Many thanks to you for your courage in publishing the article on Palestine.

I write as a long experienced counsellor and social worker who has visited some of the places mentioned in the article, and know some of the people visited. I have also read a great deal of the history of the difficulties, and considered much theology, too.

I have also been able to read online responses to the article, which mostly disappoint me. The suffering on both sides is dreadful. It seems people forget that it is real human beings, from both sides, with so much in common, who are working together to alleviate suffering on both sides. There is compassion shared across the religious and ethnic divides, but we hear little of it.

The online analogy with marital dispute resolution was apt. The conflict is indeed fuelled on both sides. Each side's badness is mirrored by the other. However, when there is domestic violence and the law is being broken, then there needs to be restraint imposed from outside the pair; otherwise people can and do get killed.

Only one side is being restrained here, suffering very severe sanctions, which have gone on for a very long time. Both sides are breaking international law and conventions, and gross child abuse is being perpetrated; but only one side has and is using dirty weapons of mass destruction against an almost defenceless people, and it is not the one being sanctioned or restrained.

Palestinians whom I respect as colleagues for their professional work in alleviating the suffering, are absolutely desperate as a result of the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) practices of domination and humiliation, which have touched every family. They are losing hope; it has all gone on too long, and a lovely civilised, westernised, generous, hospitable and educated people desperate for peace, as most of them are, is being strangled to death.

Roger Gordon