Before a Divorce, End the Suicide Pact

Re “A Good Divorce,” Opinion, Nov. 9: A serious suicidal pathology must prevent Amos Oz from noticing that Palestinian Arabs have not honored a single provision of any agreement that became uncomfortable for them, and that Palestinian Arabs -- through some combination of propaganda, education and religious beliefs -- overwhelmingly favor genocide for Jews and the dissolution of Israel. His sickness allows Oz to equate the attacker and the victim.

Robert Milford

Woodland Hills

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Oz frames his column about the Geneva initiative around the idea of a divorce, as if both parties came to be entangled voluntarily. He conveniently omits the imposition of the European Zionist state in 1948 and hopes Americans have forgotten.

The real intent of his article and the initiative is to convince us of the “explicit recognition of the Jewish people’s national right to their own country.” Zionism (a then-small movement of European Jewish elite) defined the Jewish religion in the late 1800s as a nationality that needed its own country. The movement chose Palestine. But the Arab peoples of the Middle East are not responsible for the European “Jewish question” or the Nazi Holocaust.

The nationality of Jews born in America is American. They pay their taxes -- much of which goes to fuel the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. It is this racist ideology that brings the world ever closer to disaster.

Rhoda Shapiro

Encinitas