RAMALLAH Feb 18 (JMCC) - Happily, it must be reported that this account is by no means impartial, and that Emma Williams, in her It's easier to reach heaven than the end of the street - a Jerusalem memoir, is outraged by the injustices meted out to the Palestinians by Israel and its Western backers.

Indeed, she is clearly contemptuous of the very notion of balance that she nonetheless attempts repeatedly to embody. She quotes a long-time observer who contrasts Arafat's appealing to the [Israeli military] to use restraint against the stone-throwers with Israel's appealing to the Palestinians to use restraint against the snipers, tanks and helicopter gunships! In a footnote (389) she refers to a French book that analyzes the false symmetries of Israeli propaganda. Her thirteenth chapter is a devastating critique of the pusillanimous rhetorical tricks deployed by the international media to avoid confronting the reality of Israel's overwhelming culpability.

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