North-south borders between Israel, Palestine and Jordan cut across Palestinian clans. Israel's original plan was a commonwealth with open borders to reunite families, raise living standards in Palestine and Jordan and empty refugee camps. Jordan rejected this.
The wall and checkpoints are necessary evils. Land is scarce and Israeli authorities are overbearing.
However, Israeli Muslims vote and are generally content, Bedouin prefer Israeli rule over rule by Egypt, Fatah or Hamas, Israeli factories in the West Bank employ Palestinians at the same pay as Israelis, and Palestinians (and Gaza people) have generous free access to Israeli hospitals.
Fake news, boycotts, sanctions, and interference from UN, US, EU, Iran and NZ will not bring peace.
ALAN DAVIDSON
Gonville
Faith bias
How does Russ Hay's agnosticism have any effect on my faith (letters, January 21)? How does my use of the term "faith" in any way constitute an "abrogation", much less a determination, of what faith is?
Since the accusation that my God has "a penchant for brutal punishments, ethnic cleansing and genocide" is evidence of atheistic antipathy, a wilful misreading of scripture, side-stepping the accusation and addressing the bias was pertinent to the original point; atheism is a faith position and the constant antipathy toward God in discussions about him is evidence of bias.
Atheism ain't (and Russ ain't) neutral and empiricism is but its mask. My faith is not germane to that point, and the taunts of Russ I take to be mere evasions.
I never sought to justify my faith at all, either by logic or reason; that is the constant refrain, though, of the God denier. What I did say is that there is more logic in creation by a supreme being who is not bound up in or subject to matter than there is in the "unscientific" fantasy that stuff made itself out of nothing.
That too suggests an antipathy toward God, a resolve to commit to the unreasonable rather than take God at his word.
JOHN HAAKMA
Whanganui
Belief systems
I reply to Paul Evans (letters, January 17), who writes of God as the energy behind the creation of the universe.
Energy is something possessed by something or someone else. So I suggest we can think of God as the possessor of all the energy behind all of nature. Naturally we must live in tune with nature or we quickly come to grief.
Consider the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mt Sinai about 1300BC. They are a pretty good guide for life.
And Jesus, who was Jewish, expounded them, offering people wracked by fear, guilt, hostility and inferiority another FGHI -- forgiveness, guidance, hope and inspiration.
TOM PITTAMS
Whanganui
