A ‘Peace Dividend’ Dream for the Middle East

Re “Give the Palestinians a Stake in Peace,” Commentary, Nov. 22: Wow! Talk about creative thinking in a situation for which we haven’t heard anything even approaching creative since Oslo. Gideon Parchomovsky and Peter Siegelman may have struck diplomatic gold.

Maybe their idea of vesting Palestinians in the Israeli economy can’t really ever work. But their inspired approach to the problem is worth the price of admission and might give birth to the kind of visionary thinking that this Middle East conundrum demands. There couldn’t be a better way to bring people together than to point out to concerned Palestinians and Israelis one real value of peace, as their index fund idea does.

Mark Rosenblatt

Los Angeles

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Parchomovsky and Siegelman turn reality on its head when they say that “terrorism has not only forced Israel to increase its expenditures on security, it has devastated the Israeli economy.” Terrorism? Israel is not fighting terrorism so much as fighting to defend the land it stole during its 1967 invasion of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem and the colonies it has illegally built throughout them ever since.

Thirty-five years of foreign military dictatorship, colonization and expulsion are terrorism. Finally giving up hope of ever seeing freedom and fighting back as best as one can are not.

Isaac Boxx

Austin, Texas

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Suicide bombers explode a packed bus filled with schoolchildren. An Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade “hero” chases a young mother and her two preschoolers out of bed in their own home and shoots them to death while they hug, cowering in the corner. Elderly Holocaust survivors are blown up while dining. Entire families are lost in an instant. Bloodthirsty militant groups are proud to claim these atrocities as their own.

The U.N. and the European Union turn a blind eye, winking at Arab oil, and “human rights supporters” on college campuses and elsewhere ignore these crimes altogether or justify them. Too many Palestinian parents and schoolteachers teach their children to commit suicide and to murder other children, and yet the compassionate of the world don’t cry out against this exploitation of children. What has happened to human values when crimes so heinous can be winked away or justified? Maybe we comfortable Americans should think about this the next time we ride a bus or dine out.

MaryAnne Tracy

Santa Barbara