Touché

A letter in the Independent on Saturday really irritated me:

Sir: Peter Slessenger/ Schlesinger (letter, 2 August) does not seem to consider how many of the "too many to count" relatives of his who were murdered in the Holocaust might have survived had the state of Israel existed in 1939.

DR TOM WEINBERGER

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

Such clever rhetoric, I thought, there's no answer to that. But lo! Today there are two answers to that:

Sir: Dr Tom Weinberger (letter, 4 August) wonders how many Jews would have survived the war if the state of Israel had existed in 1939.

One wonders, too, what sort of state it would have been. According to a columnist in the Ha'aretz newspaper in early 1983, Yitzhak Shamir and the Stern Gang approached the Nazis in 1941 with an offer to form a Jewish state "on a national and totalitarian basis, which would establish relations with the German Reich and help protect its interests in the Middle East".

Not surprising - any nation dedicated to the interests of one ethnic or religious group will inevitably find affinities with another.

COLUM GALLIVAN

LONDON SW17

Sir: Had Israel existed in 1939, Hitler's view of Jews could have been entirely different. Indeed, he would probably have been able to embrace Zionists as fellow racists and recruit them for his crusade against Soviet Communism.

DON ADCOCK

HINGHAM, NORFOLK

Good stuff!