Daniel Bloch begins his essay blaming our problems on the anonymous bureaucrat and the bureaucratic mind- set in general.  As he moves along, the blame shifts to Prime Minister Sharon, who does not provide leader- ship to the bureaucrats. 

Finally he gets to his real point – the economy is being milked by the Haredim.  That is Bloch's real war and the Haredim are his real enemy.  So why waste the opening paragraphs – let him put his point up front.  Does he need the opening paragraphs to fill space or to provide a veneer of logic to his predetermined conclusion? 

Some years ago, a Chicago judge was asked to rule on a sukkah in a condominium building.  He gave the defendant ten days to remove it.

The condominium's committee got the message and subsequently changed their rules.

In out contentious society, we cannot expect that much good sense from either our judges or our citizens.

If Daniel Bloch needed the Channel 1 interview with Arafat to see the Chairman's "true colors," one wonders where he (Mr Bloch) has been until now - and why you need to waste space on his op-ed.

If the interview was newsworthy only because of Mr Shimon Peres' awkward reaction, perhaps it would have been even more newsworthy to interview Yossi Beilin and see him explain it all away.

The POST Internet Edition features the quote from President Bush "If you feed a terrorist , you are a terrorist."

I first glance, I thought it said "freed" instead of "feed" but that too is worth reminding both the PA authority and Messrs. Zinni and Burns.  If you free a terrorist, you are a terrorist. 

Arafat – with his revolving-door jails - certainly fits the bill.  And our own government must not follow suit in a misguided effort to appease either the enemy or our American friends.

David Newman takes exception to his university's awarding an honorary doctorate to Ariel Sharon, the Negev's only representative ever to serve as Prime Minister, because he is "a symbol of everything that divides contemporary Israel."

Newman doesn't seem to recall that Sharon divided Israel nearly 2:1 in his most recent election and divides the Knesset nearly 3:1.  Contrast that to Yitzhak Rabin who ran a minority government that had to ram Oslo down our throats with the help of MKs who had to be bought off with a few months of prestige and a Mitsubishi.

Sharon's award by Ben Gurion University can only help the university salvage some of its own prestige.

The POST internet edition carried the headline "Bullets target Israeli car near Kiryat Sefer."  Bullets target, indeed?  The POST is starting to sound like BBC and CNN where "shooting starts" and "violence erupts," as
though by some unseen hand.

You report that the Air Corps "may place its flight school, aircraft maintenance, and crew transport under private hands" turning it into (in the words of its current commander) "one of the most efficient forces in
the world." 

I don't know about that – but I am quite certain is that it will provide high paying jobs for their retired generals, whose ranks the current commander will be joining. 

Your Op-Ed by Emanuele Ottolenghi was out of line.  It's one thing for foreigners to tell us what they think we should do.  It is quite another for a foreigner to tell us how to vote.

Is there some reason that you seem to be avoiding the repeated postponement of the Avishai Raviv trial in your editorials?

In a POST book review, Shimshon Arad writes "Iran and Hizbollah have, so far, refrained from direct acts of terror against Israeli targets inside Israel."  The kidnap- ping of the three soldiers and the way they refuse to reveal any information is terrorism in my book.

Does Arad not follow current events or is he a member of Four Mothers?

When will Daniel Levy (and his master Yossi Beilin) get it?

If the IRA doesn't follow through on its disarmament pledge, the British can put their watchtower back.  The last person who suggested that if Oslo doesn't work we could turn the clock back, was Yitzhak Rabin in defending the agreement in the Knesset.

We should listen to James Baker because of "his closeness to the US administration and the analogies between US-Israel relations today and those between Bush senior and Yitzhak Shamir in 1991?"  Are we not a
sovereign state?

A strong PA is in our interest?  Hasn't he noticed that they have abrogated every agreement made in the past eight years and have been making out-and-out war the past thirteen months?  So who needs them?

And perhaps they don't realize that they lost the last election and will lose the next as well.  I think Levy and Beilin are the ones who don't get it.

David Newman complains about the proposal of Rehav'am Zeevi to separate the Jewish and Arab populations and even attributes this invention to Rabbi Meir Kahane.  Others have written that Israel's extreme, racist Gandhi was the exact opposite of the peaceable Indian original.

May I respectfully point out that the partition of Imperial India into Gandhi's India and Jinnah's Pakistan resulted in the transfer of some twelve and a half million people between the two countries in the Punjab
district, within a period of less than six months. 

I believe that "our" Gandhi's proposal was meant to be somewhat less disruptive.

I don't know about all the other pundits and politicians, but I would think that as a professor of political science, Mr Newman would know this bit of Gandhian history.  Or perhaps he does, but hopes his readers don't.   I wonder what his students know. 

The questions of Ikrit and Bir'am - and there are appa- rently very different histories to these two villages - may be complex and may have conflicting yet legitimate perspectives, but one thing is sure - repopulating them would not be a precedent for any "right of return."

Let us remember that the "right of return" that the refugees claim is for those who live outside the 1949 cease-fire lines.  The former residents of these two villages are Israeli citizens.

Tuesday evening I ran my car into an earth-and-rocks roadblock between Shim'a and Othniel in the southern Hebron hills.  Insurance etc are taking care of it, but that is not why am writing to you.  The army towed me to Othniel and from there I got a couple of fellows to drive me (and the groceries I had just bought in Beer Sheva) to Kiryat Arba (not fifteen minutes away) and my wife picked me up from there.

Othniel is about eighteen years old, about seventy families and a yeshiva.  It's location has always been a bit problematic from a security standpoint.  Relative to other communities in the Hevron hills, the residents are considered fairly high on the "daring" scale.

I take this road to work almost every day, past Kiryat Arba and Othniel to Beer Sheva.  My car has plastic windows which are OK for stones.  I do not travel armed.  There is a fellow I know from work who lives there and I figured it would be a simple matter to ask him to take me to Kiryat Arba.  (I did not want to ask Frances to come all the way out since she does not
know that specific area.)  Turns out he was getting ready to work night shift so could not help me.  But he arranged for the two other fellows to take me.  One of them took a rifle with him, but that was to be expected.

So here is my point. Before setting out, they gathered up bullet-proof vests for the three of us - two of them the ceramic kind that are supposed to be particularly effective.  OK.  It's hard to drive that way, but I was
a passenger.  Along the way, one says to the other "Remember when we used to take this road all the time?"  Now this is a twelve minute drive on what was once the main J'lem-Beer Sheva road.  It's mostly within the confines of the South Hebron Hills Regional Council.  Some of their kids certainly take the bus to Kiryat Arba to school.  And I find this very curious.  They still drive the half an hour the other way to work in Beer Sheva, but it seems that Othniel folks don't take the Kiryat Arba road much anymore.  And one says "We even took this road to Jerusalem."  (Taking "this road" to Jerusalem is forty minutes.  Going around any other way is double that at least.) And the folks from Othniel are doing it.

How the mighty have fallen. 

Last month, I took an armed bus when I had to go someplace in the Gaza area, someplace I'd would have driven to a year ago myself.  But that was different - we all feel less at ease with "someone else's" Arabs.

I am concerned for our internal strength. 

Mr Shimon Peres has been quoted as saying  "The Americans are not asking us to give up territory or our right to self-defense, but merely that we should sit with Arafat."

If that's all he wants, then by all means let's meet with Arafat.  But not Peres.  Maybe you or me.  We would have the good sense not to turn the meeting into anything beyond the formality Mr Peres claims it is.

Freedom of the press aloows for all kinds of nonsense, but you should really consider whether printing outright falsehoods is part of your mandate, even in an opinion column.

Jessica Stern writes in your paper "Jewish extremists have repeatedly attacked the Dome of the Rock."  For the record, no one has attacked the Dome of the Rock since it has come under Israeli control.  The neighbor- ing Al Aksa mosque was attacked, by an unbaklanced Christian tourists quite some years ago, but Israeli security has imporved since then.  The only other attacks perpetrated on the Mount since then are the ongoing Moslem attacks on the artifacts of the Jewish Temple and Jewish worshipers.

That may be inconvenient for the point that Ms. Stern wishes to make, but the truth can indeed be inconvenient for the ideologues and the ignorant.

When he addressed the media Wednesday, secretary Colin Powell talked about the necessity to attack all aspects of terrorism - not just the perpetrators, but the supporters as well.

Then when asked how that fits with the problems Israel is having with our own Nobel Prize terrorists, he said that we have to go back to talking as quickly as possible.  Does the man have no sense of reality?  Or no shame?

I just heard that the recent report by Mekorot on water consumption includes a matter of water extortion aside from the Jordanian leak left over from Yitzhak Rabin.  It seems that when Arab consumers use more water than they are permitted, the quotas are simply enlarged.    And lest we think this is purely a political matter, Mekorot tells us that the police are supposed to shut off the water but are afraid to.  Lovely.

(I haven't seen this report myself, but it is surely available to the POST.)

Ariel Sharon's decision to shut down two of the main PA offices in Jerusalem was a good one.  Unfortunately, he fell short.

That would have been the perfect time to retake the Temple Mount and get rid of all the heavy equipment there.  It would be nice to think that he will do that "next time," but the move is now so obvious that he has already lost any element of surprise.

Your David Rudge wrote "One of the open questions is how the group managed to cross the Green Line and various checkpoints en-route without being stopped before reaching Tel Aviv."

No big surprise there.  Moshe Shahal - back when he was Minister of Police - said that it is not our policy to check women because thusfar none have blown themselves up. I suppose that since this latest one didn't succeed, we will continue this policy - until finally one of them kills enough Jews.

Whenever the subject of programs for large families come up, the bourgeouis parties like to tell us that the first child places a larger burden on a family than the fourth or fifth.  That's to remind us that the folks in Ramat Aviv can't save money by passing used clothes to younger children.

But the fact is that the average family of what Amotz Asa-el calls Middle Israel buys a four room apartment that has plenty of room for the first two children and in many sections of our society for the third and fourth as well.  But when you get to the larger families, the space just isn't enough and people need more room. That is where the larger expense for larger families really kicks in.

Of course the bourgeouis parties would just as soon the large families stuffed themselves into tiny apartments.  "Serves them right," no doubt.

I don't understand much of what you don't understand, Mr. Alpert - and more.

I must say however that I especially don't understand why everyone makes so much of a deal about yeshiva students who don't do army service when there are Haredim who are not in yeshiva, but the army itself can't be bothered to take them for service.  Reminds me of a managing director I knew who refused to get excited about big savings programs and cutbacks until the plant managers got off their [chairs] and "picked up the loose money from the plant floor."

You wrote in your editorial "and as US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk said yesterday, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat was never sincere about renouncing the use of violence."  What you should have said is "...even ... Martin Indyk, himself one of the main proponents of the failed Oslo process..." or "...even ... Martin Indyk, who would have liked Ehud Barak to make further concessions..."

But on the bright side, Jeff Barak and Herb Keinon tell us at the close of their article that Indyk admitted that the Oslo process failed.  That should have been your headline!

David Newman that the existence of Jewish communi- ties beyond the 1949 cease fire lines will forever be a cause of strife between the Jews and the Arabs.    His implication is that evacuating these Jews would remove the cause of strife.

Much as I would like to believe Mr. Newman, I think it wise to believe Mr. Arafat who says that the causes of strife include the Jewish settlements in places like Mr Newman's own Beer Sheba.

Mr. Stephen Rosenfeld believes that complete security for the citizens of Israel is impossible and therefore suggests that we quit trying and settle for less.

How much less, he doesn't say.  Three bomb victims a week?  How about one mortar attack and two sniper shootings?  Perhaps something on the order of the Chinese targeting of Quemoy and Matsu every other day?

If this week's victim included a cousin of Mr Rosenfeld who came here after the Holocaust or even his own child here as a tourist or a student, would he be so generous with our lives?

Your photo captioned "a Jerusalem man leaves a Mea She'arim community center holding the bag of food he was given for the Pessah holiday" (page 2 of Friday's second section) is out of line.  It's bad enough to be poor - does this elderly man have to have his poverty
exposed in the press?

In a radio interview with Yaron Enosh, Minister for Something-or-Other Dalia Itzik tells us that if citizens dare to raise a hand against policemen, it will be the end of our democratic society.  She was referring to accusations made against the Jews of Hevron who may or may not have been responsible for a gas explosion that injured an as yet undetermined number of policemen.

The Minister might consider applying that logic to the Orr Commission, under whose very noses police were physically attacked.  There too democratic society is under siege, but when it's Arab citizens who do the attacking, we excuse them.  In particular the Orr Com- mission excuses them - for that is their raison d'etre.

But that would have been too much to expect from either the Minister or the interviewer.

There is a story about a cabbie driving Cole Porter when "Some Enchanted Evening" came on the radio.  The cabbie said "Mr Porter, did you write that?" and Porter supposed replied "no, it was Rogers and Hammerstein.  Can you imagine - it takes two people to write a song!" 

At least we knew what Rogers and Hammerstein brought to their collaboration. 

Your op-ed by Messrs. Ford, Carter, Baker and Cutler makes one wonder what each of these people brought to their eleven paragraph essay.  Aside from their names. 

Since submitting blood for testing a couple of years ago, I have been called for further tests three or four times.  Hadassah's procedures as well as the time difference, airline schedules etc are such that this test
requires the potential donor to come to Jerusalem Sunday, Monday or Tuesday mornings only.  At a stretch they will wait until three or four o'clock.  Only those who work in Jerusalem can do this without taking off a day from work.  In one instance, I was asked to do the additional test the same week I was doing some in-patient tests at Shaare Zedeck Hospital (in Jerusalem), but Hadassah would not send the test tubes to Shaare Zedeck to take the blood there, even tho we could have hand delivered them back to Hadassah afterwards.

The whole thing comes out like Hadassah is doing the potential donor a favor.

In my case, I have a neighbor who works at Hadassah and they agreed that he bring me the test tubes and the local nurse could draw the blood.  But this solution is good for a small fraction of potential donors.

You might think that taking a day of vacation is a small contribution to saving a life - but as I said, I have been asked to do this several times already.  Obviously, if I were approved as a donor, I would take off the time from work, but all this testing must be able to be done more simply.

I will be one of the many sporting a "Pardon Margalit Har-Shefi" bumper sticker.  Ms Har-Shefi deserves a full and unconditional pardon, the kind that voids the conviction itself, requiring neither admission nor contrition.  There is no other way to remove this stain from our society.

But I fear that President Katzav does not have what it takes to do the right thing.  I fear rather that there will be some sort of pardon, but tied up in a deal to irreversibly close the file against Avishai Raviv without ever learning what he has to tell us about who really knew what about the Rabin assassination.

Dear Mrs. Ragen,

Your suggestion to disband the Rabbinic Courts regarding matters of divorce overlooks one thing - the civil courts are not much better and certainly not more accountable.

From my personal experience, I can tell you that:

a) they don't show up on time either

b) they don't enforce their own decisions, even when they take the trouble to make them

c) they make their decisions without examining the facts presented to them

d) their decisions are often based on what's easiest for themselves

e) when one side is in blatant violation of the court's  instructions and the other side asks for enforcement or sanctions, the court's attitude is "a curse on both your houses"

Getting more specific in this context would be lashon hara.

When Mr. Clinton someday explains his pardons - as he surely will, perhaps in a well-paying book - the public should insist on a comparison between those who received pardons and those who did not.  Perhaps an analysis of the attorneys, contributions and other 
"issues of merit" between these two groups, will shed some light on this shadowy corner of a dark presidency.

Ehud Barak, Shimon Peres and other prominent Israelis have been mentioned among those who helped US fugutive financier Marc Rich get his last minute pardon from President Clinton.  It is publicity which does Israel no good, for even assuming our local luminaries didn't know they were helping the pardon effort, they surely knew that the man has been a fugitive since 1983.

This kind of thing has happened before - witness Robert Maxwell, for one - and neither major party can claim immunity.

Of course, we have a Jewish logic that says that if people help them, we must pay them respect and help them, regardless of what they may have done to others in their home countries.  Too bad that this logic doesn't extend to the South Lebanese Army and to GSS informants, who have actually helped save Israeli lives.  Or to Jonathan Pollard.

Some months ago, analysts were considering the possibility that Ehud Barak is a genius, by making Arafat an offer he couldn't refuse and then capitalizing on that very refusal.

Now Ariel Sharon is in a similar position vis-a-vis Barak's colleagues in the Labour Party.  Sharon will likely make Labour an offer they cannot refuse, generous to a fault with ministerial positions.  If Labour rejects this, they will rightly be portrayed as ignoring the national interest for some spurious electoral gain next time.

More likely, Labour will take the offer and then leave when they disagree with some decision taken at a point of crises.  That will not only disgrace themselves, but allow for new elections that can only help stabilize a Sharon government in which Labour can fight among themselves from a position of opposition.

So the government is now trying to run Margalit Har- Shefi out of her teaching job, based on her problematic conviction for not revealing Yigal Amir's talk about killing Yitzhak Rabin.  Ms. Har-Shefi has paid any she debt she may have had to society and should be left alone.

The government's persecution of her stands in stark contrast to its continued unwillingness to proceute Avishai Raviv, whose involvement in the Rabin killing is beyond doubt and who continues to walk free (and get his GSS salary?) five years later.

One of the results of active military command involves sending soldiers to death or injury.  It's unfortunate, but it is unavoidable. 

Sharon did so as did every other decision-maker in the military field.  So did Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan, David Ben-Gurion - the list goes on.

For many years now, it has been considered bad taste to remind people that the commander responsible for the Sultan Yaakub debacle - from which we still have three missing soldiers - was Ehud Barak.

So what is all this fuss about the one injured soldier from the fighting in Lebanon?

"AS FOR Ariel Shalom... uh, Sharon - I'm certainly glad
to have learned that he does in fact lisp in more than one language."

If this piece of bad taste is the best you can do, then you must think we will be going into very good hands.

I don't understand the fuss about whether the Jerusalem rally was political. Of course it was. 

But it was not partisan - and that is the point. 

For some reason, both the English and the Hebrew media are having trouble defining the difference.

The reason what you write is the online Jerusalem POST will not work is quite simple.

1. The Arabs want to kill us - not much matter if they are Moslem or Christian Arabs.

2. The Moslem Arabs have no tolerance for even Christian Arabs, let alone Jews.

3. Christians have demonstrated a remarkable ability to turn the Jews' other cheek.

Consider the following possibility.

The ill-conceived law for direct election for Prime Minister allows for a candidate to withdraw up to ninety-six hours before the actual election and to be replaced by a candidate of his party's choosing.

Two-three weeks from now, the papers start asking a survey question "Would you vote for someone other than Barak and Sharon if you had the choice?" Seventy percent of the people say "yes."

People start to pressure Barak to withdraw in favor of Peres.  Sharon - whose campaign is based on the arrogance and incredulity of Barak the man - has to begin considering a different approach - but it's too late to change gears properly.

Late Thursday night, 1 February, Barak withdraws and is replaced by Peres.  Shas supports him.  ("Ehud Barach" will take on new meaning, but who cares.)

Impossible - no.  Under consideration - almost certainly.

So what do we do?  Two things.  First, publicize this scenario so that it will be seen as the trick it is and not some genuine change of heart by Labour, Meretz etc .  Second, Sharon's campaign must not neglect the
collective responsibility of the rump coalition for the concessions being made to our enemies.  This is not just about Barak, but about Barak and his friends.

Dear Mr. King,

I found your piece "Keep Government out of Christ- mas" interesting and certainly in keeping with modern liberal thought.  Let me give you another standpoint.

I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1950's (where my family lived since about 1900) and attended a public school with a sizable Jewish minority.  Some of those Jews had some kind of extra-curricular Jewish education, but - at least in the early grades - only a handful (including me) stayed missed school on the Jewish holidays.  (There was also one Jewish teacher and she did too.)

On a daily basis, we recited the Lord's Prayer (I think that's what you call it) or did some Bible reading - depending on the preference of the individual home- room teacher.  There was a large Christmas tree in front of the principal's office and we all had to gather to sing carols for several days before the vacation.  The school had a Christmas program - not called a "holiday pageant" or a "winter festival" - but Miss Pesognelli also acknowledged that "Honica" was going on at more or less the same time.

The school's Christmas wasn't ours, but it didn't make us uncomfortable.

After the Supreme Court ruled out school prayer, one of the members of our synagogue, Dr Seymour Mandelbaum, a professor of history (then at Carnegie Tech, later at Stanford and who knows where else) 
spoke from the synagogue pulpit and explained why he disapproved of the ruling.  To distill it into a single thought, he said that we Jews are a minority in the United States and no legislation would make it
otherwise.  Better we get our children used to that sooner than later.  Let them learn, he said, that the majority is different and that in some things we participate while in others we remain respectfully silent.

That made sense to me when I heard it as a high school student and it still does today.  With proper parental guidance, it didn't do us any harm and didn't make us feel less American.

In an essay about Shlomo Ben-Ami in Friday's Makor Rishon, Uri Dan mentioned almost in parentheses that the professor (who spent about eight months as a part-time Minister for Foreign Affairs - and some of that as only a fill-in) still has the use of a car and driver from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and will contimue to do so for another two years.

He didn't say why, but I can only assume that he is not the only person thrown out of office who still enjoys this (and only this??) perquisite.

During this season on budget battles, it would be useful to see an article exposing this and other spending which does nothing but enrich our public servants for postions they do not hold and work they do not do.

Martin Sherman's call for a Commission of Inquiry into the actions leading to the Oslo agreements has one basic flaw - the makeup and inclination of the Commission itself.  The head of such a commission would be appointed by Aharon Barak and from there on, its findings would be a foregone conclusion.  The task for future critics would be compounded because a Commission of Inquiry would have found that Oslo was a good idea, done in the most kosher way.

Some years ago, the local radio stations began playing an American recording called something like "Liza Day" (I don't hear as well as I once did!), a duet sung by a man and a woman.  At the end of the narrative, the
man bashes in the woman's head with a rock as part of some kind of love ritual.  I have protested the broad- casting of this song from time to time, but apparently the free speech folks hold the upper hand here, despite the obvious problem with such a portrayal of violence.

Now, in order to make sure our youth doesn't miss anything important, Dani Litani and Si Heiman have put out a Hebrew version which plays from time to time on Reshet Gimel, and presumably elsewhere.  And the female DJ tells us "oh, what a wonderful song."

Why are we surprised that some of our youth take violence so trivially?

Ron Dermer joins a long list of columnists, letter writers and op-eds purporting to relate to what might happen in the event that we crush Arafat's PA.  All of the writers seem to think that if we keep out of it, the enemy/partner will not change.

May I respectfully point out that the seventy-three year old Arafat will die someday on his own - perhaps during the term of our present government.  The ensuing PA will be a different animal altogether. 
Crushing the PA must be considered on it's own terms, not relating to "who will come afterwards."  That bridge is inevitable no matter what we do.

There was an announcement on the radio news today saying more or less the following:

"The Police request the public's help is locating [So-and-So].  He is short, thin, with curly black hair and was wearing  .....  He speaks Amharic."

So why can't they say he is Ethiopian?

It's like the directive that the news cannot say that a Russian immigrant beat his wife - but they can say that Boris beat up his wife Svetlana.

Is this society of ours stupid or what?

Had the article about selling pork in Bet Shemesh been about Thai workers eating dogs or cats, I have no doubt that the Shinui advocate would have been on the other side of the debate - the one to restrict the rights of the seller.  The fact is that there is no difference between eating pigs and eating dogs except in the European culture to which Shinui, the courts and much of the rest of the country subscribe.

So having established that society is permitted to impose cultural restrictions on someone's eating habits, the decision is simply where to draw that line.  It is not unreasonable to do so in the place that Jews have traditionally done so - without pigs.  It's either that or let the Thais (and anyone else who cares to) eat the stray dogs and cats.

The "us and them" phenomenon that you decried regarding the air crash in the Black Sea is so typical of certain parts of our society. I am sure that if, for instance, some minor mainstream entertainer had been aboard, we would have heard much more from our broadcast "journalists."

I bring that example after hearing for the nth time a radio promotion for a benefit concert for Shimrit Or, who needs a kidney transplant.  I wish Ms. Or only well, but I cannot help being annoyed that all these
entertainers are running a benefit for one of their friends when there are surely many less fortunate who need similar treatment.  (And who is paying for the ads??)

This is more of the "us and them" disease that so afflicts parts of our society.

There is one gaping hole in Robert Malley's theory on how terror found a home in Islam.  That hole is represented by Poland (for instance), where similar conditions gave birth to Solidarity, not terror.

The announcement by President Bush that the US vision of a Palestinian state is an inauspicious start to the war against terror.

The idea was supposed to be to decrease the number of terrorist states, not to increase it.

The recognition that the President speaks of is not something he will be able to rescind once he realizes his fundamental error.

It was with great amusement that I read your piece comparing the Talpiyot supermarkets.  I live in Gush Etzion and work in the Beer-Sheva area, so I have the pleasure of shopping at Hutzot Lahav, which has all the Talpiyot stores beaten hands down.

They bag, there is loads of parking, there are upwards of thirty cashiers, their prices are great, they have a branch of Bank HaPoalim (complete with a cash machine) , they are friendly and they don't insult
you by making you pay a deposit for the shopping cart.

I don't know why someone in Jerusalem can't operate a business at that level.

The discussions about including unsavory elements in the coalition against terror brings to mind the 1960's television program "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."  The good guys featured an American agent and his pre- detente Soviet partner in a weekly fight against a shadowy organization called Thrush, dedicated to the destabilization of the "organized" world.  The premise was that despite their great differences - even open enmity - the nations have a joint interest in preserving some sort of world predictability.  An underlying assumption was that this United Nations arm (imagine that!) was composed of nations who would have no truck with Thrush on the side.

In today's planned coalition, the US has to make that same distinction.  We may not like the way that Russia, China and others act, but given that they do not support international terror, they should be with us.  The states that provide willing support to terror, such as Sudan, Syria and Iraq definitely do not belong in our ranks.

There is also a grey area - those who for reasons of survival or expedience are willing to appease, accom- modate or otherwise tolerate terror.  Pakistan is clearly one of these as are Egypt and occasionally some of our European friends.   (The President's "with us or against us" is particularly disingenuous.  Can you imagine 
declaring France an enemy just because they get into one of their moods?")

The countries in the grey area have to be treated individually - each according to its circumstances and each according to the coalition's needs. What is clear is that none of them has any right to demand the exclu- sion of anyone else.

No, Mr Richard Cohen, the problem is not simply "because [America] has repeatedly inserted itself into the Middle East."

Four hundred years ago, the Moslems occupied Hungary and were not stopped until they reached the gates of Vienna.  This time they have inserted supporters into the Western countries and that will make that effort easier when it reaches it's planned climax several decades hence.

But on the way, they have that burr in the side called Israel and it is for that reason that the US support for the Jewish state is so offensive to those who would try again to rule the world.

As analysis of the attacks on the United States begins, we hear people saying that we must determine who exactly is behind this.

We know that it is terrorists and we know that the terrorists are supported by particular states.  We are not sure which.

But this is war, not crime.

Terror is the eneny and in war we attack the enemy, regardless of which of his units attacked us.  Now is the time to destroy or subdue the scourge, regardless of who holds the smoking gun.  The organizations
themselves, the governments that support them, the crowds that cheer them.  Even the US tax code which allows contributions to their youth clubs have to be changed.

In identifying the writer of the most recent op-ed lecture on the necessity of US involvement in the Middle East, the Post should have identified Samuel Berger as more than "President Clinton's national
security adviser."  The Post should have stated clearly that he was a key member of the "peace process" team who got us into this mess to begin with. 

"The IDF incursion into Beit Jala was not cancelled, but
rather delayed 24 hours until this evening, according to
senior military sources."

Tell them to get ready for us?!  Is this some kind of joke?

The terrorist attack from Jelazoun on girls from Merav triggers a memory from only a couple of months ago.

The POST reported happily about the joint security patrol carried out between these two friendly commu- nities.  Isn't it wonderful how they all get along!

So much for that one.

You wrote "Non-smokers will breathe easier and smokers will find their rights severely curtailed, when smoking is barred in all public places around the country starting today."

Let's not be naive.  In my office, for instance, company policy is that any office where the occupant wishes to smoke becomes a designated smoking area.  Anyone who wishes to complain does so at his/her own peril.

Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz has issued an insurance policy for terrorists by announcing that had he known there were children in the vicinity of the Hamas headquarters building, he would have not allowed the attack.  Now all the PA and it's terrorists offspring need do is announce that children will roam all offices, training camps etc connected with terror.

Don't we have any leaders with common sense anymore?

How does a suicide bomber who gets caught count in the calculation of Mitchell's terror-free days?

Do we count it as a terror day because the PA sent him or as a non-terror day because no one was hurt?

To the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

I would like to congratulate you on your rejection of Mr. Carmi Gillon as Israel's ambassador to Denmark.  A man suspected by many of being involved in the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin should not be welcomed in your democratic country.

Why is throwing "small stones" at a stationary building worthy of condemnation, while throwing rocks at moving cars considered legitimate protest?  One can only conclude that the stone-throwers message about
European anti-Semitism has a basis in fact.

You wrote: Together, they planned to set up a "Peace and Protest" outpost across from the illegal settlement of Givat Tamar established a month ago by Efrat residents on village lands. 

"On village lands?"  The village of El-Khader?

Fact is that Givat Tamar is part of the Efrat Municipality and as such all issues of land ownership were settled to the satisfaction of the courts years ago.  Givat Tamar, like all of Efrat, was built on State land.  This kind of sloppy reporting is not what we need right now.

In light of the insignificant punishment meted out to Yitzhak Mordecai and considering the Supreme Court's position on other issues that the rules must be clear and fair, it seems to me that from now on all citations for bravery should include a detachable coupon stating "This entitles the bearer to two sexual harrassments."  That way everyone will know where he stands.

Firing Sarah Honig does not bode well for your readership.  If I were a subscriber, I would consider cancellation.

Mr. Rose responds (14 May)

i am terrified

The drawing accompanying the ad on the back cover of In Jerusalem (6 April, Erev Pesah) is remarkably offensive and is in bad taste.

Why does the Tower of David Museum need to show us an (Israeli?) soldier and an unshaven Arab (terrorist?) eating each other.  Does the Museum - and by extension the paper that publishes the ad - really feel that this reflects reality?

I know it's part of the ad, but you still have the right to decline to publish it.  Or even a responsibility.

Amos Perlmutter writes "Had [Arafat] accepted [the "Camp David" offers], occupation would be at an end and there would be a Palestinian state today. There would be no need for violence."

There might not be a "need," but violence there would be.  It would come from the new state which would have an easier time of it both militarily and logistically, not to mention the international support.

In describing last week's Israeli rocket attacks against Arafat's Force 17, you say "but the facilities targeted, including Mr. Arafat's house, were not those of the suicide bombers."

Tghere isn't much point in targeting the house of a dead suicide bomber, is there.  When previous Israeli governments did just that, the Post and other foreign well-wishers complained that that was punishing
other presumably uninvolved residents of those houses.

So now the Sharon government is targeting the ones who send and support the bombers and you don't seem to like that either.  There's no pleasing some people.  It's a wonder anyone tries.

Gerald Steinberg's suggestion to call the current fighting "Arafat's War" sounds pretty Sisyphean to me.  But more important, it overlooks the fact that Arafat and the PA are the initiators and like all parents, can call their child whatever they want. 

Last year in the big snowstorm, my mother and I were among those who were evacuated to Kiryat Arba.  The army would not permit us to bring our things with us - in this case, my mother's things.  They said they would protect the cars left on the road.  In fact, the cars were
towed to the Gush Junction, but only after the looting and vandalism by the residents on Bet Omar.

Mas rechush agreed to pay compensation as the damages were considered a hostile act.  I asked for damage to the car, loss of my mother's things and loss of the car radio.

Forget the radio - mas recush wouldn't have anything to do with it.  (I got that from my own insurance.) 

Mas recush sent me to two assessors - one for the damage and one for the theft.  The assessor for the damage told me what to fix, but then shorted me nearly seven hundred sheqels on the repair itself.  I informed
mas recush that I was appealing the decision and shortly thereafter they sent me a check for the difference.

The assessor for the theft said he would approve NIS 2600, but mas recush itself shot it down.  I filed an appeal in May.  They ignored me entirely until December, when I inquired what was happening.  Then "just by chance" they informed me that my appeal would be heard in January.  The appeal was heard by a panel of three judges and I was completely unprepared for this semi-formal setting.  (The other appelant that day came with an attorney.)

The State contended among other things that if they compensated me for theft, they would have to compensate everyone else, including one person with thousand of sheqels of recording equipment.  The way they told it, it sounded to me like these other cases were still open to appeal.

The judges made it clear that the State's position was unacceptable and later in the week, I was notified that they had decided to award me NIS 2400. (I'm sorry I didn't think to raise the issue of the radio again!)

I am bothering to tell this story because there are others out there - including the fellow with the recording equipment - who may be able to cite the precedent and get what they are entitled to.  Good luck!

PS - Submitted 5 March

Two weeks after I received the money, according to the decision of the Appeals Board, I received a formal notice from mas rechush advising me that the money had been deposited in my account and informing me that they had agreed to pay the money "lifnei meshrat hadin" (beyond the requirements of the law).  The purpose of this fabrication - for in fact they paid me because the Appeals Board ordered them to in a court
proceeding - is to try to help them defend themselves in case anyone else wants to use my case as a precedent.  Apparently they really fear this possibility. 

I truly hope that someone else tests it.

George Will may take consolation that when Zachary Hood's children try to bring the same story to school in thirty years, there will be no problem. His teachers - having been educated by teachers like Zachary's - probably won't recognize it as a Bible story to begin with.

Your suggestion that we need non-politicians in government is a good one, but better in theory than in practice.

Our public life is full of cronyism and if pressed for a businessman, the government will more than likely turn to one of the former generals or GSS officials whose very positions are nothing more than the result of
cronyism to begin with.

And so far as academics goes - look where Shelomo Ben-Ami has gotten us.

Yosef Goell is correct in urging Ariel Sharon to rescind the offers of Defense and Foreign Affars portfolios to Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres.  But he is wrong to make this a question of integrity.

It would indeed be a mistake for Sharon to think he can survive with these two troublemakers at his side - perhaps a foolish mistake which raises questions of good judgement - but integrity is not the issue here.

Not many weeks ago, Ehud Barak - who had the support of some thirty MKs - was talking to Ariel Sharon about a unity government is which the Likud would have nothing resembling parity with Labour.  Not the same number of ministers, not a veto on major issues, not much of a say in policy - either nationally or in their ministries..

Now having been resoundingly rejected, Labour thinks that Sharon's proposed unity government should reflect Labour's rejected policies and be headed by Labour's failed senior ministers, with enough junior
ministers to block anything they don't care for.  And it goes without saying that Labour expects its ministers to have a free hand in running their own ministries according to their own personal policies.  (Not to
mention preserving their Knesset chairmanships.)

All this so that a couple of months from now, they can get angry about something and walk out.  Would anyone believe this as fiction?

I cannot help but wonder if anyone will make an issue of the failure of the two exit polls to get the election results right yet again.

The three percent error - one big enough to cause a a wrong result in many elections - proves that the poll-takers have not learned their lessons from 1996.  Does anyone care?

David Newman would like to believe that Ariel Sharon has an advantage because the Russian olim and the younger voters do not remember Sharon's negative role in the war in Lebanon.

Mr. Newman might consider that these same voters do not know that Sharon  had a major role in the develop- ment of the IDF in the 1950's, in the successes in the Yom Kippur War and in making sure that these same
olim didn't have to live in tents when they arrived.

But we know from Mr. Newman's regular articles that he is more concerned about defending the Labour hegemony than about serious analysis.

You said that the two Purim verses are "the only instance where textual accuracy is publically called into question."  This is inaccurate.  In the same article in which Rav Breuer challenges the custom of reading the Purim verses twice, he challenges the same custom 
regarding zecher-zeicher in Devarim.

In all three cases, Rav Breuer claims that the practice is about a hundred years old - not some long-held custom. 

Let's be fair.  You write in your editorial that "Sharon pushed for the government construction of whole neighborhoods, on the theory that the state knew best where and how the new immigrants should live." 

The fact is, he built whole neighborhoods because he hoped that a million or more immigrants would come and he wasn't about to take the chance of recreating Mapai's maabarot of the 1950s.

Save the criticism for where it is relevant.

There may have been a time when SAT scores were of value.  Today they seem to be largely a way for admissions officers to avoid hard decisions and to protect themselves from charges of unjust rejection.

I don't know about the US and other countries, but here in Israel the local equivalent of SATs has spawned an industry which prepares students for the tests.  Despite the costs, almost all students feel it necessary to take
these courses in order to keep the playing field level.

Dear President Creighton,

I read your op-ed in the Washington Post regarding SAT scores and applaud the Mount Holyoke position.

I have lived outside the United States for many years and was not aware that the institutions themselves are graded by the SAT level of the incoming freshman.

From the simple viewpoint of the layman, I would think that people would want it the other way around - not how high the scores are when the students begin, but how well the students learn despite their entry-level scores. The value added should be the concern and that can be accomplished by making stars of students who are classified as mediocre as freshman.

Yours,

In response to a challenge by a Channel One interviewer (31 December) about negotiating under fire, Mr. Shimon Peres pointed to Secretary Kissinger's willingness to negotiate a peace agreement with the North Vietnamese while the war there was continuing.  MK Silvan Shalom's response ("So what!") is correct, but insufficient.

Mr. Peres may recall Kissinger's Nobel Peace Prize, but he seems to have forgotten that the North Vietnamese used the peace agreement as a base to overrun South Vietnam not long after.  Is that really the model that Peres has in mind?