Madam, - Dr Hikmat Ajjuri tells us that the Palestinian leadership rejected the UN partition resolution of November 1947 "because the deal it offered was completely one-sided", then claims that the Israeli Plan Dalet of March 1948 aimed to "seize strategic areas allotted to the proposed Arab state before that state could be established" (Opinion, May 15th). These statements are difficult to reconcile.
In the spring of 1948 the "proposed Arab state" was a dead issue, and the concern of Zionist fighters was the seizure, and clearance, of the strategic areas that were being used by three Arab forces, local and foreign, to strangle the yet-unborn Jewish state.
The figure of 80,000 given by Dr Ajjuri for the Israeli army is a laughably gross exaggeration. The "many" who, he claims, were well trained numbered fewer than 10,000; the 21,000 Haganah reserves were only partially trained. All were poorly armed and equipped: a US arms embargo was in place, and the first artillery pieces arrived only in late May 1948, from Czechoslovakia.
An illustrative example is the heavy casualties sustained by recently arrived, inadequately-trained Holocaust survivors who took part in the fierce and abortive struggle in April 1948 to capture the Latrun fortress from the British-officered and British-equipped Arab Legion. This fortress, handed to the Arabs by the departing British, dominated the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road, one of a chain of such strategic points that made the supply of Jerusalem's 85,000 Jews by road impossible.
It is disingenuous of Dr Ajjuri to claim that the Arabs rejected the UN partition plan because it gave 56.47 per cent of Palestine to the Jewish state (60 per cent of that, incidentally, being desert). Rather, the rejection was in line with the Arab response to previous more modest proposals.
The 1937 Peel Commission proposed to give Jews a state roughly equal in size to Co Cork. Response: Zionist acceptance, Arab rejection and revolt. In summer 1947 the Grand Mufti boycotted the hearings of the UN Special Committee on Palestine, while the Arab League warned the committee that any partition would lead to bloodshed.
In the world view of Dr Ajjuri and many Palestinians, there should be no consequences for launching attacks that failed to achieve their objectives. All territories won by Israel in self-defence in wars not of its choosing should be handed back so that the attackers can try again, the tape of history being replayed as many times as it takes to get the desired result.
If the Arab-Israeli conflict were merely about land, it could have been solved long ago by the payment of appropriate compensation. Sadly, the tragic position of the Palestinians results from their being chained to a religious ideology that cannot conceive of a Jewish presence in the Middle East other than on the basis of inferiority, the dhimmistatus which was the lot of Jews in the region through the ages.
The mere existence of a Jewish state, even one with an area equal to 0.5 per cent of that of the Muslim Arab world, is a standing affront to such an ideology.
- Yours, etc,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.