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“When Illusions Are All” (Week in Review, Nov. 21), an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, says, “It is worth noting that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been largely drained of deadly violence in the past few years.”

What explains the difference between the two cases is, precisely as Kurtz suggested, the double standard that exists with regard to Jews and Israel on one hand, and Palestinians on the other. Statements that would never be tolerated against Jews or Israel are regularly made and tolerated against Palestinians.

“This used to be a very, very political society and it no longer is,” said Tom Segev, the Israeli historian. “Israel has gone through a deep change. People don’t trust politics, they don’t really believe in peace and the million recent arrivals from the former Soviet Union didn’t bring democratic values. Democracy is weaker.”

Clinton put some of the onus on the Palestinians to take unspecified steps to help Netanyahu to extend the freeze.

This chill is a bad thing. Let’s do whatever it takes to find out how Dogan died — and the eight other victims. The Middle East requires more open debate and the dropping of taboos. It needs the leading institutions of American Jewry to encourage broad discussion rather than, as Peter Beinart put it in an important recent essay in The New York Review of Books, checking “their liberalism at Zionism’s door.”

Under an agreement signed toward the end of the Bush administration, annual U.S. military assistance to Israel has been boosted from $2.5 billion in 2009 to $3 billion in 2011, meaning that almost a quarter of Israel's actual defense expenditures comes from the United States, according to Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Obama's Iron Dome money would be on top of that largesse, already the most military assistance to any country.

“Our play does not mean we hate Israel,” said Abdel Qader Ismail, 24, a former employee of the military intelligence service, with no trace of irony. “We believe in Israel’s right to exist, but not on the land of Palestine. In France or in Russia, but not in Palestine. This is our home.”

So if the present policy has failed utterly — even backfired by possibly bolstering Hamas — let’s start over. It’s time not just to ease the siege of Gaza, but to end it once and for all.

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is widely acknowledged to be unsustainable and costly to the country’s image. But one more blunt truth must be acknowledged: the occupation is morally repugnant.

The Israelis claim that Insani Yardim Vakfi is a dangerous organization with terrorist links. They have yet to offer any evidence to support that charge.