The anonymous author of "Blame Arafat" (Letters, August 10) is repeating 50-year-old Israeli propaganda, foisted on the West since Zionist terrorist organisations forced Britain to renege on its Mandate to Protect Palestine in May 1948. These terrorists were said by Sir Winston Churchill to be "gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany".

The dispossession of the Palestinians was a very real event and is called the Nakbah (Catastrophe). It is just as real as the beaching of the "Exodus" ships carrying Jewish settlers from Europe to found Israel in July 1947.

If anyone cares to read the facts, they will find that Menachem Begin, for instance, was a convicted war criminal who was sentenced to death for his personal involvement in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villagers. His sentence of hanging was reduced to life only because of an accepted plea of insanity. He later became prime minister of Israel.

There were many atrocities in the late Forties, ranging from hotels being bombed to British policemen being hanged in the streets, all carried out by Zionist terrorists.

Today, in an Israel led by Ariel Sharon - another "war hero" - to speak of these truths is banned. As Dr Ilan Pappe notes in an article written for Al-Ahram Weekly on the occasion of the anniversary of the Nakbah, an MA student at Haifa University in Israel was expelled from the university in November 2001 for exposing a hitherto-unknown Israeli massacre carried out against the Palestinian residents of the village of Tantura in 1948.

Now it is Dr Pappe's turn to be expelled, as the Israeli authorities crack down on freedom of speech. Dr Pappe, who holds a doctorate in history from Oxford University and is one of Haifa University's best-known and most-respected historians, writes: "The verdict has already been decided... A fair trial does not exist and hence I do not even intend to appeal against this McCarthyite charade."

Jews did live in harmony in Palestine but the forcible foundation of the Zionist State of Israel changed all that. Only the US has the power to have any effect, by withholding its unquestioning multi-million-dollar support. But this removal would lose the Jewish vote in the US. Does anyone have any real solutions by which ordinary people of different faiths can live together, or even side by side, in peace?

-M R Startup, New Road, Worthing