There is a depressing contrast between those who seek to promote peace by building bridges (Dancing in Jaffa, Review, 13 February) and those who want to continue hate by tearing them down (Over 100 artists announce a cultural boycott of Israel, Letters, 14 February). But at least I now have a good reason not to sit through another Mike Leigh film.

Paul Wernick

Hertford

• I search in vain for a protest organised by the signatories against the ruthless totalitarian, apartheid and antisemitic theocracies of Iran, Saudi Arabia and other despotic nations. Gaza is, in respect, an aircraft carrier for Iranian ambition, and it is a mercy that Israel is adept in its defence against the Iranian Quds force, Islamic Jihad, and numerous other Islamist fascist death squads currently in occupation of Gaza.

Artists everywhere, not just in Israel or Paris, are under threat of attack from nihilist, absolutist fundamentalist onslaught. It is a great disappointment that these artists have withdrawn their principled support at such a time.

Keith Steiner

Cornhill, Aberdeenshire

• As a citizen of Ashkelon who was nearly killed in the recent conflict with Gaza when part of a missile missed my car by a few metres, I have a message for those artists with a selective communal conscience. I do not want you to visit my city and insult 120,000 people who were under daily attack in violation of international law. There are no military targets in Ashkelon but lots of Jews.

After you make a stand against the extrajudicial killing of people in Gaza, and after you make a stand on the whipping of a blogger in Saudi Arabia, and you apologise to the citizens of Ashkelon, I will consider extending you hospitality.

I will continue my daily tasks, including treating Gazans who are brought to the medical centre I work in for advanced medical treatment. Odd, isn’t it, that they visit but you won’t? Even odder that I will welcome them and not you.

Stephen Malnick

Ashkelon, Israel

• Arab Israeli artists, unlike in states such as China, Iran, Syria and Russia, are free of state persecution and able to create whatever works they choose, political or not. Could these British artists possibly be the target of sophisticated anti-Israel propaganda shrouding its antisemitic message under the cloak of liberal rhetoric?

Judy Samuel

London

• I have been exercising my own feeble boycott of all things Israeli for many years now. It was originally spurred on by the imprisonment of Mordechai Vanunu for 18 years, which included 11 years in solitary confinement, for leaking details of Israel’s nuclear programme in 1986, but my resolve has been kept alive by the treatment of the inhabitants in Gaza.

Michael Howes

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