Disproportionate claims
Sir: According to its website, the British– Israel Communications and Research Centre, of which Lorna Fitzsimons is CEO (‘Israel is getting ready to invade Gaza’, 23 February), is an organisation ‘devoted to creating a more supportive environment for Israel in the UK’. These aims might be more easily fulfilled if she did not put her name to articles that read as though they were taken directly from Israeli government handouts.
To take only one example, Fitzsimons goes on at some length about the ‘soaring’ number of rocket attacks on Israel since Hamas’s election victory in January 2006, and then (curiously) quotes figures for Israelis killed and wounded by these since 2001. However, she does not quote the figures for the period since January 2006, nor the number of Palestinians killed and injured by Israeli attacks on Gaza during the same period. Had she done so, your readers would have been reminded that these are wildly disproportionate, far in excess even of the overall kill ratio of 3:1 or 4:1 during the second intifada.
Moreover, while blaming Hamas alone for the current state of tension, Fitzsimons completely fails to mention the fact that, since its ‘withdrawal’ from Gaza, Israel has continued to maintain a complete blockade of the territory, preventing its port and airport from operating and for much of the time preventing aid and supplies from reaching its people. Nor of course does she mention the continuing construction of Israeli settlements on the West Bank, despite their illegality and the government’s promise not to allow any more.
This sort of blatantly one-sided approach, presumably meant to provide an advance justification for an Israeli invasion of Gaza, is frankly not the best way of creating a more supportive environment for Israel.
Richard Hoare
East Lavant, West Sussex
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