A resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict must be found with the utmost urgency - Yorkshire Post Letters

I firstly wish to express my total revulsion and horror at the most brutal and cruel attacks on Israeli citizens together with other innocent individuals by Hamas terrorists.

I totally accept the right of the Israeli government to take all necessary legal measures to protect their Israeli citizens both Jews and Palestinians against such attacks and to bring such terrorists to account for their illegal actions against all such innocent people.

Such actions should be undertaken ensuring as far as possible that other innocents, including both Jews and Palestinians, are protected throughout this process as far as possible.

It is regretted that over the past ‘relatively peaceful’ decade opportunities for both the Palestinian people and the Israeli people to move towards a resolution of the ‘Palestine problem’ failed to be realised.

UN reports of mounting deaths in the West Bank and Gaza before Saturday, October 7, together with the allegations of apartheid and the appointment of an extreme right-wing Israeli government would suggest otherwise.

Sadly, information regarding events in this part of the world appear not to be evenly presented by the British media and most probably by the rest of the Press across Europe and North America.

Why this should be the case warrants investigation as the events taking place in the Middle East may have a major impact in the UK as well as a wider impact on Western civilisation.

It could certainly be argued that the present and previous Israeli governments are responsible for the failure of the two sides reaching agreement in this sad continuing saga of pain, cruelty, death and distress.

But why have the major western powers effectively ignored this simmering problem? Yes, the West has been giving money to both sides of the conflict. It is suggested that the main beneficiaries to this largesse have been arms manufacturers.

This is not only a problem for the West to resolve, though the West sadly initially created the current problem, albeit with the best intentions by creating the Israeli state in Palestine.

The initial proposal to create a homeland for the Jewish People was the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when the British mandate for Palestine was formed. Following the second World War and the devastation of the holocaust, the Israeli state was created in Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people in 1948.

Palestine was at the time, and remains, the homeland of the Palestinian people which is the fundamental cause of this continuing problem of the past 75 years and will continue until an agreed solution is found.

The horrific continuing story of cruelty against a small and dispersed people has been played out for millennia, culminating in the holocaust. It appears however that the holocaust was just another step along the way for the Jewish people.

There are increasingly many nihilistic extremists who are prepared to take whatever extreme measures are necessary because they may rightly believe that the Palestinian people have been badly dealt with over the past 75 years since the imposition of the state of Israel in Palestine.

A resolution must be found with the utmost urgency, even whilst this latest disaster is unfolding a way must be found to bring both sides together.