Madam, - It seems a pity to disturb the cosy view of the Middle East held by Dermot and Eleanor Kelly (November 21st) with the intrusion of brute facts.
The real "elephant in the sitting-room" is not the Palestinian "problem" - a very small baby jumbo indeed - but the jihad currently being waged by radical Islamism both in the West and across the entire Muslim world, of which the annihilation of tiny Israel is one among many objectives.
Islam's "alienation from the West" long predates the establishment of Israel (Tours 732 AD, Lepanto 1571 and Vienna 1683 come to mind). The original two-state solution for Palestine was rejected by all the surrounding Arab polities.
On the day of Israel's declaration of independence, May 14th, 1948, a holy war of extermination was declared against it by the Arab League and the Mufti of Jerusalem, while its territory - then even smaller than it has been since 1967 - was invaded by five Arab armies, an event which precipitated the flight, for a complex of reasons, of the Palestinian refugees.
When the Kellys call for Bush and Blair to press for "a just process and an equitable outcome" to undo the "injustice" perpetrated by their predecessors, can they have forgotten the efforts of President Bush's immediate predecessor in the 1990s? The return for Mr Clinton's sponsorship and Israel's embrace of the Oslo agreement was the launch of a bloody campaign of suicide bombings within Israel in the mid-1990s.
And when agreement on a two-state solution seemed likely at Camp David and Taba in 2000, Yasser Arafat preferred at the last minute to reject the offer of 95 per cent of the West Bank, all of Gaza and $30 billion in compensation for the 1948 refugees, and instead launched the Al-Aqsa intifada.
What result can the Kellys expect to flow from further concessions by Israel in the light of what has happened since the withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005? Instead of turning that territory into the nucleus of a peaceful independent state, the Palestinian Authority has allowed it to become a terrorist base from which rocket attacks have rained down almost daily on Israeli cities across the border.
The notion that an "equitable outcome", should such ever be found, would conciliate the jihadists is a vain one. The only action capable of that would entail Israel's Jewish population heading for the Mediterranean sea. - Yours, etc,
DERMOT MELEADY,
Dublin 3.