Sir, - Brian Quinn (October 10th) suggests that an inordinate amount of hostility to Israel is manifested on the Irish Times Letters page. He concedes that Palestinian youths are shot by the Israelis Defence Forces, but asks who sends them into the line of fire, implying that it is their parents who do so. The young people of Palestine are no more forced to riot than were young nationalist Catholics in Northern Ireland at the start of the Troubles. But Bloody Sunday, when the British Army fired live ammunition at protesters, lives as a day of infamy in the recent history of Britain and Ireland. There have been many dozens of Bloody Sundays in Palestine, perpretrated by Israeli forces.
Mr Quinn says that the PLO "lusts" after all Jerusalem. But the facts on the ground are that Israel has illegally annexed East Jerusalem, and cut it off from its West Bank hinterland with a massive arc of illegal settlements.
Mr Quinn says Israel holds on to territory only to deny it to those who would attack Israel. But this is patently inaccurate: the suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad come from within the Territories. Israel would not be building the settlements if its only desire was to have buffer zones. It hardly makes sense to fill a buffer with a quarter-of-a-million colonists.
Mr Quinn says Israel has long recognised the real terrorist states: Iran, Iraq, Libya and the PLO. But while one will admit that these countries and organisations have sponsored terrorism, it must also be allowed that Israel has launched wars of aggression in 1956, 1967 and 1982; it has assassinated Palestinian leaders all over the world, using air raids to do so, as in Tunis in 1985; it has used a policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders within the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority; it helped to create Hamas, originally seen as a counterweight to the PLO in the Territories; it put down the first Intifada with a policy which the Nobel Prizewinner Yitzhak Rabin characterised as "breaking the bones" of the Palestinians. It has used helicopters, tanks and strike aircraft in the second Intifada; it has used massive bombardments of South Lebanon with the avowed intent of creating a huge refugee problem for the Lebanese government, as in Shimon Peres's "Operation Grapes of Wrath" of 1996, which culminated with the Qana massacre of over 100 Lebanese women and children.
I suggest to Mr Quinn, that Iran, Iraq, Libya and the PLO have no monopoly of terror in the Middle East. - Yours, etc.,
Conor McCarthy, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.