Opposing views on 
Gaza conflict

WHILE the death of even one innocent person is deplorable, and every effort should be made to avoid their occurrence, they are inevitable in any military conflict, especially where one side insists on placing its offensive capabilities in heavily populated civilian areas, in clear contravention of the Geneva conventions.

However, I cannot help 
but feel that the vehemence of those protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza is disproportionate.

The number of deaths in 
Syria is vastly greater but I have yet to see such large demonstrations outside its embassy calling for a halt 
to that humanitarian 
disaster.

Similarly the actions of ISIS in Iraq in demanding that Christians and others in areas under its control either convert to Islam or leave their ancestral homes with those refusing to obey threatened with “execution”.

This form of apartheid gets relatively little coverage in 
the media, and no demonstrations of popular outrage on the streets, yet Israel is consistently described as an “apartheid state” with virtually no basis in reality.

From: Geoffrey F. Bryant, Queen Street, Barton-on-Humber.

AS part of his recent letter concerning events in Gaza/Palestine, Michael Ross (The Yorkshire Post, July 21) poses two questions – where does all this hostility against Israel come from and is he missing something?

Both questions display a profound ignorance of events in that area over the last 60 years, an ignorance about which I have been provoked to write at length to your paper on numerous previous occasions.

Sufficient for today could I remind Mr Ross and many 
others (perhaps even the 
Israeli PM) that the most recent flare-up of hostilities had its origin in the tragic murder of three Israeli youths travelling in West Bank land illegally occupied by Israel.

The illegal occupation of anyone’s land, anywhere in the world, throughout the whole of history, has almost invariably provoked understandable retaliation from those whose occupation has seemed endless (viz many parts of the British Empire).

Here is a lesson from history which Israel seems unable to get its head around but rather feels able to extend its ever-creeping illegal occupation of Gaza (control of all land, sea and air movements is de facto occupation) and the West Bank at will.

If such circumstances continue to prevail, I fear Israel will never be able to live in peace.

From: Mike Ridgway, Ghyll Wood, Ilkley.

AS the crises in the Middle 
East deepens and more 
costly in lives and individual hardship the question arises: where is our Middle East envoy Tony Blair?

His silence speaks volumes!

From: Tony Drake, Knedlington Road, Howden.

AS a response to Michael Ross’s letter (The Yorkshire Post, July 21) regarding the “outcry against Israel”, I would like to offer 
the following, hypothetical, situation for consideration: 
You are trying to live peacefully in your new home but an 
angry neighbour who doesn’t 
like you and wants to get rid of you starts hurling bricks at 
your house and into your 
garden.

After five years of this, during which time nothing was being done to try to stop it, you retaliate and hurl bigger bricks at his house and garden in an attempt to bring it all to an end.

But he still keeps on hurling bricks at you so you build a high wall. In spite of this he manages to get his bricks over the wall somehow.

So what do you do next? Being so frustrated that nobody has been able or willing to stop 
this, you resort to hurling 
sticks of dynamite over the wall…. and so on…. and so on….and so on…

Folly of more building

From: Andrew Suter, Station Road, Ampleforth.

I REFER to the speech by Clive Betts MP (The Yorkshire Post, July 21) concerning the lack of housing in the UK and that we should be building 250,000 houses plus a year for 20 to 30 years.

Why do we as a nation accept that we must build more to solve our housing woes?

Go to any city and the folly is revealed.

Head north out of York and the decades of building slip by medieval to Victorian to 1920s etc to modern day the further you head north.

All these building booms have intended once and for all to resolve our housing needs. It hasn’t happened and it will never happen.

As a nation, we must decide the size of nation we can accommodate and live with it.

From: Iain Morris, Caroline Street, Saltaire, Shipley.

WE are very lucky here in Bradford in that two-thirds of the Metropolitan District is in fact rural, though it would seem Bradford Council is doing its utmost to alter that.