Re: “Years of Strife and Lost Hope Scar Young Palestinian Lives” (The New York Times, 12 March 2007): Steven Erlanger reports of the youthful fighters that “All of them want to leave and start again, somewhere.”

Intriguing to compare this sentiment with the attitude of a “Galilean pioneer” in Arthur Koestler’s novel, “Thieves in the Night”: “We don’t want to change and we don’t want to improve, we want to begin from the beginning.”

It seems by now the government of Israel would have learned the ultimate futility of forcible ghettoization. That which inspired revolutionary actions in Zionist history is likely to have the same effect on others today.

Probably there will never be sustainable government (let alone democracy) where walls and ghettos are necessary.