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.
