Write to life

Here's a wonderful letter to the Guardian in response to a "shooting and crying", zionist-with-conscience, article in last week's Guardian Review.

David Grossman beautifully describes writing as individual defiance to the situation of conflict in the Middle East ('To see ourselves', March 12). In the process, he resorts to what is increasingly becoming a fashionable tool for many well-meaning Israeli and western commentators: the creation of false moral equivalence between the two sides of the conflict. The act of writing for an Israeli, in his triumphant, dominant society, is one of choice, at its best, a taking of responsibility for the deeds of one's own - a ' j'accuse! ' For a Palestinian, it is an act of survival, the affirmation of a humanity trampled on every day - an anguished ' j'existe! ' If you look at reality from the eyes of your enemies, you will perhaps see that this conflict has no symmetry.
Dr Ala Khazendar
Cambridge

J'existe! I love that.