MY HUNCH

To the Editors of the Crimson:

In response to Prof. Michael Walzer's reply (Feb. 26) to my letter of Feb. 21, let me say first of all that I am certainly not opposed to personal discourse with him on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and I suspect he knows where my office is located. But the issues involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict cry out for serious public discussion in the Crimson (the Harvard community's most widely read organ) and I wrote my letter precisely with this in mind.

I have several additional comments by way of rejoinder to Prof. Walzer:

1) As to the editorial "Learning the Wrong Lessons" by the new editors of The New Republic (Feb. 1), not only was it essentially a defense of Prof. Robert Tucker's irresponsible proposal to invade the Arab oilfields but a thoroughly cheap defense at that--especially for intellectuals who insist on calling themselves "liberals", and alas even "socialists".

The major reason offered by the new editors of The New Republic in support of such invasion is that Arab oil states deploy their financial power "capriciously, adversely affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people ...." This, of course, is nonsense, quite unworthy of the editorial page of what used to be one of the finest organs for sanity in American life.

2) As to binationalism, I think some variant of it is unquestionably preferable to the current ethnocentric and chauvinistic exclusivism which informs the fundamental character of the Israeli state today. And I am not bothered on bit by the failure of the Palestinian groups to endorse binationalism. My hunch is, however, that in time and with the right kind of U.S. military and economic presence in the Middle East (a presence quite different from the tendentious design Prof. Walzer has in mind) the Palestinian leadership will more readily recognize the equity of a binationalist solution than the Israeli leadership. Martin Kilson