Letter to Independent, reply to to Dr Jacob Amir's letter

Today the Independent published a letter from to Dr Jacob Amir about Fisk's article "How can you trust the cowardly BBC? The BBC Trust is now a mouthpiece for the Israeli lobby which abused Bowen"

This is Amir's letter as published by the Independent:

"Robert Fisk writes: "Anyone who has read the history of Zionism will be aware that its aim was to dispossess the Arabs and take over Palestine." ("How can you trust the cowardly BBC?", 16 April).

It appears that Fisk is not very familiar with the history of Zionism. In November of 1947, the Zionist leadership accepted the UN partition plan, while the Arabs vehemently rejected it. They refused to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state in Palestine, regardless of its size. They started a war to prevent by force the implementation of the UN plan. Had they accepted the UN plan, their state would have been 61 years old today and thousands of lives would have been spared on both sides.

To speak of the security barrier between Israel and the West Bank, without acknowledging that it was constructed in response to a flood of suicide bombings, that killed hundreds of innocent civilians, is obscene.

Dr Jacob Amir"

This is my reply Letter to the Editor:

Sir,

One wonders why the Independent chose to publish Dr Jacob Amir's disingenuously misleading claims that "the Zionist leadership accepted the UN partition plan", in view of the mountains of evidence which prove that the real reason behind the decision was a ploy to gain international recognition and support. The Zionists had no intention of settling for what was offered. The myriad of declarations the Zionist leaderships made in private, and exposed by historians long ago, show that their true intentions were, as Jeremy Bowen said, "to push out the frontier". This also shows the inherent pro-Israeli bias in the BBC Trust's attempt to rewrite history.

According to Benny Morris, "large sections of Israel’s society — including...Ben-Gurion — were opposed to or extremely unhappy with partition and from early on viewed the 1948 war as an ideal opportunity to expand the new state’s borders beyond the UN earmarked partition boundaries and at the expense of the Palestinians." Benny Morris, in “Tikkun”, March/April 1998.

In a letter Ben-Gurion sent to his son in 1937, he wrote: "No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of the Land Of Israel. [A] Jewish state in part [of Palestine] is not an end, but a beginning ..... Our possession is important not only for itself ... through this we increase our power, and every increase in power facilitates getting hold of the country in its entirety. Establishing a [small] state .... will serve as a very potent lever in our historical effort to redeem the whole country." (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 138)

One day after the UN vote to partition Palestine, Menachem Begin, the commander of the Irgun terrorists and Israel's future Prime Minister between 1977-1983, proclaimed:
"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever." (Prof. Avi Shlaim, Iron Wall, p. 25)

The historical record is so overwhelming, it comes as a major disappointment to see the Independent publishing such a letter containing these discredited myths.

Yours Sincerely