Righting the wrongs on Israel

■ In your editorial ‘World indifferent to the massacre of protesters’ (May 16), you make some blatantly untrue assertions about Israel.

You claim that Gaza is in a state of “constant siege” from Israel, while conveniently ignoring the fact that since

2007 Gaza has been controlled by Hamas, an organisation which is in a permanent state of war with Israel.

Instead of using international aid to develop infrastructure, schools and hospitals for the ordinary people in Gaza, Hamas consistently diverts resources to build weapons and tunnels to launch terror attacks against Israel. Just this morning, Hamas has rejected medical aid offered by Israel.

Hamas forsakes the ordinary people of Gaza, in its quest to destroy Israel. Indeed, the people in Gaza are effectively hostages to the Hamas terrorist leadership.

You say that Palestinians were “expelled” in 1948 when Israel was founded. In fact, a fair compromise was proposed for the land to be split into a Jewish state called Israel and a Palestinian Arab state.

Israel accepted this compromise; the Arabs rejected it, and seven Arab armies attacked Israel to destroy it at its birth.

The so-called ‘right of return’ for Palestinians is in fact just a mechanism to destroy the state of Israel by swamping its tiny borders with millions of people. Israel is only the size of Leinster.

Extreme naivety is evident in your reference to a “massacre of protesters”. The IDF was forced to defend Israeli citizens in the face of a violent riot, where tens of thousands of people were attempting to breach the border with Israel.

Regrettably, it is hardly ever mentioned in the Irish media that, following Israel’s establishment and its survival against a genocidal attack by seven Arab armies, some 900,000 Jewish people were expelled from Arab countries and had to flee to Israel as refugees.

Is it too much to hope that one day there will be an emotional reaction in the Irish media and from Irish politicians about that?

Zeev Boker

Ambassador of Israel