Duarte on shaky ground over Israel

MUCH has been written in response to Jessie Duarte's spurious statement on behalf of the ANC, aimed at Israel's acts of self- defence against Hamas.

I'll therefore confine my focus to some of the "facts" offered by Duarte. She refers to Gaza as being the most densely populated area on the planet.

This oft-stated "fact" is no more than a disingenuous myth, proven as such by amongst other sources the UN Statistics Division Demographic Year Book 2008, which lists the Gaza Strip as having a population of 4603/km², making it almost insignificant against that in more than 20 other cities and areas, including Athens (20235/km²) or even Tel Aviv with 7524/km². Against Manila (42857/km²), Gaza is a veritable Garden of Eden.

Duarte's reference to Israel turning the so-called "occupied territories" of Palestine (they are "disputed territories") into "permanent death camps", displays her total ignorance of what constitutes an actual death camp, the most infamous being Auschwitz-Birkenhau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec and Majdanek.

By neither definition or intent, they were not places where the so-called "oppressors" hauled in more than 500 truckloads of vital provisions per month, including foodstuffs and medical supplies, plus more than one million litres of fuel in order to ensure "prisoner"-survival. This is what Israel brings into Gaza. That is an indisputable fact.

All this proves that, as with other slanderous accusations, eg that Israel is an "apartheid state", the repeated repetition of a lie will ensure it becoming the "truth" in the mind of a non-discerning public.

Duarte's inability to inject anything original into the debate has her resorting to well-worn cliches such as: "Gaza, the world's largest open-air prison with 1.5 million Palestinians caged in and cut off from the rest of the world". While Gaza can hardly be regarded as a "prison", its strategic isolation – imposed also by Egypt – stems directly from its inability to behave itself in a civilised manner when handed the opportunity to do so.

Had Gaza not opted to attack Israel with rockets as soon as the latter withdrew from the territory in 2005, and had it not chosen a terrorist government (Hamas) committed to the annihilation of the Jewish state, this war would not have occurred.

On Duarte's snide question, whether "lest we forget" has lost its meaning in reflection of Nazi atrocities directed at Jews, I assure her that "lest we forget" is the very reason that Israel takes measures to protect itself, in the secure knowledge that no one else will.

Victor Gordon, Brooklyn