We had a family seder last night, as we do each Passover, and we recited the hope of 'next year in Jerusalem' and the children asked the 'four questions' and we drank the wine and we enumerated the plagues and we dipped the parsley in the salt water and ate the matzo with bitter herbs and thanked God for our 'deliverance' or rather for the deliverance of our ancestors from Egypt - and then we 'partook of the repast', a huge 5 course meal, and we sang the songs of Pesach and we basked in the knowledge that we were continuing a tradition that goes back many centuries - and we felt good.

That is if we forgot to remember our neighbours in Gaza living under the iron fist of the IDF - although living is not the word that adequately describes their existence and the brutality and humiliation they suffer day after day from an illegal occupying force that the world is paid by America to ignore - lest their aid be cut or cancelled. As Egypt sells its soul for the mighty dollar - the rest of the world is little different. We ignore the killings and the beatings, the razing of homes and the diverting of essential water to fill Israeli swimming pools. 'Next year in Jerusalem' is an empty phrase. Who would want to live in the capital of a brutal occupier. Not me, nor my family, nor anyone I know. Passover is about deliverance from oppression and that is my hope this Pesach for the Palestinian people.