Madam, - Tony Allwright (January 27th) is disingenuous when he suggests that millions of Palestinians remain refugees only because the Arab states refuse them rights.
He wilfully ignores Israel's responsibility for the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1947-48, and the fact that that expulsion preceded and largely caused the flight of Jews from Arab countries.
Palestinians were not pushed out "in the. . .war launched and lost by the Arabs". If Mr Allwright looks at the latest book by the major scholar of these events - The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, by the Israeli historian Benny Morris (Cambridge University Press, 2004), he will see that Palestinians were already being cleared from their villages (and massacred, as at Dayr Yasin), by the Hagannah and the Irgun, before May 15th, 1948 and the attack on Israel by the Arab armies.
Accordingly, to write that the refugee problem exists because of "'Israel's refusal to massacre" Palestinians in 1948 is a historical and moral travesty. - Yours, etc.,
CONOR McCARTHY, De Vesci Court, Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin.