Sir, – Further to “Betrayal of Arabs after first World War set stage for turbulent century” (Weekend, June 21st), the impression is often given that the Sykes-Picot line was an arbitrary imperial carve-up of the Middle East, rather like the lines drawn on the map of Africa by European imperialists.
However, if you were to overlay the current map of the Middle East with the Ottoman Vilayat map – a map showing the governates or districts of its empire – you would see that there is a remarkable confluence.
The problems of the Middle East are those of competing nationalisms and ideologies and not necessarily caused by imperialism, real or imagined. – Yours, etc,
MELVYN WILCOX.
Dundanion Road,
Ballintemple,
Cork.
Sir, – Ciaran Ó Raghallaigh (June 24th) repeats the myth of the “broadcasts” that it is claimed were made by Arab leaders ordering the Palestinian population to leave their homes in 1948 “on the expectation that they could return once the fledgling Jewish state had been erased from the map”.
This myth was exposed as far back as 1961 by Dr Erskine B Childers, who examined all the radio transcripts of the British and American monitoring units of the time. He concluded that, “there was not a single order ... there is repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put”. The Palestinian people attempted to stay put but tragically failed, and roughly 800,000 of them were expelled. – Yours, etc,
JACK O’NEILL
Carrigtwohill, Co Cork.