THE inevitable failure of the latest Israeli-Palestinian peace talks was reported as follows in the Haaretz newspaper of April 29: “In the nine months when Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were officially under way, the Netanyahu government advanced the construction of at least 13,850 new housing units in the West Bank.”

How were the Palestinians to negotiate in the face of such outrageous and routine land grabs?

As they sit humiliating themselves and wasting their time talking to an apartheid regime committed to expansion, they suffer their infants to be arrested for throwing pebbles, their homes demolished, their water sources diverted or poisoned and their olive trees uprooted and burned.

A ‘just peace’ is not an option for the Israeli government; even the US and its quisling collaborators within our own government would have to accept that no treaty would be possible without half a million settlers withdrawing from Palestinian land; the dismantling of the apartheid wall; the surrender of thousands of square miles of stolen land and withdrawal from East Jerusalem.

That will never happen as long as the US supplies them with a $3.4 billion permanent war budget.

Roger Westmoreland, The Oval, Pocklington.