The anonymous respondent to Tony Greenstein's courageous stand for accuracy and principle refers to 1.2 million Arabs living peacefully in Israel until the Oslo peace talks failed, conveniently forgetting that between 1946 and 1948 another two million Palestinians, mostly villagers, fled their homes, land and country in fear as a result of massacres and orchestrated terrorising of country dwellers by Zionist thugs. The land thus cleared was then illegally transferred to settlers.

At the time, my sympathy for persecuted Jewry obscured the truth. Survivors of horror would oppose it. Surely Israel would become a beacon of democracy and multiculturalism? After all, Palestine was ethnically Jewish before the modern Israel, most of the ethnic Jews (Palestinians) being Muslim or Christian but ethnically at least as pure as Jewish settlers from Europe or the US. Blond or red-headed Jews are not uncommon but among Palestinian Muslims or Christians are rare, thus Ariel Sharon's persecution of the Palestinians must be an evil manifestation of religious bigotry.

To justify barbarities by reference to a section in an ancient book - a section that is also incorporated into Muslim and Christian theology - and thus exclude people of the same blood on the basis of religious differences is untenable. Such hypothetical right can, over such time, be by blood-line alone. I refer to Abraham's leaving Ur of the Chaldees and settlement in Palestine, upon which the homeland claim is based. Ironically, Ur is in modern Iraq so it seems Jews are Arabs too.

The present Israeli government is among the world's most racist yet it undermines its own concept of Jewishness by ancestry by importing foreign converts - with no historical or blood-line links to Israel - to populate illegal West Bank settlements.

Yasser Arafat, though not perfect, did not destroy the peace process. He held out for the terms enshrined in United Nations' resolutions that are not unduly generous to Palestinians. Sharon, however, deliberately provoked trouble even before his election and, once elected, commenced his campaign of State terrorism to obliterate the peace talks so as to avoid complying with the commandment "Thou shalt not steal".

-Alfred O Thompsett, Ridgeside Avenue, Patcham