Here we go again. Another example of the antisemitic slur ‘from the river to the sea’ from Mary McMorrow (Letters, 7 February). If the hopes of the opponents of the Israeli government’s policies are antisemitic then so must be the policies of the Israeli government because the territory they control is exactly that: from the river to the sea.
The war in Gaza has clearly exposed that the Gaza strip has been little more than a Palestinian refugee camp since 1948. Prior to 1948 it was not the overpopulated, unsustainable, Palestinian enclave, supported only by UN and other refugee organisations. Most of the Palestinian families who live and die in the Gaza strip today were forced out of Palestine by the Israeli government’s massive expansion in 1948.
Although the Israeli expansion and occupation of nominally Palestinian territory was in contravention of international law, recently adopted by the newly formed United Nations, it was accepted, at least by the victors of WW2. I have a 1952 Oxford University Press atlas which clearly illustrates Israeli territory occupying all former Palestine (British Mandate).
I imagine this illegal expansion and occupation which produced the vast Palestinian refugee population was accepted by the UN in 1948 because it happened only a few years after the end of WW2 and the formal discovery of the murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime.
The territory surrounding the Gaza strip into which Hamas attacked the Israeli towns and kibbutzim on 7 October was part of the territory acquired by Israel in 1948. No doubt Hamas considered that territory was as illegally occupied by Israel as the West Bank was in 1967. Today all reports of the 7 October attack describe the territory where it occurred as a legitimate part of Israel with no reference at all to the events of 1948.
I recently learnt that there are 750,000 Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, which the Israeli government wants to incorporate into Israel in the same manner that the other occupied territory was in 1948. We often hear our own prime minister as well as leaders of many other countries calling for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. Where do they imagine a Palestinian state would be? Do they think the Israeli government would reverse its policy of the last 57 years and abandon its settlements in the West Bank and call its fanatic settlers back to Israel or do they think that a Palestinian state could be established containing 750,000 fanatic armed Zionist opponents?
Have you ever tried to put a genie back in the bottle 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. 
