I usually admire Nesrine Malik’s excellent writing, but found her latest article troubling (What does it mean to erase a people – a nation, culture, identity? In Gaza, we are beginning to find out, 18 December). First, it’s written as if the Holocaust never happened. We don’t need the terrible destruction in Gaza to imagine what wiping out a people and their way of life looks like.
Second, it’s written as if Jewish people have not lived in Palestine and right across the Middle East since biblical times. We are asked to feel sad about the destruction of a historic mosque, originally a fifth-century church, and Roman ruins, without considering that these Romans, Christians and Muslims were among many conquering invaders who were occupying the Jewish homeland over centuries of oppression and dispossession.
These were cultures that variously persecuted, enslaved and murdered Jewish people; at best they were made second-class citizens. The collective actions of these cultures over centuries created and helped maintain the Jewish diaspora, as well the widespread antisemitism that persists to this day.
I don’t support Israel’s current destruction of these historical sites, or of anywhere else in Gaza, or the massive toll of deaths and suffering of Palestinians. I know the point of the article is that life in Gaza is being levelled and that this is wrong and criminal. I agree. I’m not suggesting that these erased Jewish connections “trump” Palestinian Arab ones either. Many histories exist at once, can be equally deeply felt, and need to be acknowledged.
Many people would say what does any of that matter when Israel is bombing Gaza now, when Hamas still holds hostages now? Ending the violence between Israel and Hamas is the most urgent matter today. But for hopes of lasting peace, both Palestinian and Jewish history in this region needs to be recognised.
Dr Dan Haines Cohen
Wellington, New Zealand
• Re Jonathan Freedland’s article (There’s only one way out of this Gaza war and Netanyahu is blocking it. Joe Biden must force him from power, 15 December), it entirely disrespects Israeli independence and democracy to imagine that its elected leader can be changed on the whim of a US president. A disdain for Benjamin Netanyahu cannot mean treating Israel as an American vassal state. This piece was published on the eighth day of Hannukah, ironically a festival which marks ancient Jewish rejection of foreign-imposed rulers.
If a Palestinian state is presently impossible, the next step is in the rule of locals by locals, and not in seeking state models run by foreigners, whether the UN, Arab states or Israel. Top-down models fail to recognise that, in the short term, only Israel can responsibly maintain security. Gaza must now find its way to run itself as a peaceful municipality, before setting off down the long road to demonstrably peaceful self-rule.
Jonathan Burg
London
• Your editorial on the conflict in the West Bank (14 December) lists reasons for the recent “wave of armed resistance”, but fails to mention one very important fact(The Guardian view on the West Bank: the suffering of Palestinians extends beyond Gaza, 14 December): the west’s indifference to the suffering of the Palestinians, giving them little option.
In June, the UN human rights commissioner, Volker Türk, called on Israel to comply with international law after it launched deadly airstrikes with helicopter gunships on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. His intervention barely made the news, and western politicians mostly ignored it.
Clearly encouraged, Benjamin Netanyahu then announced the building of 5,000 new homes in the occupied West Bank, a move which a US spokesperson criticised as undermining “the geographic viability of a two-state solution”, but which prompted little reaction elsewhere. All governments should have been not merely calling on Israel to exercise restraint but demanding sanctions against it.
Bernie Evans
Liverpool
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