By Robert Fisk
"....I recalled this searing passage this week when I received a letter from a reader, taking me to task for my "constant downplaying of the suffering of the Palestinians on the grounds that their deaths and suffering are minimal when compared with that of the Second World War". Now, I should say at once that this is a bit unfair......
Yet our reader does have a point. The Second World War, she says, "does put it in a category apart ... but surely if one is caught up in any war and sees one's loved ones killed or maimed, one's home destroyed ... then that must be the greatest cataclysm in one's life. The fact that a hundred others, a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million are suffering likewise is immaterial to the individual's suffering. The Second World War lasted six years. The Palestinian suffering has lasted over sixty..."
But our reader has another point. "After all," she says, "in the Second World War, after the entry of the US and USSR on our side, people could feel pretty positive about the outcome. But where is such hope for the Palestinians? And now to cap the horror the BBC is refusing to even show an appeal to help Gaza..."......
I think, however, there is yet one more point. The rules of war – the Geneva Conventions and all the other post-Second World War laws – were meant to prevent another Holocaust. They were specifically designed to ensure that no one should ever again face the destruction of Mrs Greenman and her child. They were surely not made only for one race of people. And it is these rules which Israel so disgracefully flouted in Gaza. It's a bit like the refrain from Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara and a whole host of other apparatchiks when the torture at Abu Ghraib was revealed. Well, yes, they told us, it was bad – but not as bad as Saddam Hussein's regime......"
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