To the editor,

Please have Michael Kinsley give “Mending Wall” another read. I’ve just finished his December 12 column, “It’s Not Apartheid,” and I don’t think he has a strong grasp on it.

He writes that former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “took up the philosophy in that Robert Frost poem: ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ ” He’s missing a key point in Frost’s work. Sharon’s wall is a unilateral border declaration in the form of a winding barrier on seized Palestinian territory. In contrast, “Mending Wall” describes a sort of weary acquiescence between two parties:

And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.

There is no mechanism in place for Palestinians to take part in shaping the barrier being constructed around them. As the wall encloses entire villages, the only exit points are controlled by Israeli soldiers, not Palestinians. Meanwhile, Israeli-only settlement construction expands and Israeli-only roads are maintained. Israelis are subject to a civil court system while Palestinians must answer to a military tribunal.

There is a word for all this. Kinsley calls Jimmy Carter “foolish and unfair” for using it in the title of his book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

Is it foolish and unfair when South Africans use the same A-word? Kinsley asks where the Palestinian’s Mandela is. Where ever he is, I imagine he would agree with South Africa’s Mandela (Nelson), who wrote: “The so-called ‘Palestinian autonomous areas’ are bantustans. These are restricted entities within the power structure of the Israeli apartheid system.”

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has also made the comparison, saying Palestinians “reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.”

And in his own review of the Carter’s book, South African law professor John Dugard wrote that “Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories has many features of colonization. At the same time it has many of the worst characteristics of apartheid.”

Kinsley says Carter’s use of the A-word isn’t becoming of a Nobel peace laureate. Perhaps he thinks Mandela and the archbishop are now less deserving of their awards as well.

“Palestinians are not struggling for a ’state,’ ” Mandela wrote, “but for freedom, liberation and equality, just like we were struggling for freedom in South Africa.”

I would urge Kinsley to give Frost’s poem a fresh reading. Hopefully he finds “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

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