Mark Mazower’s article on American Jewish support for Israel gives the impression that such support was seen as a way of righting the wrongs of the 1930s (The origins of today’s conflict between American Jews over Israel, 25 September).
This is much too narrow a view: Jews everywhere were very well aware of the oppression that their forebears had endured for hundreds of years in Europe, and especially of the pogroms in the Russian empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many also knew of the problematic position of Jews in mandate Palestine, including the history of the 1929 Hebron massacre.
This long history, of which the Holocaust was simply the latest and most revolting manifestation, was what drove the setting up of the state of Israel in 1948 and the determination of Israel to defend itself against successive attacks by Arab forces.
Mazower’s comment that some saw Israel’s success in the six‑day war of 1967 as, potentially, a Pyrrhic victory may be true, in that it poisoned relations with its neighbours. But it would not have been so if the Arab states had not issued the notorious Khartoum resolution of September 1967, which declared there would be no peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel and no recognition of Israel.
When the rest of the world understood that it was impossible to eliminate Israel by military means, this declaration was a disaster for the Palestinian people as well as for Israel, and continues to be so today.
Roger Fisken
Ashampstead, Berkshire
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