Gareth Smith, Byron Bay
Dany Wakil lays all the blame for failed Israel/Palestine talks on the Palestinians (Letter, July 31). From its inception the Zionist objective was to create an exclusive Jewish state but the existence of an indigenous population was a problem.
In 1967 Golda Meir asked Levi Eshkol what he intended to do with the more than a million Palestinians living in the newly captured territory. Jokingly, Eshkol replied, ‘I get it. You want the dowry (the land), but you don’t like the bride (Palestinians)!’ Meir replied, ‘My soul yearns for the dowry, and to let someone else take the bride’. Moshe Dayan said, ‘Before (the Palestinians’) very eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where they and their ancestors have lived. We are the generation of colonisers and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a house.’
Israel implemented a harsh apartheid policy making the conditions of life almost impossible for Palestinians in order to force them to leave. This strategy is incompatible with a Palestinian/Israeli rapprochement.
So-called peace talks are designed to fail and the prospect of a two-state solution is moribund. Palestine will never have its own state because its land has been fractured by Israel’s strategically placed settlements populated with heavily armed settlers and road links that are exclusively Jewish.
Unlike Israelis, Palestinians are subject to military checkpoints, arbitrary arrest, night raids, electronic surveillance, torture, child arrest before military courts, extra-judicial killings, home demolitions, timeless incarceration through administrative detention, a draconian pass system and, in the case of Gaza, calorific restrictions designed to starve but not kill. No, Danny Wakil, we can see through your Zionist propaganda!
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
