Jerusalem Post Letter to the Editor

Surprisingly  I had a letter to the editor published by the Jerusalem Post.  I wrote it in response to this Alan Dershowitz article about Alice Walker's decision to not have The Color Purple published by an Israeli firm. The letter (you'll have to scroll down to read it) was edited quite a bit and I am afraid it sounds a bit weak. If I knew that it would be published, I would have said a lot more about the brutal occupation of Palestine, but then it probably wouldn't have been published. Catch-22... Anyway, you can read it below. 

Sir, – It is clear that Alice Walker’s decision to not have The Color Purple published by an Israeli firm was not motivated by bigotry. Instead, she is preventing a publishing company, which she feels benefits from the brutal treatment of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, from profiting from her book. In fact, there is already a Hebrew translation of her novel, just not one sold by an Israeli publisher.

If Alan Dershowitz were to prevent one of his books from being published by a Palestinian or Iranian publisher because of a desire to not support the regimes there, I think it would be unfair to accuse him of bigotry against the Palestinian or Persian people. It is the same case with Walker.