Israel and the PLO

When you publish a piece so blatantly anti-Israel by an Israeli journalist like Avnery, you are being misleading by not disclosing to your readers that this man is part of the minuscule, generally unsupported radical left element within democratic Israel.

The patent nonsense of Avnery’s advice to the Israeli people is personified in his concluding paragraph wherein he states that Arafat is “the only man whose signature can hold the Palestinian people to a peace agreement.” Avnery is offering an illusion when he feeds us the nonsense that Arafat’s signature will be worth anything more than the paper it’s written on.

Not only do we have daily experience that Arab agreements, even between Arabs, are broken as fast as they are made, but we have this very example in the ultimate agreement with the Camp David accords involving Egypt, Israel and the U.S.

Those are the accords that Shamir insists must be upheld, and rightly so, if agreements are to mean anything. But we have Egypt’s Hosni Mubarek saying, now that Israel gave back 100% of the Sinai, with its oil fields developed by Israel now feeding Egypt’s economy, that Camp David is “passe,” we have the U.S. waffling on the enforcement of the Camp David plan, and we even have Avnery telling us that Shamir’s insistence upon the Camp David peace plan is “nonsense” and an “illusion.”

It seems to me that it is Avnery’s advice that is the ultimate example of what is “nonsense” and what is an “illusion.”

LEON PERLSWEIG

Los Angeles