• RUTH Tenne’s letter does not provide the context of the destruction of “Palestinian villages” that she says have determined her attitude to Israel ever since, (We must not be blind to the injustice faced by Palestinians, August 16).

May I? It was the 1948 invasion by five Arab armies aided by the Palestinian Arabs that turned the land into a ravaged war-zone. The Jews accepted the UN proposal for partition. The Arabs, in defiance of the international community, did not.

The term Nakba (catastrophe) was coined by the Syrian Christian Arab intellectual Constantin Zurayk, an advocate of secular democratic Arab nationalism, to describe the politically humiliating military defeat of the Arabs by the nascent tiny Israeli state.

As Israeli deaths came to 1 per cent of the population the war was a disaster for them too. But the cost of losing would have been no Israel and far fewer Jews.

DR BARRY HOFFBRAND
Cholmeley Park, N6