Sir,
the picture accompanying your report on the new Middle East peace talks (World News 26 July) showing Jewish emigrants from the US arriving at Tel Aviv Airport captures the essence of the apartheid nature of the Israeli state.
The infamous Law of Return allows anyone with remotely Jewish connections to travel to Israel, become an Israeli citizen and in many cases receive financial aid to live in illegal settlements built on Palestinian land in the West Bank. Meanwhile, the descendants of Palestinians from Jerusalem, the West Bank or Gaza cannot even visit their homeland, let alone return to live there. Those Palestinians who do live there, whether within 1948 Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territory, are subject to a Kafkaesque cocktail of discriminatory laws, house demolitions, expulsions, land theft, travel restrictions, harassment and deathly terror attacks by an occupying military.
The American Government’s intentions are highly suspect given its own total support for the occupier over the occupied, its refusal to deal with the mandated representatives of the people of Gaza, and its perverse insistence on the ever illusive chimera of a two state solution that its own policies have rendered unattainable.
Yours etc.
JIM ROCHE,
PRO Irish Anti War Movement,
PO Box 9260,
Dublin 1.
Sir,
the picture accompanying your report on the new Middle East peace talks (World News 26 July) showing Jewish emigrants from the US arriving at Tel Aviv Airport captures the essence of the apartheid nature of the Israeli state.
The infamous Law of Return allows anyone with remotely Jewish connections to travel to Israel, become an Israeli citizen and in many cases receive financial aid to live in illegal settlements built on Palestinian land in the West Bank. Meanwhile, the descendants of Palestinians from Jerusalem, the West Bank or Gaza cannot even visit their homeland, let alone return to live there. Those Palestinians who do live there, whether within 1948 Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territory, are subject to a Kafkaesque cocktail of discriminatory laws, house demolitions, expulsions, land theft, travel restrictions, harassment and deathly terror attacks by an occupying military.
The American Government’s intentions are highly suspect given its own total support for the occupier over the occupied, its refusal to deal with the mandated representatives of the people of Gaza, and its perverse insistence on the ever illusive chimera of a two state solution that its own policies have rendered unattainable.
Yours etc.
JIM ROCHE,
PRO Irish Anti War Movement,
PO Box 9260,
Dublin 1.
