Note from The Echo
The Israeli/Palestinian conflict has been a consistent topic of letter writers to The Echo, even before the latest tragic events.
This newspaper was started when the local media refused to publish complaints of locals about the abuse of police power. Our ongoing commitment to publishing different, sometimes strong opinions, many that we don’t agree with, is why you’ll find the conflicting and contradictory opinions of our readers here. They aren’t our own opinions.
We can’t publish everything we receive, some submissions are not based in fact at all, some are defamatory or too offensive or just too crazy. But while some readers don’t think opinions they disagree with should be given any space in The Echo, we don’t. We publish opinions we disagree with, and we hope everyone will read them and consider their worth, because we believe that this is an essential part of a healthy democracy – to scrutinise ideas even if we choose to discard them.
River to the sea
I have heard or read the rhyme ‘From the river to the sea Palestine will be free’ denounced numerous times by Israelis and supporters of Israel as antisemitic, ie racist or anti-Jewish.
The irony is, of course, that it is the Israelis who for the past 56 years since 1967 have controlled all the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea except for a tiny sliver of land, half the size of the Canberra metropolitan area, called the Gaza strip. They have not yet claimed the West Bank as Israeli territory but it is controlled by their army and occupied by more than half a million religious fanatic settlers supported by the Israeli government. So if the pro-Palestinian rhyme is racist then so must be the actions of the Israeli government.
This invasion is totally contrary to international law. But 1967 was not the first time Israel invaded Palestinian territory. Since the Great War (WW1) and the end of the Ottoman Empire the territory of Palestine was governed by Britain and controlled (more or less) by the British army. It was known as the British Mandate. In 1947 the newly formed United Nations voted to divide the British Mandate into roughly equal Israeli and Palestinian territories. Within a year of its formation Israel invaded about half the UN-designated Palestinian territory in 1948 and drove the Palestinian population out. The Gaza strip is so heavily overpopulated mainly due to the Palestinians driven out from their homeland in Israeli occupied Palestine. Other Palestinians went to refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and other countries.
Now that the Israelis have invaded the Gaza strip, who knows what is to become of it or its population. This war is the latest event in the 75-year-old history of Israeli expansion. The Israel-Palestine conflict did not begin on October 7, as many would have us believe.
Michael Trevaskis
Alstonville
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. 
