|
|
 |
| |
Israel can’t be described as the underdog in this
• I THINK that the three letters you published in response to my Forum article (The only way out of this mess is to engage Hamas in dialogue, January 15) were an interesting selection.
Thank you, Sue Drake, for your greatly appreciated and much-needed support.
Thank you, Francis Joseph, for stating “the alternative viewpoint” in measured terms even though I believe that you have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.
But what is one to make of Josephine Bacon’s intemperate letter, which contains some really dreadful psychobabble? Should I thank her for diagnosing my “syndrome”, which appears to be “identification with my persecutors”?
Whatever can she mean?
Is she a psychotherapist? If she is her diagnosis (or that of her friend) is inexcusable. Who are my persecutors, for heavens sake? So far as I know I don’t have any, and I certainly never had reason to identify with the Nazis: to suggest otherwise is just plain barmy.
As for describing Israel as the underdog. Can she be serious?
Israel is reckoned to be the fourth most powerful military country in the world and is provided not only with the most advanced weaponry (which seems to include phosphorus shells) but has also an arsenal of nuclear weapons that would, presumably, be used in a dire emergency.
Israel also has as its protector the most powerful nation on the planet, the USA.
Boasts about the elimination of the state of Israel are therefore so much empty rhetoric. In 1967, when Israel’s existence was seriously threatened, I considered offering my services in its defence, having been an infantry officer in World War II.
But now?
One final error in her letter: how I wish I could afford to live in Hampstead, but thank you for the thought...
LESLIE BARUCH BRENT
Tufnell Park,
Emeritus Professor
University of London
Sanctions necessary
•I WAS deeply touched by the Forum article of Professor Leslie Baruch Brent (January 15) who, through his experience as a Holocaust survivor, reached the conclusion that “there can be only one way, and that is to engage with Hamas in a dialogue”.
However, I was dismayed to read the letters by Francis Joseph and Josephine Bacon. (January 22) who seem to repeat the misinformation fed constantly to the media by the “sleek” Israeli PR machine.
Hamas is a political party which was democratically elected by the Palestinian people. In the past few years it repeated its offers of a lasting truce with Israel on the condition that Israel would withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, in line with UN resolution 242.
Hamas was also party to the Saudi peace initiative (2002) which was endorsed in 2007 by the Arab League and included the PLO.
In contrast to Israeli false allegations, Hamas kept a recent truce which commenced in June 2008. On November 4 2008, when the world’s attention was focused on the American elections, the Israeli forces entered Gaza Strip and killed six Hamas members. During the ceasefire period Israel killed 14 Palestinians and tightened its strangulating blockade of Gaza which brought the population there – half of them children under the age of 15 – to the verge of starvation and early death through the lack of medicine, hospital equipment, fuel, clean water and basic essentials. Hamas, however, was prepared to renew the ceasefire on the condition that Israel would lift its 18-month blockade of Gaza Strip, a condition which was indeed part of the initial truce agreement.
The Israeli government, as in the past, has refused to consider Hamas’s peace overtures and continued its unlawful siege of Gaza Strip as well as arresting and killing Hamas members in the West Bank, where no rockets have ever been fired onto Israel.
As the tragic figures demonstrate, between October 2001 (when the first rocket was fired by Hamas) to November 4 2008, nearly 3,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel in Gaza as compared with 13 Israelis who were killed by Qassam rockets in the same period .
The shredded bodies, scorched corpses of burnt children, blood-soaked injured civilians, and the death of whole families who were buried under the rubble of their homes demonstrate, as in Israel’s wars against Lebanon (2006 & 1982), the lethal firepower of the fourth strongest army in the world which has been using the Palestinians as guinea-pigs for conducting a battlefield test of the latest American- supplied weapons.
This time, I hope, western leaders will listen to the growing number of the many thousands who have already signed a global petition calling on them to bring Israel to justice under the International Humanitarian law stipulated by the Fourth Geneva convention.
In the words of 540 Israeli citizens (myself included) who signed and supported a letter published by the Guardian on January 7 “only immediate, decisive and strict sanctions against the state of Israel and its limitless aggression will make it realise that there’s a limit”.
RUTH TENNE
Goldhurst Terrace, NW6
Battle fury
• ALL this talk of Hamas destroying Israel is a paranoid fiction. Israel is a nuclear power with the latest weapons supplied by the West’s merchants of death.
They attacked the people of Gaza with battlefield fury as if confronting an equal enemy. Hamas was elected and it has the right to a police force and armed security units for its own protection.
An army that attacks a civilian population in such a ferocious manner weakens itself through the internal dissent that will eventually occur.
And salutations to those Israeli soldiers (and there were many) who refused to take part in this murderous attack. They were quietly sent home and not jailed, as they usually are, for PR purposes.
Maybe when the Royal Navy eventually lies off Gaza’s coast to help stop arms smuggling by Hamas it will also stop Israel from topping up their munitions.
WILSON JOHN HAIRE
Lulot Gardens, N19
Torture
• IT is interesting to witness how the Palestinian solidarity groups are responding to the reports of the torture of hundreds of Palestinian Fatah members by Hamas terrorists, or rather how they are not responding.
When groups are so outspoken when it comes to Israeli actions, and so deafeningly quiet and disinterested when Palestinians suffer at the hands of anyone else, one has to question the groups’ agendas. Are such groups primarily interested in defending the Palestinians or criticising Israel?
There is sadly a great difference between the two.
MICHELLE MOSHELIAN
Givatayim, 53454, Israel
|
 |
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
