Raid and reprisal
Sir: Excessive retaliation is a legitimate target for criticism as is, indeed, any form of extreme immoderation. I would not bother to quarrel with Nicholas von Hoffman for attacking Israel over her bombing of PLO bases in Beirut (1 August), even if he has omitted the slightest mention of PLO terrorist attacks on Israeli civilian targets which provoked the Israeli response. I do, however, find his treatment of the subject frivolous and his sniping little cracks at Israel gratuitous, puerile, and insulting.
There are many deplorable examples of overkill in modern history: Dresden, Rotterdam, Vietnam, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Mr von Hoffman has chosen to compare Israel's bombing of Beirut with the Nazi response to the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia. One has to be either crassly ignorant or hate the Jewish State passionately — probably both — to be able to sustain such an absurd comparison between the two events.
Von Hoffman describes Israel as 'the petite theocracy'. Whatever that means, is it at all the relevant to the incident he is writing about? And if Israel is a theocracy, petite or gross, how, I wonder, would he describe Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, even Egypt, where the Koran — in varying degree — is law?
I happen to know the Israeli Ambassador to Washington, Ephraim Evron, and I can assure your readers that whatever he is he is no more a `smirky gentleman' than von Hoffman is a Zionist. But even if, after a careful personal observation, von Hoffman reached the ineluctable conclusion that the Israeli Ambassador was indeed a smirky gentleman, it is hard to see from the article what bearing this has on American Middle East policy or on the bombed Palestinians. Elon Salmon
21 Hillfield Park, London N10
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