Ms. Richards, in her April 5 letter, explained that "violence is often the only weapon that people who feel powerless believe they have to fight injustice," while attempting to understand possible reasons for Palestinian Arab suicide massacres on Israeli civilians. However, Ms. Richards has neglected to point out that the Palestinian Arabs have been peacefully offered a way out of their "oppression" four times in the form of an independent state.

In 1937 and 1948 with the Peel and UN partition plans which would have awarded Palestinian Arabs much more territory then just the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in 1967 when Prime Minister Levi Eshkol offered to return all of the territories gained by Israel in the Six Day war in exchange for peace with the Arabs, and most recently in 2000, with Ehud Barak's offer of a state of "Palestine", including parts of Israel's capital Jerusalem and a compromise over the refugee problem.

However, instead of accepting these compromises, the Palestinian Arabs have chosen to continue their fruitless war against the existence of the Jewish State of Israel. In this case, violence has not been used by the Arabs to stop suffering, but only to prolong it.