It’s easy to lecture from the West when you have your freedoms

While people like Zoe Lawlor (Irish Examiner, Letters, October 29) are busy deflecting attention away from the failings of Palestinian society and blaming Israel, I wonder why she has nothing to say about the Palestinian state that would come about if people like her get their way.

Even if everything that she claims about Israel was true, which it is not, there is not one single area of Palestinians’ society that shines a hopeful light for the future prospects of the Palestinian people to ever hope to achieve the same quality of life as Israel has provided for its people.

We already know women in Gaza are forced to live under Sharia Law, we already know that a red line for the Palestinian leadership is that there should be not one Jewish person present in any area that forms a state, and that there should be no Jewish symbols of any kind left standing — no trace of a Jewish presence in any shape or form.

We already know that in Palestinian schools, which we pay for, children are taught disgusting depictions of Jewish people that wouldn’t be out of place in a German school in the 1930s.

Palestinian women might want to know that there is an alternative: You can have control of your own body; you can choose how many children you have; you can choose whom you marry; you can have a career; you can have an education; you can be anything you want to be and that you are equal to any man.

Desmond FitzGerald

Canary Wharf

London