Some are fighting hard to prevent an apartheid Israel

THE EDITOR of the English edition of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Bradley Burston, doesn't call Jeff Jacoby's pro-occupation views ``Tough love from friends," but ``Israel-bashing from the right."

The average Israeli voters are trying to keep from becoming a Jewish minority that rules over an Arab majority as whites did over blacks in apartheid South Africa.

In addition to wanting to avoid the injustice of apartheid, voters also want to prevent becoming the object of international economic sanctions like South Africa's.

Ultimately, voters want to prevent the consequence for South Africa after apartheid collapsed : becoming an official American-style nonsectarian democracy.

Some people may wonder what is wrong with becoming an official non sectarian democracy like the United States.

But whatever people's often sharply divergent views on this may be, it is incomprehensible how Jacoby refuses to understand how the possibility of Israel becoming a future apartheid state and a later nonsectarian democracy are precisely what the average anti-occupation Israeli voters are trying to keep from happening.

JAMES ADLER
Cambridge