Hezbollah Militants Detained by Israel

Your March 10 editorial, “A Wrong Turn by Israel,” is further evidence of the anti-Israel bias in your Middle East coverage. You very conveniently overlook the fact that Hezbollah announces itself to be at war with Israel. It is a war that Israel would happily end on the day Hezbollah declares an end. As such, Hezbollah prisoners are prisoners of war and their term is entirely within the control of Hezbollah.

There is no precedent requiring formal charges for such prisoners--they are held until the end of the war or until an exchange is negotiated--and to suggest that Israel behave as no country in the history of warfare has behaved is either naive or blatantly partisan.

JACK ISKEN

Encino

* The editorial pointed to Israel’s choice to detain Hezbollah members, some of whom have never been charged with a crime and some of whom have served their time, as evidence that “Israel has co-opted the tactics of the terrorists.” Well, you haven’t even told the half of it yet.

The Israeli Defense Force is currently carrying out an Israeli policy of bulldozing the homes of Palestinians to make way for Israeli settlers. These Palestinian families are not compensated but rather have to go find other relatives to live with or are left homeless. Many of these Palestinian families have lived on the land they are being forced out of since the time of the Ottoman Empire, long before the current state of Israel.

BERT NEWTON

Pasadena

* I agree with your editorial that hostage-taking, indefinite detention without charge and other violations of human rights for political ends, as apparently is happening in Israel, is “wrongheaded and immoral” and a “terrorist tactic.”

Shouldn’t we extend this line of reasoning to the matter of the sanctions imposed by the U.N., but largely at the insistence of the Bush administration, upon Iraq? Something like 1.3 million innocent Iraqi men, women and children, many very young children, have died as a result of the sanctions that our government has been so adamant about maintaining during the past seven years. The right of the Iraqi people to their lives has been brushed aside and their lives themselves have been destroyed by our political and economic agenda. Sacrificing those lives has been the means that our government has used to pursue its ends. If we think that what the Israeli government is doing is wrong, and it surely is, we should work to end the sanctions against Iraq now.

STEPHEN D. SIMON

Claremont