IN response to Elaine Gregory’s letter (“Courier”, July 18) I just want to place the present conflict in context.

One simply cannot cherry pick facts that suit one’s argument and ignore the rest.

On the scales of humanity, every life lost in a violent way is tragic, whether in Israel or Ipswich, from Palestine to Paris. 

Her letter starts in 1948 … when the state of Israel had been just set up under UN auspices.

She chooses not to also mention that in that year alone 900,000 Jews were expelled from their homes in Iraq, Syria and other Middle Eastern countries with no expectation or hope of ever being able to return.

Around that time as the states of India and Pakistan were being created, a million (maybe more) people were butchered and 14 million Muslims and Hindus displaced.

None of these took their house keys with them. Armenians, Bosnians, Serbs they all know what it’s like.

Each paragraph in her letter tells part of a story but not the whole.

In her final section she writes: “No other entity would be allowed to kill on this scale…” Really?

Look at history, even in the last decade.

As China severely represses, imprisons, brainwashes and slaughters minority groups such as Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Mongols and others on a huge scale, are there weeks of protests and marches in our cities?

When Myanmar uses violence, discrimination and persecution of the Rohingya people, causing nearly 800,000 to flee the country, do university students boycott lectures and set up camps in the grounds?

There are so many other massacres and atrocities going on in other continents which are barely even reported. But really who cares - until it happens in Israel and Palestine.

It is baffling the way some folk choose to elevate one people group over another, endorse one cause, completely ignore another and completely vilify a third group of people.

Jean Hope

Sandford