letters

Israel and Palestine

Sir: Melanie Phillips (‘Happy 60th birthday, Israel’, 3 May) denies Israel one of its greatest successes over the last 60 years by deliberately ignoring its status as a regional military and economic superpower. The image of Israel as a David to an Arab Goliath is massively outdated. Arab states have long since given up any notion of trying to defeat a US-backed, nuclear-armed Israel, but have offered Israel a full withdrawal for full peace option.

Another blind spot is Phillips’s routine denial of Palestinian identity. This is as idiotic as denying an Israeli identity. Even Israel’s leaders have begrudgingly accepted this. In addition, she continually condones all Israeli actions, effectively justifying everlasting military occupation and colonisation and the collective punishment of an entire civilian population. This continues today with Israel still occupying both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, now little better than open-air prisons with Israeli soldiers as wardens. These wardens have little hesitation in using massive force. So far between January and March this year, the Israeli army has killed 40 children alone in Gaza, three times more than the entire Israel casualty count as a result of Qassam rockets since 2001. Neither is justified, but Israel’s actions are vastly disproportionate and counterproductive.

If Israel is around in 60 years’ time, it will not be by following the sort of warlike anti-Arab policies Phillips advocates but by coming to terms with its neighbours and recognising their legal rights. Peace requires mutual recognition and a final complete end of occupation. This is the only option if both peoples are to have any meaningful future. Chris Doyle

Director, Council for Arab-British Understanding, London EC4

Sir: I expect you will be deluged with angry letters a result of Melanie Phillips’s excellent 60th birthday card for Israel. As a sane, Anglican, English Conservative I would like to add a few facts, rather than opinions, in her support. To start with, 60 per cent of the British Mandate was given to form Muslim Transjordan (note the original name). Second, Jews who formerly occupied Judaea and Samaria (the West Bank) were driven out by Arab Fedayeen. Third, there never was a Palestinian nation: who was the last King of the independent kingdom of Palestine or the last President of the Palestine Republic?

‘Palestine’ is an invention of the Romans (Palestina — Land of the Philistines after the Jews’ ancient enemies) as a punishment for the Jewish rebellion. The Kingdom of Israel was founded circa 1,000 bc according to ancient historians and modern archaeological research, which makes Israel a modern and historical nation, Palestine a hysterical Islamic fiction.

John Draper Nordelph

Norfolk

A death foretold

Sir: John Patten (‘A bill to end a child’s right to a father’, 3 May) suggests that even science-fiction writers ‘never dared foretell the death of fatherhood’. He must have forgotten John Wyndham’s hallucinatory novella Consider Her Ways (1956), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian novel Herland (1915), and Mary E. Bradley Lane’s risible story ‘Mizora’ (1890), all of which feature societies totally populated by parthenogenetic women.

Jeff Aronson

Oxford

My best shot

Sir: Simon Hoggart wrote kindly about Foyle’s War (Arts, 26 April) but I wonder what makes him think that ‘give it my best shot’ was not a phrase that would have been used in 1945. I always took great pains to get the language right and — as usual — the script was read by Terry Charman, our adviser at the Imperial War Museum, and he sees no problem. OED ascribes the phrase to Dorothy L. Sayers, which seems about right. Questioning our accuracy became almost a national sport but this time I’m genuinely puzzled. Can Dot Wordsworth help?

Anthony Horowitz

London N8

Work of the devil

Sir: Opus Dei (‘The BBC and Opus Dei’, 26 April) has just cause to complain, but others, too, have come off badly in BBC drama. This week’s Waking the Dead was such a grotesque portrayal of the army, and of the Guards in particular, that it amounted almost to a hate crime. And a recent series of Spooks was nothing but a sustained and virulent attack on the United States. The BBC could stop this sort of thing if it wanted to. The fact that it does not tells us a lot about its corporate prejudices and lack of objectivity.

Leonard Allen

King’s Lynn, Norfolk

Good call

Sir: Matthew Parris should not be too hard on cold-callers (Another Voice, 26 April). Last January I received an unsolicited phone call from a very nicely spoken (and very persuasive) young man named William. ‘Can I interest you in a six-month subscription to The Spectator?’ he said. I was won over by his charm and have thus enjoyed months of excellent articles; especially those of Matthew Parris.

David Lydamore

Leigh-on-Sea, Essex

Unfair dismissal

Sir: I was surprised by P.J. Kavanagh’s review of my Isaac Rosenberg: the Making of a Great War Poet (Books, 3 May). Having happily followed my interpretation of his life, he rather suddenly dismisses Rosenberg as a poet, citing Geoffrey Grigson as his authority. Personally I should hesitate to disagree with two such eminent poets, but T.S. Eliot, arguably the 20th century’s greatest poet as well as a perceptive critic, thought Rosenberg the ‘most remarkable’ of the war poets. Another highly respected critic, F.R. Leavis, went even further, finding Rosenberg ‘as remarkable as Wilfred Owen but even more interesting technically’. Leavis identified ‘genius’ in Rosenberg, as did Siegfried Sassoon.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson

London NW1