Letter from Israel

Dear Comrades,

First I want to thank you for putting up my article. What you say in the forward about bringing the atomised individuals like myself together and transforming them into a genuine socialist opposition within Israel, is my dream, but alas we are far and few between.

What I have just read in the article about The Passion of the Christ (Part One) has made me very angry. I refer to Mel Gibson's father being a Holocaust denier. My grandparents and two of my uncles and an aunt died in the Holocaust. My mother and the two remaining uncles survived, my mum and one uncle because they left for England about 1935, and my other uncle managed to escape the Nazis. He is now the only one left and lives here in the same town as I do.

He is angry with me because I've never asked him the exact circumstances of the death of the members of our family. I've never really wanted to know. I know how he escaped with a friend, wandered through a forest with the snow up to his waist, was hidden by gentiles who would have been killed if the Nazis had found them out. He joined the Red Army and fought through up to Berlin. One of my uncles who was killed (my mum said he was the cleverest, out of a very clever family) was a communist. She had a photo of him he was my hero when I was a kid. You say the prospects are Socialism or Barbarism. I like that.

Recently there was a discussion on TV here about the alliance of the ultra right settlers here and the evangelist Christians in the US. The fool who was interviewed said that basically he and the evangelists had the same aim, they were waiting for the messiah!! Gibson's film should make clear what I have suspected for a long time. The only reason America supports Israel, is because the ultra-right in the US, want it (Israel) for themselves.

Also I must say how much I have learned from your site, regarding so many things. But the last thing I expected to learn was the truth about the gospels. As they were written a relatively short time after the event was supposed to have taken place I regarded them as more or less a good historical record of what happened, leaving out the stuff about the miracles of course. Such a shame that compared to how many people get there information from the usual sources, such as radio, TV and reactionary rags like the British daily, The Sun, you reach such a small and select band of people.

All the best,

Mordachai Peargut.