Martyn Quinn rightly draws attention to the US's failure to condemn Israel's continuing expansion into Palestinian lands, while blithely ignoring the many United Nations resolutions criticising such illegal action (Letters, September 26).
It is deeply disappointing that President Barack Obama has already promised to veto the Palestinian petition to the UN for recognition, even if it receives a sympathetic response from a large majority of the 193 member states.
Such official recognition of a Palestinian state might just kick-start the process of bringing a lasting peace to the Middle East, and it beggars belief that the US intends to kill the initiative at birth.
Instead Mr Obama, in professing that he is totally committed to a free and independent state of Palestine, repeats the mantra that “this can only be achieved by negotiations between the two parties involved”.
How can a successful compromise be reached when one of the parties has total military and economic control of the region? And then there is the unquestioning support of the US, while the other has no statehood and its democratically elected government is not recognised as legitimate?
All previous peace talks have broken down because of this imbalance in negotiating strengths, and Israel’s refusal to make any concessions at all while demanding that it retains all the territory it has occupied since 1967.
Israel must be prepared to accept that Palestinians have a sovereign right to the lands their ancestors have lived in for the last 3000 years.
The only chance of solving this 40-year old dispute is for the US to bring its powerful influence to bear on Israel, urging it to stop further settlements and withdraw from the occupied territories it has acquired illegally by force.
But I fear that, like his predecessors in the White House, Mr Obama is more concerned with retaining the important Jewish vote in next year’s presidential election than with bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.
Iain AD Mann,
7 Kelvin Court,
Glasgow.
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