Madam, – As the representative body of the Jewish community in Ireland, we wish to distance ourselves from the letter published in The Irish Timeson January 22nd and signed by Katrina Goldstone and others. The authors of the letter may be Jewish, but they neither speak for the Irish Jewish community nor do they take any part in Jewish communal affairs here. They represent nobody but themselves.
The overwhelming majority of the Irish Jewish community supports Israel’s right – indeed, obligation – to defend its population against Hamas, recognised by the international community as a terrorist group, which for the past eight years has rained missile, rocket, and mortar fire on a daily basis, indiscriminately, on the men, women and children living in the cities and towns of southern Israel.
As Irish citizens and members of the Jewish community we are concerned by the tone taken against Israel by some of the media in recent weeks, ignoring altogether the steps Israel has been forced to take to protect its citizens.
Clause 1 of the Hamas constitution makes its position quite clear – the destruction of the State of Israel. Hamas is sponsored by Iran, whose position has been given many times by its president: to eradicate the state of Israel from the map. And Iran is working flat out to complete its nuclear weapons capability.
We are all deeply saddened by the deaths of civilians in the conflict in Gaza, largely caused by Hamas using the population as human shields and firing at Israel from sites adjacent to schools, hospitals, mosques and the UN compound.
We are also deeply saddened by the deaths and injuries of Israeli civilians, and the widespread destruction caused over the past eight years by over 5,000 Hamas rockets, along with numerous horrific suicide bombings, all deliberately aimed at killing civilians.
Even now, during the fragile truce, tunnels through which weapons are smuggled into Gaza are being repaired and rebuilt by Hamas, whose admitted master-plan, the destruction of Israel, has not changed. – Yours, etc,
LEONARD W. ABRAHAMSON,
Chairman,
STEPHEN MOLINS,
President,
Jewish Representative Council of Ireland,
Rathgar,
Dublin 6.
Madam, – The letter of January 23rd from Nadav Cohen, a counsellor in the Israeli embassy in Dublin, is skilfully written. It is also highly disingenuous, as it fails to address the fundamental issue in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Mr Cohen says that “between 1994 and 2004, Hamas and other terrorist organisations killed hundreds of Israelis. . . thereby derailing the Oslo peace process”. The statement that the terrorists derailed the Oslo peace process is false.
Under the Oslo agreement (1993), Israel agreed to stop expanding its settlements. The ink was hardly dry on the accord before Israel began doing otherwise. Indeed, Israeli settlements on Arab lands have increased by more than 50 per cent since 1993.
Therein lies the nub of the Israeli-Arab conflict – the theft of land. The fundamental problem is Israel’s policy of appropriating lands that the Arabs have occupied for thousands of years.
Gaza is a ghetto of the dispossessed. It contains more than a million Palestinians who have been driven from their homes, businesses and farms in Israel. Indeed, the land and towns upon which Hamas’s rockets land were, less than a generation ago, occupied by Arabs in their ancestral homes.
What choice do the Palestinians have? Does Israel expect those it has driven out to go quietly? Are the Israelis surprised when the Palestinians react violently and try to get their land and property back? Does Israel expect the dispossessed Palestinians to retreat quietly into their ghetto and weep silently? – Yours, etc,
PAUL D. KENNEDY,
Craiglands,
Dalkey,
Co Dublin.
Madam, – Alan Shatter TD’s concern over the dreadful abuse of children in Roscommon is well meaning and well founded and his call to action merits a positive response. However, this concern for Irish children is in sharp contrast to his failure to condemn the Israeli authorities’ killing and injuring of hundreds of children in Gaza. – Yours, etc,
BILL HARTE,
Ormond Road,
Rathmines,
Dublin 6.
Madam, – Alan Shatter TD is rightly outraged by the revelations of neglect and abuse in the Roscommon case. Could this be the same Alan Shatter who so trenchantly supported the Israeli shelling of Gaza which caused the killing and maiming of hundreds of innocent Palestinian children? Mr Shatter should reflect upon the relationship between consistency and respect. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN McBRIDE,
Ardeevin Road,
Dalkey,
Co Dublin.
Madam, – The academics who call on national and European authorities to cut funding to Israeli academics have a shaky sense of the value of freedom of academic inquiry (January 23rd).
Promoting inquiry and the free exchange of ideas is the pinion of academic enlightenment; using the sting of political disagreement to paralyse the pursuit of knowledge and understanding defeats the whole point of academic diversity.
The writers yoke together inherently contradictory reasons for their academic intifada. First, they allege that Israel has breached international humanitarian law. Hamas has been conducting armed attacks against Israeli civilians contrary to international humanitarian law, but they do not think that this violation warrants sanctions against academic institutions in the Gaza Strip.
Second, they denounce Israel for striking academic buildings in the Gaza Strip. Lacking a sense of basic fairness, they do not consider whether Hamas combatants had turned the buildings into “military objectives”, within the meaning of international humanitarian law. They conveniently ignore awkward material facts: for instance, that Hamas attacked Sapir College in Sderot and forced Ben Gurion University in Beersheba to close, and that Hamas intentionally fired rockets when Israeli children were going to and from school. This had a paralysing effect on education in the south of Israel. But this crime against humanity does not, from their ideological high ground, warrant sanctions against academics in the Gaza Strip.
Third, they do not call on the EU to cut funding for academics in Iran, where the regime tramples on the rights of women, gay men and lesbians, and endangers the life of any academic who advocates respect for human rights. Yet they advocate indiscriminate, collective punishment of the Israeli academy, which houses a politically diverse community of scholars who have made advances in so many fields – including computer science, desalination, agriculture, cancer research, medical technology – from which the whole world benefits.
This single-minded focus on Israel, the national Jewish homeland, lacks the principled consistency that integrity must exact. It embodies a pernicious, hostile, discriminatory attitude toward Israel. The reasoning is not just academically shallow. It has an articulate fit with the mind-set of Archbishop Langton, who, at the 1222 Canterbury Council, threatened to excommunicate anyone who had contact with Jews. – Yours, etc,
TOM COONEY,
c/o UCD School of Law,
Belfield,
Dublin 4.
Madam, – The apartheid regime in South Africa never slaughtered civilians to the extent that the Israeli state has in recent weeks. Yet while Israel enjoys a status on a par with any Western democracy, apartheid South Africa was shunned as a pariah state.
Israel’s offensive against what is effectively now the Gaza Ghetto has killed hundreds of innocent children this month (as objective UN observers on the ground testify). The Israeli state has come to a point where it dishonours the memory of all brutalised peoples in history, including its own.
It is now time for Israel to be pressurised with the same tools that were used against apartheid South Africa to encourage it to respect civilised and democratic norms. A boycott of Israeli goods, isolation in the international sporting arena and other economic sanctions should now be employed. – Yours, etc,
IAN KILROY,
Oaklands Crescent,
Rathgar,
Dublin 6.