Yes, religion does have some impact on Israelis’ life, with marriage, divorce and other issues but to liken Israel to Saudi Araba – or Iran – with the phrase ‘one religiously based state’ is outrageous.

To detail Israel’s sins in the 2nd para such as assassinations etc. is simplistic unless you put in the context of the overall Middle East conflict in which Israel is generally reacting – unless of course you subscribe to the theory that Israel is itself the ‘original sin’ by its very rebirth.

To say that Iran’s human rights record is at least as bad as Israel’s to me seems farcical. There are things that Israel is doing in the occupied territories that it should not, but to put a regime that has hanged Bahais for being Bahais, imposes horrendous punishments for both criminal and merely non-Islamic behavior, restricts personal freedoms, massacres and tortures its own people for merely protesting against a fraudulent election as in 2009, on at least the same footing as Israel is appalling from the point of view of objectivity.

To add that Iran does not ‘hold another people under colonial occupation and grab their land for itself, as Israel does…’ is at the very best simplistic, at its worst pernicious. Go ask the Kurds, Azeris, Iranian Arabs and Iranian Baluchis – all ethnically, culturally and linguistically different from the Persian majority and all victims of long-standing Persian colonialism – how they feel and what they would have liked at various times over the past 40 years. This would, I think, give the lie to the theory of the Persians not being occupiers.

Then to say that Iran helped create Hezbollah as the spearhead of Shi’ite-led resistance to Israel’s 22-year occupation of south Lebanon is again simplistic. Just go by the words of Iran’s leaders and Hezbollah’s: their aim is not to end the occupation of south Lebanon but of all of Mandate Palestine – i.e. annihilation of Israel. Iran’s former president Ahmadinejad said it quite clearly when he said the very existence of Israel, way beyond the rights of the Palestinians, insults the dignity of Islam due to the Wakf order that any land that has once had Islamic feet walking on it must forever be Islamic.

I feel the writer could have easily made his points, including on the post-1967 occupied territories, by dealing directly with the objective facts and context, and not with what seems to me to be an inbuilt bias against Israel.