Sir, – Amos Oz sent Marwan Barghouti only a book – defending Israel. What impedes Seth J. Frantzman (“Marwan Barghouti, Amos Oz, Haim Oron and a tale of darkness,” Terra Incognita, March 30) from acknowledging Oz’s good intentions? He demeans that book, which the Post’s own reviewer termed a “lavish, intricate, panoramic…epic story” of Israel.

Frantzman scorns a comparison of Barghouti to Nelson Mandel without showing why it isn’t appropriate. Likewise, Britain’s work with Gerry Adams let Northern Ireland heal. Reintegrating Eastern Europe’s communists let it heal.

An interview with Oz sums up his peacemaking: “A well known Israeli Arab told me that reading my book was the first time he understood why Jews came to this country. I immediately wanted to have it translated into Arabic.”

Like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Oz builds bridges for a future in which neither side’s doctors must treat victims, or peoples mourn their loved ones.

JAMES ADLER

First, a devastating hell for the innocent victims and their families.

Their blood cries to heaven and deserves first comment all its own – silence and prayer just about this, a tragedy, injustice and hell beyond words.

But these innocent victims and their families with destroyed lives, whose horror is simply beyond language to express, also live in a larger world. And how horrible also for prospects for peace, and what an excuse for Netanyahu to continue the occupation and settlements, and for continued Palestinian suffering.

Nonetheless, today this is beside the point.

The first moments should be reserved only for these innocent victims and the shattered lives of both the dead, whose blood again, like Abel’s, cries out to heaven, and for their surviving loved ones.

JAMES ADLER

To the Editor:

Will yesterday’s opponents of a no-flight zone for Libya — who perhaps, forgivably, assumed that the rebels would win without one — continue to allow the imminent, systematic, but still preventable mass slaughter?

It’s too bad that years of American interventions and favoritism in the region now harm our credibility at a time when we could do good. But do the Libyans deserve to suffer because of George W. Bush’s arrogance in Afghanistan and Iraq? Have we become too self-doubting to save Muslim lives in Libya?

Is President Obama going to emulate Bill Clinton’s intervention to save lives in the Balkans, or instead what Mr. Clinton has called his biggest regret of his presidency, his failure to save lives in the Rwandan genocide?

James Adler

Sir, – I wish to thank The Jerusalem Post for praising J Street as a “laudable endeavor to present a viable left-wing, pro- Zionist alternative to American Jews” (“J Street’s fragile alternative,” Editorial,, February 28).

I hope that instead of emphasizing only the relatively minor issues on which it might disagree with J Street, the Post will fully cover the crucial central issues on which the two agree – Israel’s legitimacy, defensibility and security, and the need for a peaceful resolution to the conflict that will ensure her existence forever as a sovereign, strong and safe Jewish democratic state.

JAMES ADLER

JAMES ADLER

Regarding the Jan. 14 front-page article “Catastrophe in Haiti“:

I am reminded of the words of The Post’s great writer Marjorie Williams, who died in 2005, in a 2002 column about trying to explain to her son about the Washington sniper and her own cancer. This week she might have been inclined to use similar words all over again:

“What we really labor to keep from our children is the same bitter knowledge that their elders avoid: not that people get killed by strangers, or that there are too many guns in our world, or that madness never sleeps, but that there is no logic at all to some of the worst blows that life metes out. Time and chance happen to us all, darling boy, and even grown-ups can bear it only a little bit at a time.”  

James Adler
Cambridge, Mass.