Courtesy Reuters

To the Editor:

Chris Hedges uses analogies designed more for insult than for analysis ("The New Palestinian Revolt," January/February 2001). He describes Yasir Arafat as the Arab world's Marshal Petain. What does that make Ehud Barak and the Israelis? Hedges also compares the West Bank and Gaza to South African bantustans, thereby equating Zionism with apartheid. Hedges' parallel between the current Israeli-Palestinian fighting, with only a few hundred casualties, and the Algerian war of independence, which claimed the lives of around a million Muslim Algerians, is simply bizarre. Israel is not France struggling to maintain colonies.

ANDREW APOSTOLOU

St. Antony's College, Oxford