Letters to the Editor | 30 June 2007

A partisan presentation

Sir: Last week Melanie Phillips attacked the West’s approach to the Palestinians as deluded (‘Gaza: another front in Iran’s war’, 23 June). But if her analysis carried sway it would only reinforce the hand of those who see no point in negotiations.

Phillips’s view is based on a partisan presentation of history. The ‘international agreement’ she refers to is the formal assumption of Mandate Palestine by Britain under the auspices of the League of Nations. Article six of the Mandate set terms of Jewish immigration ‘while ensuring that the rights and position of the other sections of the population are not prejudiced’. This echoed the Balfour Declaration of 1917: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’ The property deeds and keys held by so many Palestinian families are testimony that Britain and the international community remains in breach of this undertaking.

Melanie Phillips’s assault on the whole Palestinian people as a group ‘who have brutalised themselves’ is both insulting and inaccurate. She would do better to ask how the tragedy of Gaza and the West Bank over the last 60 years has come about and why it was that Palestinians voted for Hamas in an election that was widely recognised as free and fair.

Those who take the time to find out will understand that Hamas’s agenda is not non- negotiable. Hamas is primarily a Palestinian nationalist revolutionary movement on the same journey as countless successful revolutionary movements before it.