You cannot compare the Paris attackers to the Palestinian fighters

It was only a matter of time before the tragic killings in Paris would be exploited and Kevin McCarthy (Letters, November 18) has done that. 

Putting aside the immorality of using the deaths of those innocents in an attempt to whitewash the behaviour of Israel, there are two falsehoods in his letter that need to be addressed.

Firstly, despite numerous letters in the Irish Examiner in recent months providing proof and referencing the dozens of apartheid laws in Israel, Mr McCarthy persists in describing Israel as a “democratic state”. As stated previously, it is an ethnocracy, or as Israeli geography Professor Oren Yiftachel describes it, a “settler

ethnocracy”. Secondly, Mr McCarthy attempts to repackage this apartheid as being a necessary component of Israel’s “defensive strategy”. This discrimination began to be enshrined in law when the state was formed in 1948 and therefore pre-dates ISIS or Islamic fundamentalism. Laws such as those that exclude Israel’s own non- Jewish “citizens” from buying land or a home on roughly 93% of its territory have nothing to do with a “defensive strategy”. The Palestinian people struggle is not Islamic terrorism. Mr McCarthy should be reminded of Israeli journalist Amira Hass’ words: ‘Young Palestinians do not go out to murder Jews because they are Jews but because we are their occupiers, their torturers, their jailers, the thieves of their land and water, their exilers, the demolishers of their homes, the blockers of their horizon’.

Jack O’Neill

Cul Aird

Carrigtwohill

Co Cork