LETTERS OF THE WEEK

In today's Australian responding to an outrageously error filled article in yesterday's edition:-

Palestine worldview

SAMAH Sabawi's article was not only factually inaccurate, but illustrated the extremist worldview that has done so much to prevent a two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace ("Palestinians the only compromisers", 4/6).

She argues that in 1988, the PLO "announced that they were willing to accept a state on 22 per cent of their historic homeland, along the 1967 Green Line". In fact, the acceptance was tactical and conditional, including a demand for the unprecedented right of return that would destroy Israel demographically.

Moreover, in 2000 and 2008 Palestinian leaders refused to accept offers of a state even along the lines she posits they had agreed to. Indeed, the offer in 2008 was for land equivalent to the 22 per cent of mandate Palestine that Sabawi insists the Palestinians accepted in 1988.

In 2005, Israel pulled out of Gaza - hardly the act of a nation bent on the one-state solution - only to face cross-border shelling.

And yet despite the pro-two-state declarations of all three of Israel's main political parties, as well as majorities in Israeli opinion polls, she insists that there is a secret Israeli plan to create a one-state solution on all of historic Palestine.

Such conspiratorial thinking, flying in the face of evidence, is a reason there is no peace today.

Tzvi Fleischer, Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, Melbourne, Vic

WHAT a shame that talented women such as Samah Sabawi are focused on the rear-view mirror. Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel, unlike all of us non-Aborigines in Australia.

Rather than try to turn the clock back in an endless vendetta that would see all of us returning to where we came from, Sabawi might be better advised to look to the future.

It's so much easier to indulge in outdated rhetoric about the Zionist agenda than to deal with the hard task of lifting up the Arab masses who are not doing too well in any of their indigenous areas.

Judy Singer, Balmain, NSW