Hypocrisy and hijacking
Sir: Surely your readers are entitled to expect from you better informed and more penetrating comment on the tangled affairs of the Middle East than was contained in your editorial Hypocrisy over Israel' of August 18? It is astonishing that you should condemn Palestinians and Israel's Arab neighbours. Some people would say that was a more reprehensible form of terrorism since it is carried out by the regular armed forces of a member state of the United Nations, It is also astonishing that you should write as though Israel's past record of cruel and unrelenting oppression of the Palestinians had nothing to do with the emergence of Palestinian terrorism. The most effective action that Israel could take to stop Palestinian terrorism is not to hijack Arab airliners or bomb Palestinian refugee camps and Lebanese and Syrian villages. It is to stop oppressing the Palestinians.
As for your statement that Israel "is fighting for her life," this is simply untrue. What Israel is fighting for nowadays is the right of conquest, the right to keep Arab land conquered in the June war — Arab Jerusalem, Sharm el Sheikh, Gaza, the Golan Heights and assorted parts of the West Bank. General Dayan, as usual, has,put it quite bluntly:
" Out fathers had reached the frontiers which were recognised in the Partition Plan. Our generation reached the frontiers in 1949. Now the Six-Day generation have managed to reach Suez, Jordan and the Golan Heights. This is not the end. After the present cease-fire lines, there will be new ones. They will extend beyond Jordan — perhaps to Lebanon and perhaps to Central Syria as well."
As Editor of The Spectator, you must surely by now be aware that the myth that in 1967 Israel was facing extermination and had to fight for her life has been blown sky high by the Israelis themselves. Their own generals have admitted that there was never the slightest danger of extermination and that they knew President Nasser did not want war. A civilian who was a former MAPAM minister and member of the Israeli coalition at the time of the June war, Mr Mordecai Bentov, has gone even further and stated (April 14, 1972, in AlHamishmar):
"All this story on the danger of ex termination has been invented in its entirety and blown up a posteriori in order to justify the annexation of new Arab territories."
Anthony Nutting Vice-chairman, CAABU, 106 Grand Buildings, Trafalgar Square, London WC2
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