Sir, - I write to endorse the observations of Michael Jansen in her report, "Prisoners of cage that is the Gaza Strip" (The Irish Times, May 4th).
I was the Irish Methodist member of a delegation from Churches Together in Britain and Ireland which spent two weeks in the Middle East in March. We first visited Arab neighbours of Israel/Palestine, and then spent a week visiting Jerusalem, Galilee, Gaza and the West Bank. Our observations and the accounts to which we listened accord exactly with Jansen's report. Everywhere we went, from small villages to capital cities, the same questions were put to us:
Why does the international community allow the State of Israel to behave towards the Palestinians in a manner it was not prepared accept, for example, from Iraq towards Kuwait?
Why does the world community not insist on Israel honoring the United Nations resolutions with regard to the Occupied Territories?
Why does Israel find it so difficult to conceive of its own security as being more dependent on Palestinian freedom and dignity than on the force of its own arms?
Gaza itself is effectively under siege, its inhabitants virtually prisoners in their own land. The closure of the border has cut off workers from their jobs and wider families; produce from its markets; medical and other essential supplies from a situation of great and terrible need. Forty-two per cent of the land has been expropriated for the benefit of Israeli settlers, currently around 3,000 in number, and guarded by twice as many troops. They pay no taxes to the Palestinian Authority but replenish their swimming pools while many Palestinians are without adequate supplies for drinking and sanitation.
Those of the CTBI delegation who visited Gaza reported at first-hand precisely the injustices to which Michael Jansen refers. This is because "the experienced reality of living under occupation. . .is that in a territory under the acknowledged jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, all aspects of economic and social life are subject to the decisions and the vetoes of the Government of Israel." These decisions have, since our visit, included the now regular and until recently unprecedented incursion of Israeli forces on to Palestinian territory.
Michael Jansen is to be commended for her courageous and forthright report. - Yours, etc.,
Gillian Kingston, Barton Road East, Dundrum, Dublin 14.