Sir, – Ronit Lentin and David Landy ("Criticising Israel is not the same as being anti-Jewish", Opinion, May 2nd) are missing an important point in their attempt at a convenient separation: People who are anti-Jewish are rarely pro-Israel and then there are those who criticise Israel in ways that could only be anti-Jewish.
Israel is a de facto Jewish state. How else, other than being anti-Jewish, could one explain the actions of those who promote boycotts of ordinary people such as PhD candidates, wheelchair athletes, and folk dancers from Israel as anything but anti-Jewish?
Although not all of such people might be Jews, clearly the majority is, yet none are the architects or administrators of Israeli foreign or domestic policy. – Yours, etc,
JUDITH GOLDBERGER
Donnybrook,
Dublin 4.
Sir, – Ronit Lentin and David Landy (Opinion, May 2nd) state that Ken Livingstone’s claim, that Hitler supported Zionism before he started exterminating Europe’s Jews, “was clumsy but based on historical fact”. The historian Niall Ferguson has pointed out that Livingstone’s source for this claim is a “book by the self-proclaimed American Trotskyist Lenni Brenner”. According to Ferguson, Brenner “is not a scholar but a political activist”.
Surely as sociologists, Ms Lentin and Mr Landy should be investigating why so many NGOs, political activists and journalists are obsessed with the tiny state of Israel?
This blinds them to injustices in the Muslim world. For example, Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds and its invasion of Cyprus, Morocco’s occupation of the Western Sahara, and Indonesia’s conflict with the indigenous populations of West Papua on the island of New Guinea.
And why are Europeans silent about the Palestinian elite’s corruption and promotion of Jew-hatred?
– Yours, etc,
KARL MARTIN
Sutton,
Dublin 13.