Please write to your MPs to ask them to urge her Majesty’s Government to help bring an urgent settlement in the Holy Land to achieve both peace and justice. Here is a letter you could adapt.
Dear [Name of your MP]
Once again the Holy Land is in flames. Once again the United Nations is prevented from offering anything but platitudes by the United States. Meanwhile the British government confines itself to repeating worn-out mantras about the need for Israelis and Palestinians to agree a two-state solution.
Israel-Palestine is now effectively a single political entity with a population of two approximately equal halves – one consisting of Israeli Jews and the other of Muslim and Christian Arabs. But the two halves are far from equal in their power and control over their own destinies, and in the numbers being killed and wounded in the fighting. Israel has an advanced economy and an impressive military capability, with access to support and resource from the US. The other half – Palestinians – are weak and divided by cease-fire lines and discrimination, with those in the Occupied Territories variously facing restriction, blockade and dispossession, the latest being the attempt by Israel to install Jewish settlers in some Palestinian properties in East Jerusalem, claiming their right to return to properties their families had owned before 1949, without, of course, recognising any rights of Palestinians to return to Jewish-occupied properties their families had owned pre-1949.
The UK carries considerable responsibility for the terrible situation, through its government’s ambiguous Balfour Declaration of 1917, which raised unrealistic hopes for a Jewish homeland without addressing the rights and needs of those who already lived there. Please urge Her Majesty’s Government to live up to its vision of ’Global Britain’ and declare its support for an urgent and realistic settlement in the Holy Land to achieve both peace and justice. It is urgent, once and for all, both to bring an end to periodic headline-grabbing ‘wars’ and also to extend to all the communities in Israel-Palestine the benefits of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights.
Yours sincerely
[Your name and full postal address]
Like us on Facebook