Madam, - Israeli ambassador Zion Evrony (May 21st) is desperately trying to defend the indefensible. He simply does not read what Israeli historians and his own leaders have been telling us for years.
In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinethe internationally renowned Israeli historian Illan Pappe wrote: "Using primarily Israeli military archives, the revisionist Israeli historians did succeed in showing how false and absurd was the Israeli claim that the Palestinians had 'left of their own accord'. They were able to confirm many cases of massive expulsions from villages and towns and revealed that the Jewish forces had committed a considerable number of atrocities including massacres."
On the issue of the expulsion of the Palestinians, David Ben-Gurion - the father of the Israeli state - in a speech addressing a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive (June 12th,1938) said: "I am for compulsory transfer, I do not see anything immoral in it."
On the issue of negotiations, the Oslo agreements of 1993 and 1995 stipulate that the Palestinian state should be declared at the end of a five-year transitional period, i.e. in May 1999. Instead of a Palestinian state, we had the Intifada (uprising), because Israel continued to build illegal Jewish settlements on our occupied land, using the negotiations as a tactic to evade meaningful pressure from any source while gaining time to create more changes on the ground.
These included expanding settlements and eventually the construction of the apartheid wall with its continued confiscation of Palestinian land. This wall was declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004.
Ariel Sharon, in 1997, when foreign minister, declared the Oslo agreement to be "national suicide" and said:"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours. . . everything we don't grab will go to them" (Jimmy Carter: Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, page 147).
On the issue of the Camp David agreement of July 2000, former American President Carter also wrote: "It was later claimed that the Palestinians rejected a generous offer; the fact is no such offer was ever made."
Furthermore, Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldman, president of the World Jewish Congress: "If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country." Yet all Arab countries have offered the Israelis - via the Arab Initiative, which was endorsed at the 2002 summit in Beirut and been reaffirmed later at the Riyadh and Damascus summits - full normalisation in return for the territories they took by force in 1967. The Israelis have so far ignored this initiative, thereby missing another opportunity to attain peace and security.
On the issue of rocket attacks , I on too many occasions have declared that it does not serve the Palestinian interest. These rockets have killed 15 Israelis, but the brutal Israeli retaliation, using the most sophisticated weapons, have caused the deaths of 2,000 Palestinians most of them civilians.
Finally, the Ambassador should recall the words of his prime
minister, Ehud Olmert, who warned that failure of the present peace
process would lead to an anti-apartheid struggle that would be "a
much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle - and
ultimately a much more powerful one" that might well lead to the
end of the state of Israel. - Yours, etc,
Ambassador HIKMAT AJJURI,
General delegation of Palestine,
Dublin.