Can the ‘Pragmatic’ Abbas Create a State?

Re “Premier, Under Arafat, Faces Rocky Road to Palestinian State,” April 25: According to The Times (and every other paper I’ve read), new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas is a moderate because, among other things, he is against suicide bombings. Never mind that he is not against them because they are immoral and kill innocent civilians but, rather, because strategically they give Israel an excuse to strike back and they hurt the Palestinian cause.

Never mind that he wrote a book in 1983 called “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and the Zionist Movement,” in which he not only denied the extent of the Holocaust but said that those Jews who were killed in camps in Nazi-occupied Europe were killed with the blessing and help of Zionists looking to push the world into recognizing a Jewish state through sympathy. Is this what passes for a moderate these days?

Joey Gold

Torrance

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Abbas is a “pragmatist” only because he realizes that the Palestinian goal of destroying Israel militarily and through the so-called right of return of Palestinians into Israel is not possible. If the Arab-Israeli conflict is ever going to be solved, it is up to the Arabs to accept the existence of the Jewish state of Israel and move beyond their so-called pragmatism into building better societies for their people, with free, democratic, transparent institutions that allow for basic freedoms to prevail. That is called progress, not pragmatism.

David J. Schwartz

Los Angeles

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Re “Hawks Rip Into Mideast Plan,” April 23: The Bush “road map” is nothing more than a journey to a dead end. You cannot make peace when you have a country like Israel that has no defined borders. Its borders change constantly through expropriation of Palestinian land, and therein lies the problem.

Robert Pisapia

Westlake Village