With respect to Wakil and Macklin (Letters, 21 July) the assertion that the Palestinian resistance wants to kill all Jews in the world is wholly untrue.
Hamas was voted into power on their manifesto of seeking a solution based on the ’67 lines and has repeatedly offered Israel truces, which Israel has rejected. The aggressor (Israel) is always the one who rejects peace and instead wages a crippling and life-taking siege against the other.
Nowhere does the Hamas charter say ‘Death to Jews’ or anything similar. You are misquoting something written in the 1980s, before Hamas was even a proper political party, by someone who has since died. It has been updated many times since – this is very disingenuous, thinly disguised propaganda (Hamas in 2017: The document in full: https://tinyurl.com/4ds9j2ym).
History has shown that every human rights abuser will paint their victims as murderous terrorists who, if allowed to be free without brutal persecution, would turn on their oppressors and reveal what monsters they really are. This racist narrative has always proved to be false, from South Africa, Algeria, Tunisia, South and Central America, to Ireland.
It is only by dehumanising, and reducing Palestinians to murderous monsters that Israel is able to justify its brutality, segregation, ethnic cleansing, house demolitions, arbitrary arrests, torture, and plain old murder.
Read the letter by Subhi Awad, Mullumbimby in The Echo.