Ghettoisation of Palestinians is an indictment of all of humanity

I’ve just finished reading Dervla Murphy’s Between River and Seal: Encounters in Israel and Palestine. The contrast between Murphy’s narrative and Derek O’Flynn’s (from the Israeli embassy) letter last week is stark.

No one reading O’Flynn’s would believe that between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea there are equal numbers of Palestinians [including roughly one million, ‘second-class’ Palestinian-Israeli citizens] and Jewish-Israelis.

The vast majority of the Palestinians are indigenous, having being born between the river and the sea, but the vast majority of the Jewish-Israelis are immigrants and the majority of those are non-observant. The Jewish-Israeli population comprises Ashkenazi (European), Sephardi (Turkey and the Balkans), Mizrahi (Syria, Egypt and Iraq etc), one million Russians, and a half a million illegal ‘settlers’ in the OPT (significant numbers of whom are Americans).