21 January 3rd blog today
One of my viewers has thanked me for a letter of mine which was published in EducationGuardian yesterday. Since it expresses my views on the Israel/Palestine situation (which ought to be uppermost in the Obama administration's in-basket) I reproduce it here. It was a response to an article headed "Why the silence over attacks on Israeli campuses?" the previous week by Professor Colin Shindler of SOAS and was headed by the paper "Lessons from Gaza". Here goes:
Colin Shindler rightly deplores one-sided outrage at attacks on university campuses. But, as a leading historian of Israel, the "serious examination" of the problem he calls for, demands that he, and other teachers of Israeli and Jewish studies, continually put in perspective the root cause of Palestinian hostility and violence, the injustice done to Palestinians when Israel was established and since, the expulsions in 1949-49 and the creation of generations of refugees, the theft and continuous colonisation of their lands, their impoverishment, the discrimination they experience within Israel and the disproportionate force used by Israel to maintain its supremacy. Then they will indeed be seen to be exercising their "educational raison d'etre"