The real victims

THe contrived frenzy over antiSemitism has lasted for days while the regular criminal acts by the israeli state against the Palestinians go unreported. it’s the Palestinians who are being imprisoned, tortured, murdered and ethnically cleansed from their land. even the Gaza fishermen are regularly shot at by the israeli navy.

One of the most horrific scenes from the Holocaust was the piles of personal items taken from the Jews imprisoned in the death camps.

The israelis also had piles of personal Palestinian property, left behind when they were driven out of their villages.

A vacuous statement often made about the area is that ‘when Jews started returning in the 19th century to their historic homeland, there were hardly any Arabs living in Palestine’ (Letters). This is rubbish.

American Rev Richard Newton who visited Palestine in the 1870s, was impressed by the fertility of the land: ‘The town [Jaffa] is surrounded by beautiful orchards and groves of olives trees, oranges, lemons, citrons and apricots, which make the country around look like one great garden . . .’

On setting out to visit Jerusalem, he wrote: ‘Jaffa is famous for its oranges. They are the finest raised anywhere in this part of the world, and the extent to which they are cultivated surprised me greatly. For a long time after leaving the town, we rode through a constant succession of vast groves of orchards of orange trees. i never saw such a profusion of this delightful fruit.’

This was 1870 when there were no Zionists there, no militant european or American Jewish ‘settlers’, just Palestinian farmers peacefully tilling their land as they had done for more than 1,000 years.

No immigrant Jewish person who returned to their ‘historic homeland’ in Palestine had any specific idea where his ancestors had lived.

The Palestinians meanwhile, know the exact properties from which they were driven by the israelis. Some even visit them, sometimes talking to the israeli occupants.

BARRY M. WATSON, address supplied