Standing up for Palestine

Sir — Corralling people into concentration camps and abusing their human rights neither began nor ended with the Holocaust.

Britain was guilty of this during the Boer War, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, internment in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, and many of the most powerful states in the world have done likewise before, during and after World War II. The Holocaust perpetrated against European Jews was by far the most serious and most unjustified crime against humanity so far. This makes it difficult to understand how the Israeli government could even consider, let alone perpetrate, the human rights abuses that are now occurring almost daily against Palestinians.

It is important to try to understand what is happening in Palestine, and why it is happening. The dreadful Holocaust is one of the root causes, but this in no way justifies similar atrocities being committed against the Palestinian people. The white, racist South African apartheid government was perpetrating similar abuses against the majority of its people until international sanctions forced it to abandon apartheid.

It is now time that the international community, especially Ireland and the European Union, took effective action to end the suffering of the Palestinian people. Edward Horgan,

Limerick