LETTER:Rabin:the high price of peace

From Ms Deborah Pritchett and Mr Jonathan Regal

Sir: When Jewish blood is shed, every Jew mourns. What brought us into existence, in 1948, as a people with a homeland was a unity and passion for the religion. We made ourselves a people and a nation, Israel became our crown and power. By the power that we have been given, we have hurt ourselves. It is Israel, through its deep divisions, that fuelled the young Jew to kill his leader, and our leader.

What Jew could act against his own laws, except the Jew who has no religion, but faith in a political whim. This whim has spat upon our dreams. It has spat upon our law. In its disregard for life, it has spat upon the essence of Judaism. What is it that makes a young man so bold as to spit at peace and at his leaders?

When Theodore Herzl, the leader of Zionism, said, "I am at the head of only boys and beggars ... with dreams", could he have believed that the beggar boy would come from Israel's own ranks to spill the blood of another Jew into the upturned glasses of anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli men, laughing at Israel's humiliation at the hands of its lone gunman?

Yours faithfully,

Deborah Pritchett

Jonathan Regal

Lenham, Kent

4 November