WW2 was still a big influence on life when I was born.   I suppose it wasn’t much more than a decade and a half earlier, but its effects were still all around.   Many of the houses near my childhood home were inhabited by single women, and many of those had been widowed by the war.   Local fishing boats often lost nets when they snagged old mines.   There were constant stories of these being shot to make them explode, resulting in complaints from the fishermen who lost nets as a result.   There were occasional problems with the souvenirs (Well, it was assumed to have been a souvenir, but I do wonder about that), that the servicemen brought home too, as below.   By the mid 70’s when I was in my teens but still at school, the troubles were of course at their rampant worst.   You would think that in such a situation, our local Police would take explosives seriously, but …….. On a beautiful summer’s day during the school holidays, I arrived ho...

  West Bank settler expansion: a year on the frontline – Channel 4 News   Have a look at this Channel 4 report about a Palestinian farmer trying to live on land he owns on the West Bank.   It is scary, horrifying, and ridiculous all at the same time.   I said before in a previous piece about this damned conflict that Israel must take the moral high ground and live by the law.   If not, then how much better than the Hamas terrorists is it? The report looks at a Palestinian family who lost their land when Israel was originally set up in 1948, but who managed to buy a plot in what is now the West Bank, to the south of Hebron.   So then the 1967 war happened and the family once more found themselves at least nominally in the stare of Israel.   That would be fine if the state actually treated all their citizens equally. The report shows how numerous incursions by Israeli settlers are taking land by force from its existing owners, and how owners like...