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Checkpoints

Are Checkpoints a humiliation to Palestinians? Are they vital to prevent lethal attacks?  The Letter to the Editor below tells the essentials about checkpoints:

Letter Editors of the Globe & Mail and To Margaret Wente
Re.: "Palestinian Life at the checkpoint" by M. Wente, Globe & Mail 06 Feb.

The checkpoints are indeed an indignity to Palestinians. For Israeli women, men, and children however, daily commuting imposes an indignity as well: Not only the indignity of an unexpected lengthy delay, but also of not knowing whether today's bus ride or shopping-mall trip might be one's very last.

Though your Palestinian professor writer has chosen not to mention this inconvenient fact: lack of checkpoints has repeatedly been used by Palestinians to perpetrate lethal violence against Israeli civilians. Israel has disclosed evidence that Palestinians systematically abuse Israel's humanitarian policies by impersonating medical personnel - and even using Red Crescent ambulances - to smuggle weapons and explosives through checkpoints.

Ms. Wente, as you have eloquently described on the pages of the Globe and Mail, in Palestinian society death is so venerated that even mothers of suicide terrorist bombers, upon hearing of the death of their child and the many innocent Israeli men, women, children and babies he or she slaughtered, "will be pressed to ululate with joy, not weep with grief. Their pictures will appear on next year's calendar of martyrs, and they will become instant heroes to the children whose counterparts they blew up a few miles away."  What you haven't described is how the families of the suicide terrorist bombers collect significant ‘prize money' and jobs in the inflated Palestinian administration.

Surely you will understand that until the Palestinian Arabs' indoctrination and support of death and violence ceases, Israel has no choice other than to enforce strict checkpoints, so that less innocent Israelis be murdered.  (Respectfully, D.G. , Toronto )

One can add to this letter's arguments a mention of the Western counterparts of ‘checkpoints': security checks for billions of peaceful citizens, in airports and other public places. People here are suffering inconveniences, not because of terrorism their kin have committed and intend to commit again, but because of the threat of others: potential Islamist, Palestinian and other terrorists.

Humankind must fight not against checkpoints and security checks but against terrorism making those necessary.