Throwing darts at Ashrawi - Letters to the Editor

Hanan Ashrawi's voice is passionate but not compassionate ("Where We Went Wrong," February issue). She claims the moral high ground while expressing pious contempt for the Israeli people, even the very large peace camp--which she caustically brackets in quotes--that her people proceeded to devastate by their violence. The Palestinians elected Ariel Sharon just as surely as if they had all cast ballots.

Ashrawi bemoans the very real miseries which her people have experienced at the hands of Israel's brutal reaction to the second intifada, yet she sees no cause and effect. She is silent on the random and deliberate murder of innocents which the intifada exults in. And she has nothing to say on how the uprising begun by her people in September 2000 destroyed a negotiating process that finally would have led them to statehood and an end to the occupation she so rightfully hates.

The Palestinians' situation is to be pitied. Their conduct, however, is pitiful.

Ralph Seliger
New York, New York

As someone who believes that neither side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has a monopoly on saints or sinners, and that neither Prime Minister Ariel Sharon nor Chairman Yasser Ararat is up to the challenges of these times, it was disappointing to see that Hanan Ashrawi chose verbal sleight of hand over the hard, introspective lifting required to be a truth-teller in her essay.

Ashrawi takes the easy road in primarily blaming the Palestinian Authority's current political dilemma--along with the absence of Palestinian democracy and the rule of law in her society--on Sharon. She only weakly alludes to those of her co-nationals in the Palestinian elite directly responsible for the corruption afflicting Palestinians and preventing the nurturing of democratic institutions.

It sounds like The Progressive settled for too low a standard of soul-searching in this instance.