From Blitz to Gaza

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 at Islington town hall  brought to mind the similarity of the present political scene to that of the past (Painters’ portrait of ‘al-Nakba’, July 16).

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 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 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 for 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 seems to have dug itself into a deep hole.

Let us hope that with President Obama it might possibly dig itself out or at least stop digging – stop building settlements and annexing Palestinian land.

TOM GOODING
Wharton Street, WC1