ARCHIE Burleigh (Letters, May 17) misquotes the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen. Bowen said Hamas did organise demonstrations, but that every protester he talked to said they had not been forced by Hamas, but wanted to take part.
That’s because Gaza has been under blockade by Israel for 12 years, since 2006, when the Israeli government decided Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza had voted the wrong way when Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian legislature.
As a result of Israeli bombing and the Israeli blockade preventing enough supplies getting in, more than 90 per cent of drinking water in Gaza is unsafe. No wonder many want to escape.
Israeli governments falsely claim Hamas refuses to negotiate. But even Efraim Halevy, a former head of Mossad, has been saying for 10 years that Hamas knows it doesn’t have the power to destroy Israel, wants to negotiate, and that Israel should talk to them.
Israel prefers keeping the Gaza conflict going to distract from their 60-year-plus illegal military occupation, settlement and annexation of much of the West Bank, with its greater water supplies and farmland.
Even in the supposedly “peaceful” West Bank if Palestinians protest, unarmed, or armed only with stones, protest against the occupation, they are often shot dead just like Gazans. Like Nadeem Nawara and Mohammad Salameh, two teenagers killed in the West Bank in 2014, just before the last Gaza war.
Israel objects “Hamas are terrorists”. Yet Israeli war crimes target civilians too. And many of the Zionists who would become Israelis were terrorists before they had their own state. Yitzakh Shamir, elected Israeli Prime Minister in the 1980s, was the head of Lehi, who boasted of being terrorists. Among other attacks he ordered was the 1945 assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, who had saved many Jews during the Holocaust. Bernadotte’s crime? He was a UN envoy trying to negotiate the implementation of the UN’s 1947 resolution on partitioning the former British Mandate of Palestine into two states – one Jewish (Israel), one Arab (Palestine).
Duncan McFarlane,
Beanshields, Braidwood, Carluke.
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