Ha’aretz carries an interview with Ruth Dayan, ex-wife of the Israeli general and politician Moshe Dayan. (The headline inaccurately refers to her as his widow; she in fact divorced him in 1971 over his womanising, long before his death in 1981.)

It has always seemed to me that while there are, inevitably, (at least) two sides to every conflict, in the case of Israel-Palestine, Israel bears the far greater responsibility for the conflict, because it is by far the most powerful of the two parties.

Dayan says:

We don’t know how to make peace. We go from war to war and this will never end. Whose fault is it? Ours, mainly. Are we, with all our power, incapable of taking a step?

It’s perhaps summed up by this artwork from Richard Hamilton, published today in the Guardian. (“Maps of Palestine is marked”, on the left, “1947 UN Partition” and on the right, “2010 Occupation”.)

Unnoticed by much of the world, the downright evil blockade on Gaza continues, as the New York Times reported yesterday.

The senior United Nations official for humanitarian relief took a tour of Gaza on Tuesday, a year after Israel’s war here, and declared keen concern for what he called the collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians due to the blockade enforced by Israel and Egypt. “What we are seeing here for the people of Gaza is an existence, not a life,” the official, John Holmes, the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, told reporters. He spoke about “the continuing and growing pernicious and negative consequences of this blockade,” saying it was “not just the absence of reconstruction and development” after the war, “but also a situation of development going backwards.”