Intolerance
Sir; Mr Perry uses strong language (Letters, 7 February) to dismiss Mr Marnham's detection in Israel of a religious justification for actions or laws which might otherwise be termed racist or expansionist.
Soon after its birth, Zionism found in the Bible material by which it sought to justify its goal of establishing a State for the Jews in Palestine. Recourse to the slogan 'the Bible says its ours' underlay most of the claims to the legality of this struggle with the indigenous Palestinian population. Was this not a religious war? The frantically religious Gush Emunim settlers are the heirs to this tradition and have much support from the present Israeli government in their attempts to settle all over 'Eretz Israel'. Rabbi Meir Kahane, though not a member of Gush Emunim, is eqully religiously fanatical: speaking for his 'Koch' movement he stated: 'Our final goal is to expel all Arabs from the land of Israel' (Newsweek, 16 June 1980). It is the Gush Emunim and the Kach who promise to fight any Israeli government which attempts to move them from their illegal (though in their eyes Biblically sanctioned) settlements in the occupied territories. Does this not smack of a religious war? The present Israeli Labour Party manifesto rejects annexation of the whole of the West Bank, not because it is illegal, but because 'this policy leads to turning Israel from a Jewish into a bi-national state'.
Mr Perry describes as 'deplorable and repellent' any assertion of `Jewish intolerance' in Jerusalem. May I refer him to a book I brought out in 1973 entitled A Palestine Chronicle in which I listed the names of almost 1,900 Arabs compelled by the Israeli military occupation aut,horities to evacuate their homes in Arab quarters inside the walls of Jerusalem between 1 January 1969 and 1 March 197? I also listed land expropriated by the Israeli government in the occupied territories between January 1968 and August 1972, which.in the Jerusalem district amounted to about 7,000 acres. There have, of course, been such actions also in Jerusalem as the bulldozing of the Muslim Waqf property and the desecration of the Muslim Mamillah Cemetery, all well documented. Outside Jerusalem, I listed the names of 385 Arab villages in Israel destroyed between 1948 and 1967, each having its own place of worship.
I believe that some people might be excused for detecting a certain 'intolerance' on the part of the State of Israel not merely for the Arabs of Palestine but also for Islam.
M.R. Mehdi 7 Lodge Drive, Palmers Green, London N13
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