‘The Great Clarifying Effect’

David Twersky restates his support for Prime Minister Sharon’s Kadima “out of a desire to separate from the Hamas reality,” though Hamas by word and deed evinces no evidence that it wants to separate from Kadima’s reality, which, as each day and strategic mistake go by, appears more and more like the 1938 Munich fantasy that led to World War II [“The Great Clarifying Effect,” Opinion, January 27, 2006].

Mr. Twersky enunciates that the so-called “better deployment” of Kadima, as presumably characterized by the Gaza unilateral disengagement — more a retreat under terrorist pressure — is a wiser choice compared to the Likud “standpat, change-is-weakness strategy.”

Ironically, aside from Munich appeasement, which Mr. Sharon decried a few years ago, that Israel would not be a patsy like Czechoslovakia, the history of Israel’s survival has been a stalwart defense of its security by standing pat and defending its sovereignty.

All Israeli governments, Labor and Likud, Begin and Rabin, encouraged and established communities in the West Bank, given to Jews by the League of Nations as their homeland, to be a bulwark against repeated Arab aggression.

It was not messianic zealots but an historic military reality that dictated that the settlements at the Jordan River, the

Judean Hills, Samaria, the Golan Heights, and even Gaza — the invasion corridor to the central coastal Israeli plain — remain unchanged.

It is messianic for Mr. Twersky to believe that Kadima, hunkering down behind a wall that mortars and missiles easily fly over, is a viable option “to separate from the Hamas reality.”

The so-called “better deployment” — really capitulation and more Kadima abandonment of strategic West Bank settlements — is a defeatist and truly stand-pat strategy that is contrary to the historic reality that has preserved Israel.

Hamas’s victory is a wake-up call that Munich times are at hand and Kadima’s opportunism is dangerous and bankrupt.

When will we ever learn?

MARVIN BELSKY
Manhattan

‘Nolan and Education Panel’

I was intrigued by the headline, “Nolan to Oversee Assembly’s Education Panel,” because I lived in Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan’s district in Queens – until I was redistricted out by one street, a result of having run against her for State Assembly in 2000 on the Republican, Conservative, and Right to Life lines [“Nolan to Oversee Assembly’s Education Panel,” Deborah Kolben, New York, January 27, 2006].

When Ms. Nolan said that she “‘stood’ with Speaker Sheldon Silver” – the man who is single handedly blocking laws to protect children from abusive and brutal parents – she wasn’t kidding. She has voted with him 100% of the time.

To say that she is disengaged from her constituents would be an understatement because she opposes vouchers and any relief for the parents in the parochial schools in her district, several of which have closed. She is in office, quite simply, because this is what happens when a district is gerrymandered.

It is unfortunate that in 2000, Patrick O’Malley, a talented maverick who ran against her in the Democratic primary, narrowly lost. His big issue was Ms. Nolan’s voting to overturn the commuter tax (at the behest of Mr. Silver), which deprived the city of millions of dollars. However, that run proved that many of the Democrats in the area were not happy with her.

Hopefully, one of them will rise again to take her on. Until then, they are stuck with an uninvolved nonentity of a politician who literally does not know which weekends the No. 7 line is running.

ALICE LEMOS
Woodside, N.Y.

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