DAVID Pratt’s report on Benjamin Netanyahu’s pre-election racist rant, promoting a Jewish-only state, reminded me rather ironically of a Channel Four programme in the “Disappearing Worlds” series (Israeli democracy undermined by its own prime minister is a warning to all, March 15).
The reporter, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, travelled to Israel to seek out the ever-diminishing number of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who had been children during the Second World War.
What he found, in Netanyahu’s own back yard, was a chilling testimony to Israeli hypocrisy.
The elderly people Guru-Murthy located were living in extremely impoverished circumstances, inhabiting ghetto-style dwellings which they could not afford to heat. They were filmed at market stalls towards closing time, picking up discarded fruit and vegetables from the street. They were in poor health, seemingly shunned by their fellow citizens, their only company and support coming from each other.
When asked by the reporter why these elderly survivors had been abandoned, a young Israeli replied bluntly that people were ashamed of them as they had been cowards.
After the war Germany had agreed to fund a compensation scheme for the dispossessed people, all of European heritage, but a combination of indifference on the part of the Israeli authorities and a degree of bureaucratic bungling had resulted in due payments being either unknown of or unclaimed.
It would seem that, even within the Jewish community itself, discrimination and exclusion are not unknown.
I would therefore urge the British Labour Party MSPS who have become very exercised of late about anti-Semitism in their own fractured body politic to consider the plight of these remaining Jewish elders in Israel. They are the contemporaries of many of these same politicians’ own forebearers whose live were brutally cut short. Or would they prefer to honour them only in death?
Joan S Laverie
Edinburgh
I WAS happily reading the article “Brexit in the eyes of the world” in the Sunday National (March 17) until I reached the final country in the article: Holland.
Please get it right – calling the country Holland is exactly like referring to somewhere in Scotland and calling the country England.
Holland, comprising the provinces of North Holland and South Holland, is only one part of a country. The whole country, which comprises several more provinces, is called The Netherlands.
It is a common mistake, but one I would have thought the Sunday National would not perpetuate. Please get it right in future.
Also, referring back to the title of the article which refers to “the world”, this does not reflect the fact that only European countries are included. I would have liked to read views from other countries of the world too.
Keith Scammell
Inverness
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