To the Editor:

Re: “The Wrong to Remain Silent by Ariela Rutkin-Becker,” Letters, Jan. 28

Ariela Rutkin-Becker overflows with feeling in her recent article “The Wrong to Remain Silent,” but unfortunately she lets this emotion get in the way of reason.

You don't have a heart if you do not feel pain for each and every innocent Palestinian Arab who has suffered in Gaza. You don’t have a brain if you fail to understand that those responsible for the suffering are the Palestinian Arabs themselves.

In 2005, Israel made the difficult decision to uproot Israeli civilians and leave Gaza entirely in the name of peace, thus giving Palestinians a chance to govern themselves. Soon thereafter, Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza elected the genocidal terrorist group Hamas as the majority party in their legislature (I don’t use the term “genocidal” lightly. Read Hamas’ charter). Hamas then launched a coup in Gaza and kicked out the opposition party. From Gaza, Hamas terrorists launched thousands of missiles into Israel and forced innocent Israeli men, women and children to live with the fear that these crude and imprecise weapons of terror could at any moment and with very little warning snatch their life or the lives of their loved ones. No state can tolerate such a state of affairs and no state would.

In fighting back against the terrorists in Gaza, I am confident that Israel did everything it could to prevent the loss of innocent life, but unfortunately the cowardly enemy they faced hid among their civilian population. Let us remember that there is no moral equivalence between a free and open society, like Israel, that protects innocent human life to the greatest extent possible and a ruthless, genocidal terror government, like Hamas, who attempts to kill as many innocent civilians as it possibly can.