Page One

Editor: 

I, Israeli and Jew, am appalled by Gabe Kurtz’s March 15 letter. I am one of those “Uncle Isaacs” he so viciously castigates. A Pro-Palestinian media to picture Israel badly is unnecessary: Ariel Sharon and his military machine are doing a great job. 

Specifically, the photograph of which he writes is from a surreptitiously shot video showing Israeli soldiers in the best traditions of a Latin American death squad.  

Mr. Kurtz may not have seen the shots of the crowd dispersed by automatic gunfire and the victim stripped to his briefs prior to being shot. In a professional disciplined army, there is no excuse (how does Mr. Kurtz know the shooter had family killed in a terrorist act?) for soldiers to act-out personal agendas.  

In the IDF in which I served thirty years ago, these soldiers would have been immediately arrested, tried and sentenced for murder. 

They shame all Israelis, in and out of uniform. 

The Israeli press recounted this past week that Israeli soldiers are “tattooing” Palestinians with numbers on their forearms.  

This practice was devised and practiced only by the Nazis for inmates of the concentration camps.  

Reading of it, I was stunned into silence, then rage at this crime of “injuring the public sensibility,” an offense which includes any public display of Nazi symbols, means and methods, particularly those used in their campaign to exterminate the Jewish people.  

And an Israeli military officer publicly stated that in the fight against the Palestinians Israel must learn the lessons from any source, including the Nazi’s methods in the Warsaw Ghetto, which included curfews, deliberate starvation of the population, public humiliations, unprovoked summary executions, deportations. 

No, Mr. Kurtz, Israelis and Jews demanding an end to the occupation of Palestinian lands, an immediate end to Sharon-and-CO.’s state terrorism, an immediate end to confiscating Palestinian land, destruction of crops, humiliating and life-threatening check-points, extra-judicial use of lethal force against suspected terrorists, and immediate end to the politically excused emulation of Nazi techniques against an occupied population violating the Fourth Geneva Conventions, are not “Uncle Isaacs” but rather modern day Jeremiahs decrying evil performed in our name.  

We proudly denounce these acts.  

NOT OUR NAME! 

E. Arnon