David Gilet and Warren Kennedy presented their incredibly biased and cherry-picked ‘facts’ in their letters in last week’s Echo in relation to the Arab Israeli conflict, which again, is part of the problem, and not the solution to peace.
Yes David Gilet, it is a very, very basic fact that the Arab armies instructed the local Arabs to leave the region so that they could return to their homes and take the land and property of the Jews once the Jews had been mass murdered. I never said that Arabs forced them to go, and as I clearly stated, some stayed. Aside from that, Palestinians have never regarded themselves as one people until the 1960s when the Egyptian born terrorist Yasser Arafat waged his war against Israel. Claiming that ‘Palestians regarded themselves as one people for centuries’ is as false and as delusional as stating that Europeans have regarded themselves as one people for centuries.
Warren Kennedy, obviously the founding of Israel was not peaceful because after the UN rightfully voted that there be a separate state for the Jews, Israel begged for peace, yet the Arabs chose a total war of annihilation against them that they thought they would easily win. Israeli Arabs now have exactly the same rights as the Jews do. Arab Israelis that previously called themselves Palestinian are high court judges, members of parliament, doctors and lawyers. They can be anything that they are able to achieve.
Warren Kennedy conveniently avoids discussing the countless and far greater massacres against the Jewish population in the region of Palestine during the war and the centuries prior as though they are a minor part of history. Every murder on either side is a tragedy. The following are a list of massacres against the defenceless Jews during that period, and obviously does not include the murder of small numbers of Jews, as that list is countless.
1517: 1st Safed Pogrom, Ottoman Palestine
1517: 1st Hebron Pogrom, Ottoman Palestine and
1577: Passover Massacre, Ottoman empire
1660: 2nd Safed Pogrom, Ottoman Palestine
1834: Safed Pogrom, Ottoman Palestine
1847: Ethnic cleansing of the Jews in Jerusalem, Ottoman Palestine
1920: Irbid Massacres: British mandate Palestine
1920: 1930: Arab riots, British mandate Palestine
1921: 1st Jaffa riots, British mandate Palestine
1928: Ikhwan Masacres, Egypt, and british mandate Palestine.
1929: 3rd Hebron Pogrom British mandate Palestine.
1929: 3rd Safed Pogrom, British mandate Palestine.
1933: 2nd Jaffa riots, British mandate Palestine.
1936: 3rd Jaffa riots, British mandate Palestine
1942: Jerusalem Mufti collaboration with the Nazis plays a part in the Final Solution
1948: 1st Arab Israeli war (one out of every 100 Jews was killed)
Most Israelis and Palestinians are beautiful and peace-loving people. Peace now.
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. 
