Israel conflict: The need for a fair political solution

Editor’s note: If you would like to submit a letter for possible publication, please email it to editor@rationalist.com.au. See our Publishing Guidelines. Dear Editor, Geoff Bloch’s piece, 'How secular humanism at our universities fuels antisemitism' (The Spectator, 19 October 2023), is mistaken on so many levels. Bloch has a completely ahistorical view of the status of Israel. Any debate on Palestine has to be predicated on the understanding that Israel is a settler colony that was established on someone else’s land on the basis of a 3000-year-old religious belief. It was only able to establish itself there because: (1) it was massively supported by Jewish people around the world; (2) most of the rest of the world were either supportive or willing to turn a blind eye, at least partly due to guilt about the Holocaust; (3) the local inhabitants were not a discrete organised entity, having suffered under a long succession of foreign empires, so that resistance was disorganised, and it was relatively easy to impose Israel upon them, after a struggle. And Israelis seem to have conveniently forgotten that a key tactic in their own fight for a nation state was in fact terrorism, directed against both the British and the indigenous Palestinians. The Palestinians were no-one’s chosen people. Having said that, Israel is now a fait accompli, with the United Nations granting it nation status, and a few million people living there. There can be no question of it ceasing to exist. So thos...