What appears at first sight to be an attempt at an evenhanded approach to the Palestine issue becomes less so on a closer reading. And on a overview the writer appears somewhat biased towards the Israeli viewpoint.

The opening paragraph mentions a “struggle to coexist” between Palestinians and Israeli Jewish “settlers.” But there is no such struggle to coexist on the part of the Israelis. Their aim is to drive Palestinians out of their ancestral homeland.

And as regards the stories of “King David,” “Judah,” and of mass expulsion by the Romans of Palestine’s Jews, there is no serious disagreement today amongst the scientific archaeological community that these stories are myth. As myth, they served a purpose for the times, but, as Karen Armstrong writes, to utilise them as justification for modern day colonisation is misappropriation.

The Hebron unrest actually began with increasingly provocative Jewish religious services at the revered Western Wall, holy to all three Abrahamic religions, and the rumour of Arabs murdered by Jews, while never proven false, was given fuel by the fact that at least one European Jew actually had earlier murdered an Arab.

And a problem, for sure, was that isolated, possibly not even politically motivated, criminal acts inflamed existing tensions.

Because these were difficult times for the indigenous population of Palestine, the Arab Palestinians, who understood that Britain had acquired the League of Nations mandate over Palestine specifically to promote a takeover by Europe’s Jews escaping centuries of atrocities, culminating in the horror of the Holocaust.

Skipping to the final paragraph, I fail to understand why the desire of Palestinians to simply live in the remnants of historic Palestine, internationally recognised as the basis of a future Palestinian state, is labelled alternatively as ideology or extremism, or both.

Palestinians are the descendants of the original Asiatic inhabitants of the land known for at least the last two thousand years as Palestine, with their bloodlines enhanced by the various travellers and conquerors who came their way, including the Hebrews of Mesopotamia, to the Phoenicians, to the Romans, to the Arabs, to the Turks of the Ottoman Empire.

It is true there are competing narratives of claimants to ownership of Palestine: one grounded in myth, but in fact the last gasp of European imperialism; the other grounded in scientifically recognised archaeological fact.

The solution must involve recognising the present, realistic, imperative of coexistence, and I submit that only one side prevents a settlement providing for this.

That side is not the Palestinians.

I am happy to enlarge on that view if invited to do so.

Hebron is a sad, lost city hidden deep within the West Bank – despite it being only 40km away from the metropolitan, cosmopolitan and similarly contentious Jerusalem. Outside of Gaza, it’s arguably the site where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fel…