Arabs

I must protest. Your Op-Ed Page of March 8 demonstrates very little objectivity and a great deal of anti-Israel bias. The columns, “Dollars to Settlements, Dollars Less in Aid” (by Alton Frye) and “Kohl Doesn’t Show Effects of Winds of Reconciliation” (by William Pfaff), are prime examples as is the devious Conrad cartoon (“After the peace treaty is signed, we’ll determine the borders!”).

The Frye column is so badly twisted it would be utterly impossible to reply to it in a letter. The Pfaff column states, “The territory in question (Poland’s annexed German border) was lost as a consequence of war . . . a war of aggression launched by Germany, a fact Kohl has seemed to deprecate. This war had, as one of its objectives, to ‘erase from the human mind’ even ‘the concept of Poland.’ ”

Exactly! Just substitute the Arabs for the Germans in wartime and Israel for Poland and you have the present picture.

After all the wars initiated against Israel by Arab states, the total blackout of Israel from Arab maps, the kidnapings, hijackings, terrorist bombings, wouldn’t you say Israel has good reason to doubt her enemies motives and promises? It would seem Israel’s crime, in the eyes of the world, was in winning defensive wars no one expected her to win against great odds.

As William Buckley Jr. (“Annex the West Bank”) puts it, “To declare, simply, that by right of conquest, the West Bank is theirs and therefore it follows that everyone who lives and works there is a guest of the government of Israel. The 1967 war was initiated by Jordan and was won triumphantly by Israel; from which it follows that it is entitled, if it chooses, to hang on to conquered territory.”

SHIRLEY WOLF

Santa Monica