To the Editor:
Professor Meir Kohn's diatribe in Tuesday's Dartmouth (July 22) was disturbing and disappointing. Prof. Kohn seems not to have listened to the talk that he condemned by former Israeli Air Force pilot Yonatan Shapira. In fact, Shapira spoke movingly of law, war crimes and conscience, which are not matters of "leftist political indoctrination."
There is a huge difference. When Lieutenant William Calley and his U.S. Army unit murdered hundreds of unarmed women and children in Vietnam, exposing and condemning that crime was not a question of partisan politics.
It was not a "leftist" issue. On the contrary, it was an issue of conscience and patriotic duty.
Nor was Shapira providing leftist indoctrination when he said: "I have taken part in the Occupation for the past 10 years as an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, as an Air Force helicopter pilot. It seems to me that it took me far too long to understand ... the reality I live in. ... I didn't see the awfully simple fact that we have occupied the home of millions of people and that for nearly 40 years they have been controlled by us as the master race."
That occupation is a continuing tragedy that is destroying the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians and that has involved innumerable atrocious crimes on both sides. Shapira's conscientious objection offers far more hope than Professor Kohn's insistence that Israel's bombs somehow fall only on "terrorist targets" and not on human beings.
