Blindness in Gaza -- Peter Leyland
Blindness in Gaza* I have been taking The Observer, an English Sunday newspaper, for as long as I can remember, and my story arises from this. When I first began teaching History in Guildford in November 1973 I was asked by my 12-13 year old pupils to explain to them about the Yom Kippur War. This had just broken out when the Egyptians and Syrians had invaded Israel in an attempt to recapture The Golan Heights which they had lost in the 6 Day War of 1967 against the same enemy. I was a recent graduate in English Literature rather than a historian, but to help explain the conflict I spread pages of The Observer, then a broadsheet paper, across the blackboard. I did my best to tell them what I knew. The Observer was a newspaper which did then and still does favour the liberal arts. I was trusting it then to give both me and my pupils a fair and unbiased view of what was happening in the Middle East. Fifty years later this November in The Observer I read Kenan Malik’s C...