Benny Morris repeats the myth of Barak's generous offer at Camp David in 2000. But the offer was not that generous. The West Bank would have been cut in two by roads going to Israeli army bases; there was no equitable land swap; there would have been no Palestinian control of borders, water or airspace; the Israelis would not allow Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount and wanted to keep large blocks of settlements surrounding Palestinian areas.And mine was in response to a letter in Friday's Independent:Professor Morris writes of "the implacable enmity of the Arab world ... towards the Jewish state, and the serial rejections by the Palestinian Arabs of two-state proposals for a solution". The whole Arab world offered Israel complete normalisation of relations if it would withdraw from all the territories captured in 1967. It is Israel that has rejected a two-state solution. Its ever-expanding settlements and land-grabbing wall are evidently intended to put the Palestinians into bantustans and perpetuate Greater Israel.
Deborah Maccoby
London
Sir: Dr Jacob Amir is being disingenuous when he says that the Zionist movement accepted the UN's plan to partition Palestine (letter, 15 May). David Ben Gurion told his supporters to accept publicly what they truly found to be unacceptable so that Israel could build an "outstanding army" and conquer the rest of Palestine "within 20 years". This is too well documented to deny.So there!
There is no evidence to suggest that if the Arab states had accepted the partition plan, events would have unfolded any differently from how they did. On the contrary, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist forces began as soon as the partition plan was announced and there were already 300,000 Arab refugees from Palestine by the time the Arab states mobilised.
Mark Elf
Dagenham, Essex
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