Danny Wakil’s letter misleads The Echo readership with a false account of the history of the colonisation of Palestine by the Zionist movement. 500 villages were destroyed by the Israeli terrorist groups Lehi, Haganah and Irgun after exploiting Arab hospitality to map the terrain surrounding each in order to strategically attack them. Many massacres were committed by these terrorists, and survivors were told to run to the next village and warn the inhabitants the same fate awaited them unless they fled. As a consequence 700,000 Palestinians fled to neighbouring countries, resulting in the world’s largest refugee population.
The colonisers of Palestine seized territory outside of the UN Partition Plan that was not ever ratified and was rejected by the Arab states because it violated the principles of the right to self-determination in the UN Charter. The proposed plan is considered to have been pro-Zionist by its detractors, with 62 per cent of the land allocated to the Jewish state despite the Palestinian Arab population numbering twice the Jewish population.
The partition plan was never implemented and civil war broke out resulting in the Zionists staking a claim to a far greater portion of Mandate Palestine that was agreed on by majority UN vote. That territory was expanded again in 1949, 1967, 1973 to, in the words of one Israeli military spokesman, ‘take what land we didn’t manage to get hold of the first time.’
Today the descendant of the Irgun terrorist group is the Likud party that allied itself with the right wing Herut party (and others) founded by mass murderers Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, the latter found culpable for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon, and the former a commander that oversaw the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948. Now aligned with the extremist militant right wing in Israel determined to wipe the people of Palestine off the map for good, the Likud party is headed by a convicted fraudster, Benjamin Netanyahu, officially indicted for breach of trust, accepting bribes, and fraud in 2019. Lest we forget, the Zionists also collaborated with the Nazi Party to colonise Palestine, most notably on the Havaara Agreement, finalised in 1933. The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941 by Klaus Polkehn and 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis by Lenni Brenner outline this co-operation. Israel remains a militant rogue state ignoring international law and human rights covenants, and as Anthony Loewenstein’s new book The Palestine Laboratory represents, in the words of Noam Chomsky, ‘A sad and sordid record of how “the light unto the nations” became the purveyor of the means of violence and brutal repression from Guatemala to Myanmar and wherever else the opportunity arose.’ For this reason, any sane person who respects and stands up for human rights will support the academic, trade, sporting and cultural boycott of Israel called for by the majority of Palestinian civil institutions to compel Israel to uphold international standards agreed on by the civilised world: Don’t buy brand Israel: bdsmovement.net
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
