Claims on lands nonsense
Ron Allison states on August 17 that he has "seldom read such nonsense" as that written by George Ashcroft on August 5. But isn't he also guilty of talking nonsense when he talks of an "occupation of Arab lands for the past 40 years", "the slaughter of 20,000 'innocent' Palestinians in refugee camps" and "illegal Israeli settlements"?
The Ottomans occupied the land of Israel up to 1917 when the British occupied it and were given the mandate to rule in 1920 by the League of Nations.
In the Balfour Declaration of 1917 they also agreed that they would create a homeland in Palestine for the Jews, which would not prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities and set apart 78 per cent of Palestine as no-go area for Jews and named it the Arab Kingdom of Jordan.
Just as in India, in 1947, the British crudely created the two-state solution but even this was unacceptable to the Arabs in Palestine.
And Islam could never come to terms with a Jewish state so ever since Israel has been in the forefront in defending its right to self-determination.
This hatred of the Jewish state brought about the occupation of the West Bank area and its annexation to Jordan in 1948 only to lose its illegal sovereignty in 1967.
What evidence is there for indigenous Arab population in Palestine?
As reported by countless 19th century visitors, Palestine was a wilderness with few occupied villages until the Jewish regathering in the late 1800s.
Derek Rous, Telford
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