A fund should be set up by one or other of our Jewish organisations to cover the legal costs of suing the BBC for its slanderous policy.
Further, by our not challenging this disgraceful state of affairs, I suggest we are giving weight to the BBC’s lies.
David Lee
Kingston upon Thames
I am an avid Zionist and supporter of Israel but I feel that I must speak out against the violent attacks being carried out by settlers in the West Bank.
Jews living in Tsarist Russia frequently suffered from pogroms committed by Cossacks and others either with the express or implied authority of the government.
At best, the police and army looked the other way; at worst, they joined in.
We now have regular incidents of attacks on Arab towns and villages by settlers, the most recent being the attack on Al-Yamun on June 25 when dozens of settlers rampaged through the town setting fire to cars and property.
The settlers are being encouraged by the inflammatory statements made by extremist members of the government, secure in the knowledge that neither the police nor the army will step in to stop them.
Moreover, if the villagers try to resist, they are then attacked by the army.
These pogroms are a stain on Israel and the Jewish people.
John Josephs
Birmingham
What is clear from the recent campaigns in Gaza and Iran is that the myth is punctured of the guerrillas or rebels who inevitably win just by surviving and rocking the economic boat.
War is a political exercise for political aims and if the politics allow the use of the appropriate military moves, proxies, hybrids and guerrillas can be thrashed, either by isolation or siege, or hunted down.
That still leaves making peace and restoring relations.
This is where the Arabs and ayatollahs forget that more than half of Israeli Jews are from Middle Eastern countries and that they are not returning to for apartheid dhimmi status and jizya “protection”.
It also means that the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank need an autonomy that both sides respect to avoid violence. To quote Bismarck: “Diplomacy is the search for the second best.”
In the long run the revival of antisemitism by the Palestine lobby will move a lot of Jews to aliyah.
That in itself might so judaise the entire “river to the sea” that most local Arabs seek their fortune in Arab countries building post-petroleum economies.
Frank Adam
Manchester
I was delighted to see Alun David’s thoughtful review of The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation by Charlotte Beradt (trans. Damion Searls), (27 June). David eloquently captures how Beradt’s collection of more than 300 dream fragments – gathered clandestinely under Nazi rule –reveals the psychological processing of totalitarian oppression, rather than personal trauma alone.
I write to add a historical footnote: in the 1980s, Dr Gordon Lawrence, then a distinguished social scientist at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, encountered Beradt’s work and recognised it as empirical validation of his conviction: individual dreams reflect the power dynamics in society.
Inspired, he developed and formalised “social dreaming” as both a method and instrumental tool in social inquiry.
Today, it would be hard to find a Tavistock Institute course, programme, conference – or even a single lecture – that does not begin with a social dreaming matrix. Participants share their night dreams and free‑associate to them, drawing links between private imagery and wider social meaning.
Unlike psychoanalytic dream work, which asks, “What does the dream mean to you, the dreamer?”, social dreaming poses the question: “What does the dream mean to us, participants in this social dreaming matrix?”
This collective reframing shifts the interpretive focus from individual psychology to the shared social context – a powerful distinction.
Any organisation or group wishing to integrate social dreaming into their work is warmly encouraged to contact the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.
Dr Mannie Sher
Trustee, Principal Researcher & Consultant, Social Dreaming Host,
London EC1V 3RS
