The Israel-Hamas war has been gripping our readers’ attention for more than four months now.
Yesterday, one of our correspondents bemoaned Scottish involvement in arms sales to Israel, whom he accused of engaging in a campaign of mass murder.
Today a reader says that many people have been brought up to regard Israel with a degree of warmth and sympathy because of memories of the Holocaust. But how, he wonders, will babies born this year perceive the state when we reach the centenary of that heinous event?
Bill Brown of Milngavie writes:
"I tend to have some sympathy with the view of Norman Lockhart (Letters, February 20) that we in Scotland should perhaps be circumspect on the issue of weapons being sent to Israel now that they have appear to have adopted a total war strategy on the civilian population of the Gaza strip.
I believe that since its creation in 1948 the state of Israel has been granted by almost all of the human race an outpouring of emotional warmth and self-reproach due to the guilt felt by humanity that we as a species could commit appalling atrocities against a group of people who simply identified with a certain believe and culture. I expect that most post-war baby boomers like myself grew up knowing that something really terrible had happened in modern times against the Jewish people.
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However history moves on and while I knew about the Second World War and indeed the First World War as they were still talked about by my family, the Battle of Waterloo, for example, and even the Boer War meant little other being distant historical events in a text book or in films.
Young people born this year will be 17 in 2041 which will be 100 years since the start of the Holocaust. I wonder if their feelings towards Israel will be those my generation grew up with or if the more recent events in the Gaza strip will have become the abiding identity Israel will have established for them."
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