Anti-Semitism, Israel and the Palestinians

Madam, - Despite your Editorial on anti-Semitism (November 20th), your newspaper has a blind spot

Madam, - Despite your Editorial on anti-Semitism (November 20th), your newspaper has a blind spot. You demonise democratic Israel but not Middle Eastern régimes that deny their citizens democratic rights. You ignore those pathological forms of Islam that demand Israel's liquidation. You never impugn the UN's history of discrimination against Israel.

You don't hector Arafat over the failed entity he runs or over the kind of state he wants to create. You shun the obligation to inquire into his doctrine of stages, his corruption, his dominion over seven terrorist factions, his involvement in funding terrorism, his murderous street "justice", his censorship, his racist and sectarian incitement in his print and broadcast media.

You see the crux of the conflict in Israeli "occupation" of the disputed lands and not in the Arab repudiation of Israel's right to exist. You propagandise the security fence as a "wall" and trivialise the right of Israelis to be safe. You are silent in the face of anti-Semites, of the left and right, who question Israel's right to exist and doom it as a colonial state.

I recall Martin Luther King's truth: "When people criticise Zionism they mean Jews. . .Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land. . .And what is anti-Zionism? It is the denial to the Jew of the fundamental right that we. . .freely accord to all other nations of the globe. It is discrimination against Jews because they are Jews. In short, it is anti-Semitism."

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And if you think you are even-handed in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, then you labour, as the Department of Foreign Affairs does, under a leaden illusion. And whenever there is a storm about Israel, your bias flares like a corposant in the political sky. - Yours, etc.,

TOM COONEY, c/o Faculty of Law, University College Dublin, Dublin 4.

Madam, - Alan Shatter (November 26th) denies the role of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories in fanning anti-Jewish rhetoric in the Arab media with the assertion that "there was no shortage of such rhetoric between 1948 and 1967". This implies that during that period the State of Israel co-existed in benign harmony with its neighbours, failing to mention that in 1948 the Israeli armed forces forced some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs into exile, and that Israel has subsequently disregarded UN resolution 194 and its oft-repeated call for justice for these refugees.

This is not to imply a justification for anti-Semitic rhetoric - there can be none - but to suggest that Mr Shatter is disingenuous and propagandistic in his logic. Similar logic comes into play when he describes criticism of Israel's unbridled savagery against Palestinian civilians as "the ideology of the pogrom. . .the expression of a view that when Jews are attacked. . .they have no right to defend themselves". This caricatures the Palestinians as aggressors and the Israelis as defenders, disregarding the brutally proactive nature of the illegal Israeli occupation.

While Israeli civilians have undoubtedly been the targets of heinous atrocities, the "ideology of the pogrom" has been more blatantly manifest in the systematic tactics of the Israeli state against Palestinian population centres. Deir Yassin, Qibya, Sabra and Chatila, Jenin, Nablus, Balata - this is just a selection of those placenames resonant with the cruelty of Israeli militarism over the past 60 years, often under the leadership of Ariel Sharon.

Finally, Mr Shatter criticises an Irish Times editorial for suggesting that "the best way to tackle anti-Semitism" is to achieve "a just settlement", which Mr Shatter cynically qualifies as "unattainable and unspecified". This implies that Mr Shatter is perfectly content to live with the intolerable injustice of the status quo. It also overlooks that the settlement in question has been specified for the past 36 years: an end to the illegal occupation, the dismantling of all colonies, and a just resolution to the refugee issue.

Meanwhile anti-Semitism, like Islamophobia and all forms of racism, will doubtless continue to exist as long as the building of real and metaphorical walls between peoples continues to be an instrument of state-sponsored injustice throughout the world. - Yours, etc.,

RAYMOND DEANE, Chairman, Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Dame Street, Dublin 2.