Paul Brecht doesn’t pick sides in the Palestine/Israel conflict ‘when it comes to one side shooting or bombing the other’ (Terror Settlements, 22 February 22). However, international law confers the right of oppressed, occupied people to defend themselves by any means available.
Referring to Palestinian resistance to Israeli land theft, home demolition, murder, terror, brutalisation and torture, the 1982 UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 reaffirmed ‘the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle’.
This week’s Israeli blitzkrieg on the old city of Nablus killed 11, including an elderly man and a child of 14 and injured over 100, many critically. This brings the Palestinian death total for 2023 to 59, including ten children. There is only silence from the Australian government on these atrocities and, when it deigns to speak, it usually blathers on about the right of Israel to defend itself, thus perpetuating the justification that colonial occupiers have the right to defend themselves from the resistance of the natives even by committing mass murder.
Palestinians are fighting their frontier wars just as our Aborigines fought theirs. Whose side are you on Mr Albanese?
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. 
