Sir, – The ambassador of Israel, Ophir Kariv, in blaming the Palestinian Authority for not providing its people living under Israeli occupation for the past 53 years with Covid-19 vaccines, is disingenuous in obscuring the basic facts of Zionist colonisation, occupation, and siege (Letters, February 9th).
During the Covid-19 crisis Israel has continued to blockade the Gaza Strip and to conduct daily raids on the West Bank, regularly killing unarmed Palestinian children, women and men, and demolishing Palestinian homes and villages. Israel has continued to withhold tax money due to the Palestinian Authority, and to finance the occupation through imposing high fines on Palestinians tried in its illegal military courts.
Meanwhile, Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, currently on trial for corruption, boasts of the high level of vaccinations, while Israel withholds the vaccines from the occupied population, despite its duty to provide the occupied with medical care under international law.
Blaming the Palestinian Authority, whose financial resources and political power Israel has depleted, despite its obligations under the by now discredited Oslo Accords, is a cheap trick. It is, however, not surprising considering that Israel’s leader – who has dragged Israel to four elections in less than two years – chooses to blame anyone but himself for Israel’s failure to manage the pandemic, from his coalition partner Benny Gantz, to the beleaguered Palestinian Authority.
As an anti-Zionist Israeli, let me cite the great anti-colonial writer and leader Aimé Césaire, who wrote: “No one colonises innocently, and no one can colonise without impunity.” – Yours, etc,
Dr RONIT LENTIN,
Retired Associate
Professor of Sociology,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2.