Reality not so rosy

It must be comforting to inhabit Rabbi Danny Schiff's alternate universe from which he surveys the peaceable kingdom of Israel ("When Will It End?" Jan. 19).

This is an Israel that never ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 and again in 1967; never committed the massacres of Qibya, Deir Yassin or Qana; does not continue to steal Palestinian land to build illegal settlements; did not erect an apartheid wall and a system of checkpoints that make life unbearable in the West Bank; did not lay siege to the mostly refugee population of Gaza for more than three years, reducing its living conditions to the utmost destitution; did not imprison and assassinate its democratically elected leaders; and so on in a long catalog of atrocities.

Over the current appalling images of devastation of Gaza, Rabbi Schiff conjures a vision of an Israel that has always been eager to help the Palestinians "have a flourishing state of their own" (he is not specific about the territory this will encompass) -- a benignant power whose persistent altruism is thwarted only by the hostility of the intransigent and ungrateful refugees.

BRIAN JOHNSTON
Wilkinsburg