Hopes of peace

War is hell; Douglas Bloomfield reminds us of that in “Sherman was half right” (May18), as if we didn’t already know. He makes the statement “If there is one thing today’s Israeli and Palestinian leaders appear to have in common, it is a lack of interest in finding a political solution,” thereby very simply creating equivalency between the two parties.

On the Palestinian side, leaders do not represent their people. In the West Bank, Abbas is in the nineteenth year of his four-year presidency. Gaza is controlled by the terrorists of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Israel has had a surfeit of elections over the course of its history, but its leaders have never strayed far from the viewpoint of Israelis regarding the security situation.

Israel has been continuously under attack from the Arabs since the start of modern Zionism. Optimism generated by the Oslo process led to hopes of peace, but they were severely dashed during the attempts of negotiations by the Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat group.

Nothing that the terrorist Arafat’s successor Abbas has done since then would lead any rational person to hope for a change in attitude, including his address at the United Nations last week, when he compared Israelis to the Nazi Goebbels, and seemed to ask to go back to the UN recommendation of November 1947, forgetting the long-lasting War of Independence that the Arabs initiated back then.

Israel’s left-wing peace camp is now largely defunct; no one has any realistic plan for peacemaking and Israelis yearn to live in peace. Bloomfield needs to wean himself from his tired rhetoric, and his paranoid hatred for Netanyahu.