One-sided view of Israeli conflict

It is good to see that John McCarthy, who survived five years of brutal captivity in Lebanon at the hands of Islamic terrorists, has not been deterred from returning to the Middle East to expand his knowledge and understanding of that troubled region.

However, in the feature on his book ‘You Can’t Hide the Sun’ by Jo Kerrigan yesterday, Mr McCarthy seems to take a one-sided approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a viewpoint accentuated by some appalling commentary by Ms. Kerrigan.

There is a chronic lack of historical context. The use of the term ‘Palestinian’ is ahistoric. Before 1948, all of what is now Israel, Gaza and the West Bank was called ‘Palestine’; there was never a historical Palestinian nation, it was merely a geographical term for an area that included Jews, Muslims and Christians alike.