When truth is twisted and facts are ignored: Mordechai Kedar challenges the views about Palestine advanced by Lois and Martin Griffiths in a recent article.

• Author: Kedar, Mordechai
• Position: 'The Palestinian story: to exist is to resist'

With much concern I read what Lois and Martin Griffiths wrote under the title 'The Palestinian story: to exist is to resist' in the NZIR (vol 37, no 5 (2012), pp.4-9). Unfortunately the Griffiths's article shows a clear lack of background knowledge about the issues brought to our attention.

The authors do not differentiate between Palestinians who live inside Israel and therefore are citizens of Israel, and those who are not, and the reader who does not know where places mentioned in the article are has no idea whether a story is about people who are citizens of Israel or those who are living under the authority of the Israel Defence Forces in the West Bank. These are two different populations. The Griffiths omit to mention that every Palestinian, a citizen of Israel or not, has the full right of appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court. Indeed, Palestinians often win their cases--for example, Supreme Court decisions have made the government change the siting of the security barrier in a way that balances Israel's need for security with the Palestinians' need to reach their fields. I would expect that the Griffiths would mention that the security barrier that Israel built was the result of the dreadful Palestinian terrorist attacks in which more than 1000 Israelis were killed in buses, restaurants, malls and hotels; and the rate of these attacks dropped sharply because of this defensive barrier, which killed nobody. Israelis who were killed cannot return to life; the fence and the wall, on the other hand, can be removed after peace is achieved.

For Israelis, the credibility of what the Griffiths write is not enhanced by their quotations of Dr Ilan Pappe and Gideon Levy. Pappe (now teaching in the United Kingdom) was discredited as an academic at Haifa University, was a former Communist Party candidate for the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) and supported an MA thesis which was found in court to be a forgery and libel. Gideon Levy of the Israeli left-wing tabloid Ha'aretz does not speak or read Arabic and thus relies on translators who are uniformly hostile to Israel.

The Griffiths relate to all the Palestinians as indigenous people of

this country. This shows an ignorance of our history. Many 'Palestinians' still carry names which testify that they are not originally from Palestine, such as d-Iraqi, al-Masri (the Egyptian), al-Hourani and al-Halabi (Syrians), al-Sourani, al-Tarabulsi (Lebanese), al-Zarqawi, al-Karald (Jordanian) and many similar names. Most of them immigrated to this country during the first half of the 20th century, mainly to work in the villages and towns which Jews built after the establishment of the British Mandate.

It is particularly strange to read in the Griffiths article that Israel is responsible for the situation of Christians in Bethlehem. Christian emigration from Bethlehem has accelerated since the transfer of power to the Palestinian Authority in 1995; the decline came about because the Muslims confiscated their assets, desecrated their churches and intimidated them. And, in fact...