Mideast Talks

* Yasser Arafat went home Oct. 2 empty-handed not because he did not have some legitimate demands but because he was holding a gun to Benjamin Netanyahu’s head while demanding. While not getting what he wanted, Arafat went home rich with new wisdom: Violence and blackmail no longer work.

Philip K. Verleger Jr. (Commentary, Oct. 3) comes up with a new idea of blackmail: If Israel will not consent to Arafat’s demands, oil prices will go up with all the dire consequences. Is this guy for real? If Israel will do this once it is as good as dead. There will never be an end to the blackmail. Every time Arafat wanted something from Israel he’ll just have to say the word “oil.”

Of course, this whole idea is a fallacy anyway. The Palestinians are not the darlings of the Arab world after they betrayed Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and sided with Iraq. The oil-producing nations need to sell oil. And they need America, the only protection they have from Iraq.

BATYA DAGAN

Los Angeles

* Thank you for publishing Edward Said’s lucid commentary (Oct. 2). The idea of a solely Jewish state in the Middle East has always been a travesty and its actuality tragic. The only solution is a multiethnic secular state in the region. Unless the United States wants a Bosnia in the Middle East, it’s time for people of goodwill to begin working for the only kind of peace that makes any sense.

RHODA SHAPIRO

Venice

* In light of the current Israeli-Palestinian situation, it’s timely and noteworthy to find what the young Jack Kennedy had to say on this issue before beginning his senior year at Harvard.

As quoted in Herbert S. Parmet’s “Jack, the Struggles of John F. Kennedy,” the young man says to his father, “ the important thing and the necessary thing is not a situation just and fair but a solution that will work. . . . It seems to me that the only thing to do would be to break the country up into two autonomous districts giving them both self-government to the extent that they do not interfere with each other. . . . Jerusalem, having the background that is has, should be an independent unit.”

SAMUEL J. HASSON

Glendale