The greatest challenge of all is to live without illusions yet Danny Wakil wanders lost in a dense fog of them.
He is wrong twice in regard to peace being the solution; peace with justice and equality is the solution. Let’s disabuse him and the Echo readership of any unsubstantiated ‘claims’ and rely instead on facts.
Israel has brutally oppressed the Palestinian people for more than 76 years displacing over 700,000 refugees in 1948 and a further 300,000 in 1967 under a ‘belligerent military occupation’ since then. Palestinian refugees now number 5.8 million representing 21 per cent of the global refugee population.
Israel enacted the Nation State law in 2018 institutionalising racism and legalising apartheid as well as over 65 laws that discriminate against Palestinians making them second-class citizens. Israel has illegally annexed East Jerusalem and settled more than 620,000 Jewish Israeli settlers on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in contravention of the Geneva Convention and UN Resolution 242.
Israel has laid siege to the Gaza Strip since 2007, restricting the flow of food, water, medicine, trade and movement of citizens – collective punishment illegal under international law.
In the last seven months Israel has killed over 50,000 people in Gaza, mostly unarmed women and children, the latter numbering over 10,000. Wakil bemoans ‘anti-Israel bias’ but it is very clear that all of the above facts generate sympathy for the innocent victims of Israeli violence along with grief and anger, not hate, and the protests around the world reflect a deepening awareness of Israeli exceptionalism and lawlessness and growing support for universal human rights in Palestine.
Israel is in the dock for the crime of genocide yet the far right, messianic, ultra-nationalist Jewish extremists in Netanyahu’s cabinet and elsewhere in Israeli society brazenly urge on the holocaust in Gaza. Until Israel withdraws from occupied Palestinian territories, agrees to a just solution to the refugee problem, ends the practice of apartheid and agrees to the creation of an independent Palestinian state there will be no peace. Every individual of conscience can take non-violent action on a grassroots level by joining the movement to boycott Israel: bdsmovement.net
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. 
