Regarding Deir Yassin: Martin Gilbert, hardly an apologist for the PLO, wrote in his: “Israel a History”

“The day of the recapture of Kastel was also the day on which Irgun and Stern Gang forces attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin, on a hill even close to Jerusalem. It was the last village on the western side of Jerusalem in whose Arab inhabitants had not largely or totally fled. The attack, in which 245 Arabs were killed – many of them women and children – generated a controversy and bitterness that remains a contentious issue in Israeli life. The official account written in 1961 by Lieutenant Colonel Netanel Lorch, who had fought in the war, and was later head of the Military History Division of the Israel General Staff, describes how Irgun and Stern Gang forces ‘massacred hundreds of villages, took the rest prisoner and paraded them proudly through the streets of Jerusalem’.”

The next page of Gilbert’s book describes the retaliatory attack on a convoy of Jewish medical personal and patients on their way to Hadassah hospital.

Once again violence begat violence. Neither side is innocent, both sides deeply stained with blood.

Gilbert notes that the only part of the Peel Commission that was accepted by the 20th Zionist Congress was the idea of partition, as a way of at least getting a foothold in Palestine. The area proposed by Peel was not accepted however, and neither was the idea of partitioning with the British remaining in control of Jerusalem.

Zionist have always wanted Jerusalem.

The Arabs rejected partition. Today it is easy to see why.

Flying forward to 1982: A group of Israeli Army officers held a press conference about what was happening on the West Bank: One told journalists: “we are gradually losing our humanity. The local population are becoming objects in our eyes, - at best mere objects, at worst something to be degraded and humiliated”.

Once again, when the occupied are treated as less than humans by their occupiers, is it any wonder that suicide bombers are willing to throw their ‘worthless’ lives away?

Ted: More fairytales and you STILL haven't dealt with my posted questions. "The Yishuv accepted the Peel partition plan", says Ted. Not that simple, Ted: "Neither the Arabs nor the Zionist Congress...officially accepted the Peel partition proposal...key Zionist leaders rejected the Peel recommendation for tactical reasons...However, even Zionist leaders accepting partition did so only as the first step toward the total conquest of Palestine...Ben-Gurion 'saw partition as a stepping stone to further expansion and the eventual takeover of the whole of Palestine'." (N G Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, p280) And considering that the plan recommended the forced departure of the Palestinian Arabs living in the proposed Jewish state why wouldn't the Palestinians reject it? As for the 47 UN partition plan, why should the Palestinians have accepted 54% of their homeland going to a minority colonial-settler community legally owning only 6% of the land, most of whom had arrived in the preceeding 30 years under the protection of British bayonets? Would you have accepted such an offer in their shoes, Ted?

The Deir Yassin massacre: Ted says DY was "a hostile village...harbouring Iraqi irregular fighters". Funny, Zionist historian, Benny Morris, writes in 'The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited': "DY had signed a non-belligerancy pact with its Jewish neighbours and repeatedly barred entry to foreign irregulars." (p237) Ted says it was "a defended locality". Defended? With "old Mausers and Turkish rifles that had only been used to hunt rabbits"? (Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe, p49)
Ted spins, "After the battle [sic: massacre] was over, the Lehi escorted a ICRC representative through the village and held a press conference. Hardly the behaviour of war criminals." Check out the facts in Palumbo's book (p52-4); De Reynier, the ICRC man went to DY uninvited and was only saved from manhandling by one of the Irgun terrorists [Ted leaves out Irgun and Haganah involvement in this massacre. Why?] whose life had been saved by the ICRC in a German concentration camp. The press conference was not at DY. It came later and provided the platform for the Jewish terrorists of both organisations to brag about their 'victory' at DY. As for Ted's claim that DY wasn't a "premeditated massacre". Palumbo writes: "According to the Irgun officer, Yehuda Lapidot, the Stern Gang 'put forward a propsal to liquidate the residents of the village...in order to show the Arabs what happens when the Irgun and the Stern Gang set out together on an operation' (p48)...The testimony of the terrorists themselves indicates that the massacre was premeditated by at least some of the attackers. Yitzhak Levi in his recent book was allowed to see but not quote the official reports on DY. He contradicts Begin's version of the attack and asserts that published accounts of a premeditated massacre 'fit in with reports in the archives.'" (p56) Nice try, Ted. Space forbids me to touch on Lehi for the moment, but watch this space. And yes, I'm STILL waiting for your response to my earlier post.

STREWTH - Yes, the devil is indeed in the details. Jabotinsky and the Zionist Revisionists rejected Peel, but they were a small minority of the Yishuv. The Jewish establishment was far more accomodating. The two most influential Zionist leaders, Ben Gurion and Chaim Weitzman, both accepted the Peel partition plan and recommended its adoption. The Twentieth Zionist Congress accepted the principle of partition, although it wanted to renegotiate the Peel provisions that allocated 85% of the Mandate to the Arabs.

Contrast this with the wall-to-wall Arab opposition, both to the particulars of the Peel plan and to the concept of a partition in any form. Compare Ben Gurion's acceptance of compromise with the Grand Mufti's absolute rejection of it. That, in microcosm, is a reflection of the moral difference between the two communities and the main source of conflict over the past century.

As for your sources, the scholarship of Benny Morris has been ripped to shreds by Ephraim Karsh "Benny Morris' Reign of Error Revisitited [Middle East Quarterly - Spring 2005) (http://www.meforum.org/article/711). In his book "Fabricating Israeli History," Karsh goes into greater deconstructive detail, eviscerating the theses, not only of Morris, but of Avi Shlaim. And in another Middle East Quarterly piece, Karsh demonstrates that hard left anti-Zionist Ilan Pappe is similarly a fabricator and distortionist. (www.meforum.org/article/897). Your Michael Palumbo is very much cut from the same cloth. He is a professional pro-Palestinian polemicist whose work is similarly flawed by sins of omission and commission alike.

Not serious.

As for these elusive "questions" that you keep kvetching about, I must confess that I'm at a loss. You asked about the early years of Hamas when it was still a social service agency. I answered - twice. Of course, my answer was not to your ideological satisfaction, so you continue to claim that I'm avoiding the issue. And that is nothing more than an artificially manufactured opportunity to take a few more polemical cheap shots.

Not serious.

Mr Lappin

You have failed to respond to my post quoting Martin Gilbert.

I find this interesting. You quote your mainstream sources and opinions, but ignore mine.

I also find it interesting why you consider that Zionists has any right to any part of Palestine at all. I know that Jewish communities had existed alongside Arab communities for centuries, but for the Jews to lay claim to the land for a state ranks alongside Islamic groups laying claim to Spain because for 700 years or so the Liberian Peninuslar was under Islamic control.

Both claims are equally preposterous.

Whilst I believe that what Christians call the Old Testament to be a true account of God's dealing with humankind, and the Jews (even though in places it is metaphorical) to base the idea of the right of a modrrn state to exist on it reminds me a great deal of that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when a peasant confronts Arthur thus:

DENNIS

Look, strange women lying on their backs in ponds handing out

swords ... that's no basis for a system of government. Supreme

executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from

some farcical aquatic ceremony.

ARTHUR

Be quiet!

DENNIS

You can't expect to wield supreme executive power

just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

ARTHUR

Shut up!

DENNIS

I mean, if I went around saying I was an Emperor because some

moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, people would

put me away!

ARTHUR

(Grabbing him by the collar)

Shut up, will you. Shut up!

DENNIS

Ah! NOW ... we see the violence inherent in the system.

ARTHUR

Shut up!

PEOPLE (i.e. other PEASANTS) are appearing and watching.

DENNIS

(calling)

Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!

The idea that a modern state can be justified by a 3000 year old historical document seems a bit farcical, don't you think? I think any further discussion is pointless: to you Israel can do no wrong.

Very strange... Are STREWTH and HAMLET one and the same?