Gordon Brown urging Israel to stop settlement building (International, 16 December) is like asking an alcoholic to stop drinking. Israel’s addiction to building settlements on expropriated land, with the aim of Palestinian transfer, is ingrained in Zionist ideology and Israel’s DNA. The more peace conferences are held, the more the illegal building frenzy goes on — through Madrid, Oslo, the road map and lately Annapolis.

Since last year alone, over 8,000 homes have been or are being built over the West Bank and in the heart of annexed East Jerusalem, the intended capital of a Palestinian state, which is being intensively "Judaised". Extremist religious settlers are literally taking over Palestinian homes with impunity, in Silwan, Sheik Jarrah and Hebron, and militant religious seminaries are now moving into the heart of Arab neighbourhoods in the Israeli mixed cities of Jaffa, Acre, Lud and Ramle. Bedouin "unrecognised villages" in the Negev are being bulldozed to make way for Jewish settlements and ranches funded by the Jewish National Fund, whose UK charity is patronised by the UK prime minister.

Instead of being sanctioned to stop this abuse of international law and the Geneva convention, Israel is being rewarded by the UK, the EU and the US with closer economic, academic, trade and defence links and privileges. Drunk with so much support, how is Israel ever going to be made to live up to its claims to be a democratic state? All we hear is a hollow laugh coming from behind the apartheid wall and the seething and starving prison camps for Palestinians under siege in Gaza and the West Bank.

Abe Hayeem
 
Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine

This letter was published in The Guardian, 17 December 2008.

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