MEMO to The Telegraph

Dear Editor,

Re: England manager Roy Hodgson fulfils his duty with lessons on the Holocaust

It is good that Roy Hodgson visited the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem (England manager fulfils his duty with lessons on the Holocaust, 12 June); a visit to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a Territorial Army soldier made a huge impression on me as a young man. I wonder, though, if his hosts took Hodgson and FA Chairman David Bernstein across the valley from Yad Vashem to visit the site of Deir Yassin, an Arab village whose residents were massacred by Jewish terrorist gangs the Irgun and Lehi in 1948, a month before the state of Israel declared its independence. An Israeli psychiatric hospital now stands on the site of the village which, along with 540 others, has been erased from the landscape in an act of ethnic cleansing that continues to this day with house demolitions and Palestinian Jerusalemites having their "residence permits" withdrawn. Visits to Yad Vashem are important to make sure that the Holocaust is never forgotten, but we have to ensure that "never again" applies to all people, including the indigenous Palestinians in the Holy Land.

Ibrahim Hewitt
Senior Editor,
Middle East Monitor