THE Rev Peter Macdonald claims (Letters, April 25) that the Iona Community has a longstanding commitment to seeking peace and justice in what it provocatively calls Israel/Palestine. We all (surely) want peace. Any peace must be a just peace, but as Benjamin Disraeli said, justice is truth in action. To state contentious opinions in inflammatory language as if they are facts does injury to any serious attempt to engage in dialogue. Without dialogue there can be no coexistence, and coexistence is the harbinger rather than the fruit of peace. To dismiss Israelis whose families fled for their lives in 1948 from Iraq or Tunisia following intense persecution as “settler colonialists” is as offensive as it is inaccurate and seems an attempt to avoid dialogue instead of effecting it.

I too was in East Jerusalem recently. Christians I met there complained that they felt under pressure to keep quiet about the harassment and intimidation suffered by them at the hands of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Bethlehem. They also said they were grateful for the protection of Israel which, unlike the PA and surrounding countries, upholds freedom of religion and freedom of conscience for all its citizens. Indeed, when one compares the plight of Christians being tortured, raped, crucified and beheaded on the other side of Israel’s borders with their growth in numbers in Israel, one wonders why the Iona Community does not give thanks rather than condemn.

How is Mr Macdonald’s attack on a troubled region’s only liberal democracy a helpful contribution to dialogue and how does it seek thereby to establish genuine peace?

Nigel Goodrich,

Convener, Confederation of Friends of Israel Scotland,

Room 5/6, 12 South Bridge, Edinburgh.