Responsibility.

Editor,

Prime Minister Netanyahu's statement that responsibility for Israel's violent assault on the aid flotilla lies not with Israel but with those seeking to deliver aid is an example of a cognitive flaw in the Israeli mentality that is causing untold hardship on Palestinian people and endangering an increasingly unstable world.

When a wife beater or a child abuser tells you that his victim is responsible for his own violence, it is obvious that he could have responded to what he perceived as a provocation in any of a multitude of other ways that do not involve violence.

But when Israel invaded Lebanon and blamed their aggression on Hezbollah, or when they bombed Gaza and blamed their violence on Hamas, for some reason policy makers in the U.S. accepted this obviously flawed logic.

Politicians who achieve power in Israeli seem not to be able to comprehend that the violent choices they make in response to what other people do are not other people's responsibility but their own. And killing unarmed civilians, whether it be Rachel Corrie or any of the thousands of Palestinian victims of violent Israeli outbursts, is the responsibility only of Israel and no one else.

Re: "Israel Holds Hundreds Seized During Raid on Flotilla" (6/2/2010)