Attack on Gaza brought back memories of Guernica bombing

Published: 10 September, 2010

• AS an octogenarian who was an interested observer of the politics of the 1930s and 1940s, the recent exhibition and your review of paintings by Gaza artists (Review, July 16) brought to mind the similarity of the present political scene to that of the past.

The attack on Gaza so vividly recalled by these pictures reminded me of my own childhood experiences during the London Blitz and also of our revulsion at the “terror bombing” of the small Spanish town of Guernica in 1937 commemorated by the famous painting of Pablo Picasso.

The Gaza painting of Child Entrapped, which I bought, seemed to me to exemplify the emotional impact on children of mass bombing and destruction and it would clearly have an even greater effect on the children of Gaza who are also confined in a Nazi-ghetto-like situation.

The children of the Palestinian West Bank are also being subjected to harsh treatment by the occupying army.

Some 700 annually are prosecuted in military courts, usually for throwing stones, with threats, beatings and imprisonment – as reported by the Defence of the Children International Palestine.

It seems that the present expansionist policy of Israel could well be leading to the creation of a generation of radicalised Palestinians in Gaza and potential suicide bombers in the West Bank.

Israel certainly seems to have dug itself into a deep hole.

Let us hope that with President Barack Obama it might possibly dig itself out or at least stop digging, that is, stop building more settlement and annexing Palestinian land.

TOM GOODING
Wharton Street, WC1