Peace Treaty

Abie Nathan, the Israeli peace activist who made a dramatic solo flight to Egypt and later founded the groundbreaking "Voice of Peace" radio station, died Wednesday. He was 81. Nathan died at Tel Aviv's Ichilov hospital, the hospital said in a prepared statement. The cause of death was not reported. He burst onto the world of Middle East diplomacy in 1966 with his solo flight in a rattletrap plane more than a decade before Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty. Although he failed in his initial bid to talk peace with the Egyptians, his daredevil escapade won the affection of many Israelis and launched a long and often eccentric one-man crusade to end the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Re "Toll mounts in Mexico's drug war," Nov. 14 For the drug war, there is a simple and relatively easy solution to end the violence caused by it: legalization. The legalization of now-illegal drugs would allow us to regulate, control and tax the in-demand products. When is the last time you had a story about a liquor dealer shooting his liquor distributor? Probably about 1933, the year that ended the disaster known as Prohibition. Our war on drugs is not winnable. Wars on poverty or drugs cannot be won. Who is going to surrender and sign the peace treaty?

Ashraf Ghorbal, a longtime ambassador to the United States and a member of the Egyptian negotiating team that worked out the first Arab peace deal with Israel, has died, the State Department said Wednesday. He was 80. Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice learned with great sadness "of the passing of a great friend to the United States."

North Korea said today that drawing up a peace agreement to replace the 1953 cease-fire that ended the Korean War would be a way to resolve the standoff over its nuclear weapons program. A peace treaty would "lead to putting an end to the U.S. hostile policy toward [North Korea], which spawned the nuclear issue," a Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement. That would "automatically result in the denuclearization of the peninsula," he said.

Condoleezza Rice spoke in her Senate confirmation hearing of the need to bring democracy to Iraq. However, holding elections in the midst of violent chaos is, at best, a very poor example of "democracy." A more immediate need in fostering democracy in the Middle East is for the U.S. to bring its full diplomatic resources to bear in creating a Palestinian state. That would do more to bring about Middle East democracies than the effort in Iraq. Rice should set an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty as her top priority.

Re "That Sinking Feeling," Opinion, March 28: Twenty-five years ago, critics of the American-brokered Israel-Egypt peace treaty were scorned as opponents of peace. Intervening events, however, have proved them right. Without the Arab world's largest army to deter it, Israel has had a free hand to oppress Palestinians, ignore "land for peace" and begin a slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. As fury against Israel and America mounts worldwide, the public must ask whether the billions to Israel, along with the treaty-provided billions in bribes to Egypt, purchase anything other than an ongoing framework for terrorism.

In 1997 I attended an international conference at Tel Aviv University. The meeting was barely an hour old when an Egyptian scholar, who had just delivered a particularly harsh anti-Israeli comment, collapsed with a thud on the floor. An alert Israeli quickly administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and the rest of us were ushered out. As we milled about in the hall awaiting an ambulance, the conversation turned to the political complications likely to arise if the Egyptian died.

"Many Disillusioned by Jordan's 'Democracy' " (July 22) should be required reading at the White House and State Department. It clearly documents that if the state of Jordan had a democracy of the people, then Jordan's friendship with the United States and the peace treaty with the state of Israel would disappear overnight. One may rationally conclude that democracy cannot save the Middle East at this time. Right now the Middle East needs good-hearted, fair-minded, peace-seeking, live-and-let-live leaders to allow the region to live and develop in peace.

CAIRO -- The loneliest diplomatic job in Egypt these days belongs to Gideon Benami, the Israeli ambassador, who has been isolated by the deterioration of relations between two countries that signed a peace treaty 23 years ago. With President Hosni Mubarak having recalled his ambassador to Jerusalem and frozen contacts with Israel, Benami finds himself cut off at his heavily guarded downtown embassy and his residence in suburban Maadi.

One recent morning, as the students at a private school in a well-appointed suburb of this capital lined up for roll call, two of their teachers stepped into the schoolyard and torched a drawing of the Israeli flag--to the cheers of children and faculty alike. That was supposed to be a lesson in empowerment, a demonstration that anger and frustration can be vented, that even schoolchildren can express outrage.