It is sad that M R Startup (Letters, August 15) should regard the 3,000-year Jewish aspiration of return to their homeland in Palestine with such venom.

The so-called Zionist terrorist organisations were battling to save the Holocaust remnants. British policy was to avoid upsetting the Arabs, even at the expense of sending shiploads of Jewish survivors back to their deaths in Europe or forcing them away to be sunk.

In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the UK agreed to a Jewish homeland in Palestine but reneged on it by restricting Jewish immigration when it was most desperately needed.

Despite the risks, 64 ships delivered more than 70,000 Jews to the beaches. Another 50,000 were stopped and taken to British detention camps on Cyprus.

Realising the Jews had nowhere else to go, the British finally yielded.

If Mr Startup wished to list atrocities, he might have mentioned the many Jews murdered by the British on the gallows.

There is no evidence of a vast dispossession of the Palestinians. Prior to 1948, Palestine was largely deserted, as confirmed by the Palestine Royal Commission in its account of the coastal plain in 1913.

In 1948, nearly 900,000 Jews lived in Arab countries and today 99 per cent of these communities no longer exist.

Arab governments forced them to leave, confiscated their property and stripped them of citizenship in the lands where they had lived for thousands of years.

The Israelis have tried desperately to live in harmony with the Palestinians. Peace will only come when the Arabs accept this tiny strip of land is the Jewish State and cease trying to destroy it.

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