Israel, Palestine and two-state settlements

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/09/israel-palestine-two-state-settlements

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Harry Goldstein's assertion (Letters, 7 January) that the Palestinians were "offered [a state] in 1947 and refused, preferring to make war on Israel", must be challenged. The Palestinians were told that 56% of their existing state of Palestine was to be taken away and made into a Jewish state, even though half of the population of the "Jewish" area was Arab. Since the Jews made it clear they wanted even more than the 56% and would take it by force, the Arab armies, far smaller in number and less well-armed than the Jews, moved up to the border of the Jewish state, in an attempt to protect the remaining territory they had been allocated, and stop Israel taking those areas by force. They failed either to stop the Jewish armies or to prevent them expelling Palestinian Arabs from a land in which they had once formed 90% of the population. Karl Sabbagh Author of Palestine: A Personal History

• Peaceful co-existence between the Jewish and Palestinian people was never on the agenda of Israel's early leaders: Ben-Gurion in 1948 was an advocate of what he euphemistically called "compulsory transfer" of Palestinians from their homeland. Little seems to have changed under the current leadership: as if the ethnic cleansing of the 40s and 50s was not sufficient, the separation wall now snakes its way through the occupied territories, severing Palestinian communities from their places of work and their land. It is difficult to imagine how a peace process can survive the insidious effect of continued land confiscation, bypass roads linking settlements, checkpoints, house demolitions. How ironic seem to us today the key words of "co-ordination" and "co-operation" which echo through the Oslo accords of 1993 and 1995. Charles Milne Hereford

• The Palestine National Council formally accepted a two-state settlement in 1988, and in 1993 the PLO recognised "the right of the state of Israel to exist in peace and security" within its pre-1967 borders. Leon Rosselson London

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