Illinois

Only those who want the conflict to continue will maintain the lie about Palestinian textbooks and find in them non-existent excuses to continue the oppression and dehumanisation of the Palestinian people while what little is left of their country is stolen from under their feet.

It ought to be possible to find a way to resolve political conflicts peacefully so that no more Palestinian or Israeli parents are left to grieve. But the callous indifference and irresponsibility of the world’s great powers, the intransigence of Israel’s leaders and the weakness and divisions in the Arab world ensure that the Palestinian struggle — the last great anti-colonial struggle of the twentieth century — will continue well into the twenty-first.

The question remains, though, what it would take for those countries that crow loudest about human rights to be up to the challenge of holding Israel and its leaders accountable.

It is extremely hard to write this morning, and yet I feel I have to. Everything hurts so much. After a few hours sleep, I woke up in the dark, hoping and praying that I had woken up from a nightmare. The nightmare is still there.

If the situation in the occupied territories caused by Israel’s relentless aggression against the Palestinians living there were not so dreadful, the Sharon-Peres discussions would form the basis for a hilarious and twisted satire. Instead, they are a marker of how far Israel’s political class is from recognising the depth of the crisis they have created and what they need to do to end it.

Your recognition that “Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been the defining reality of Palestinians’ lives there for over three decades, longer than most of the Palestinians living there have been alive,” makes plain the continued causes of this conflict.

I wonder why I am so rarely asked by the same media how I feel when Palestinians are killed. No one asked how I felt last week when five Palestinian schoolboys were killed by a bomb planted by the Israeli occupation forces in their refugee camp in Gaza.

I am writing to urge you to take immediate action in response to Israel’s double-arrest and beating today of leading Palestinian human rights activist and physician Dr. Mustafa Barhgouthi.

While we have seen peace established with several Arab states, we have yet to see any Israeli commitment to full withdrawal, and many acts on the ground that suggest quite the opposite.