Israeli Tactics

Your July 10 editorial blaming Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat equally for the present conditions in Palestine makes me sick. For over three decades, Americans, through our elected officials, have unconditionally supported a government in Israel that blatantly practices apartheid, resorts to brutal ethnic cleansing, metes out collective punishment to hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, resorts to political assassinations on a massive scale and has illegally occupied and suppressed the West Bank in defiance of international law.

Why is the Western world so surprised that the Palestinian people fight back against this brutal oppression with whatever means at their disposal? Is the right to freedom reserved for the Western world exclusively?

Jamshed H. Dastur

Newport Beach