Gareth W R Smith, Byron Bay
Danny Wakil you are wrong to claim that people do not have a ‘balanced view’ of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The problem is that they do, and it is not ‘like every conflict… nuanced and complicated’.
Terrorism gave birth to Israel with the Haganah and Irgun’s commander, Menachem Begin, killing Palestinians and Britons (176 at end of 1947) and placing a 350kg bomb in the King David hotel, Jerusalem. Recent historical discoveries by Akevot, the Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research (IIPCR), support Ilan Pappés claim that Israel practised ‘ethnic cleansing’ in 1948 when it terrorised between 700,000 and 800,000 Palestinians into abandoning their homes and farms. Palestinians call this the Nakbah or Catastrophe.
Akevot (IIPCR), has also unearthed details of the gang rapes, murders and looting perpetrated by the Jews, which have been kept secret for 73 years. These atrocious crimes have never ended; the Nakba continues.
According to Samidoun, the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, ‘Israeli occupation authorities arrested 3,100 Palestinians, including 42 women and 471 children, throughout the month of May, in different areas of Palestine, at demonstrations, in night raids and random arrests’. Israel’s May Gaza blitzkrieg killed at least 253 Palestinians, including 66 children, and wounded more than 1,900 people, according to the health ministry in Gaza. Seventy-four government buildings, three mosques, 16,800 housing units and 66 schools were destroyed, bringing the cumulative total of homeless people to 58,000. 250,000 cannot access piped water because water treatment plants were deliberately bombed. Perhaps, for a nuanced and balanced approach, Danny, I invite you to share the damage and death statistics resulting from Gaza’s rocket attacks on Israel!
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. 
