Sir,
Clive Hyman (Letters 29 November) fails to admit that some of Israel’s senior politicians have alas used the cancer analogy when referring to Palestinians.
In his book, Cities, War and Terrorism – towards an urban geopolitics, 2004, Prof. Stephen Graham quotes Efraim Eitam, a Minister without portfolio in the Israeli Government of 2002, who refers to the natural urbanisation of Palestinian cities as “a cancer that undermines the ordered nature of the organic host body of Israel” and to the construction of Palestinian homes as “a jihad of buildings”.
Such racist language by an Israeli minister shows the contempt in which Israel regards Palestinians – a contempt we now see exercised by the so called Prawer Plan, which threatens to wipe out thirty five "unrecognised" villages and expel over 40,000 Bedouin Arabs from their homes and way of life in the Negev Desert. This threatened ethnic cleansing is within the 1948 borders of Israel, not to mention the almost daily house demolitions and settlement construction in the West Bank and the continuous siege of Gaza which now looms as a serious humanitarian crisis.
Israel is the only state in the region wiping anyone off the map which is why boycott, divestment and sanctions are the only way to treat such an apartheid state.
Yours etc.
JIM ROCHE,
PRO Irish Anti War Movement,
PO Box 9260,
Dublin 1.
Sir,
Clive Hyman (Letters 29 November) fails to admit that some of Israel’s senior politicians have alas used the cancer analogy when referring to Palestinians.
In his book, Cities, War and Terrorism – towards an urban geopolitics, 2004, Prof. Stephen Graham quotes Efraim Eitam, a Minister without portfolio in the Israeli Government of 2002, who refers to the natural urbanisation of Palestinian cities as “a cancer that undermines the ordered nature of the organic host body of Israel” and to the construction of Palestinian homes as “a jihad of buildings”.
Such racist language by an Israeli minister shows the contempt in which Israel regards Palestinians – a contempt we now see exercised by the so called Prawer Plan, which threatens to wipe out thirty five "unrecognised" villages and expel over 40,000 Bedouin Arabs from their homes and way of life in the Negev Desert. This threatened ethnic cleansing is within the 1948 borders of Israel, not to mention the almost daily house demolitions and settlement construction in the West Bank and the continuous siege of Gaza which now looms as a serious humanitarian crisis.
Israel is the only state in the region wiping anyone off the map which is why boycott, divestment and sanctions are the only way to treat such an apartheid state.
Yours etc.
JIM ROCHE,
PRO Irish Anti War Movement,
PO Box 9260,
Dublin 1.
