• BARRY Hoffbrand’s letter is a distortion of history, (Look at the context of the conflict in 1948, August 23).

The UN partition plan of 1947 proposed to divide historical Palestine into two zones, giving 56 per cent of the land to the Jews and 43 per cent to the Palestinians although the Palestinian population outnumbered the Jewish population by roughly two-thirds to one-third (1.1 million Palestinians compared with 630,000 Jews).

Virtually all the cultivated land was held by the Palestinian population, with a mere 5.8 per cent in Jewish ownership. The Jewish state was also allocated sole access to the Sea of Galilee and the Red Sea, both crucial for access to water supply.

Unsurprisingly the Palestinians rejected these proposals. No people could have accepted such an unfair division of a land which they had inhabited for around 1,500 years.

The Nakba (catastrophe) was the ethnic cleansing of two-thirds of the Palestinian population by Zionist militia. Between December 1947 and January 1949 around 700,000 Palestinians were expelled at gunpoint, some 350 villages destroyed and several massacres perpetrated such as at Deir Yassin and Tantura.

The first and biggest wave of refugees were expelled before the official outbreak of hostilities on May 15. The majority ended up on the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip and in neighbouring Arab countries.

The War of Independence that lasted from May 1948 until January 1949 has been consistently portrayed as an Israeli David pitted against an Arab Goliath. At first the Jewish fighters did have inferior military hardware, but illicit arms supplies from Czechoslovakia tipped the scales in their favour.

By mid-May 1948 the total number of Arab troops, regular and irregular, was under 25,000, whereas the Israel Defence Forces mobilised 35,000. By December the latter’s numbers reached a peak of 96,440.

At each stage of the war the IDF outnumbered the Arab forces pitted against it, by the end of the war by nearly two to one. In this, as in most wars, the stronger side ultimately won.

One cannot solve the problems of one people at the expense of another. There can be no peace unless Israel recognises the right of return of the Palestinian refugees, as demanded by international law.

SABBY SAGALL
Chair, Camden Palestine Solidarity Campaign