Sir, - The various claims of Dr Steve Harris (May 3rd) do not constitute a refutation of Mahmoud Darwish's point that the foundation of Israel led to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.
Dr Harris asserts that the British set up an agency to deal with Arab complaints on the issue of dispossession by incoming Jews, but that it received "few claims (six in 1936)". What Dr Harris neglects to mention in this context is that the period 1936-1939 witnessed the Palestinian Revolt, an uprising directed both at the British Mandate and at the Jewish settlers. The Palestinians, in other words, had no reason, in their own eyes, to make such "claims". To have done so would have been to recognise the mandate.
While Jewish economic activity, combined with the land purchase programmes of the Jewish National Fund, led to a major restructuring of the regional economy, it is too simple merely to say that Palestinian Arabs "arrived" because of the restoration of the land by the Jews. The British Hope-Simpson Report of 1930, referred to by Dr Harris, clearly acknowledges the "extra-territorialisation" of land, meaning its denial to the local population under the stringent terms of the JNF lease, even as a site of employment, let alone of ownership. In other words, land purchase by incoming Jewish settlers created an increasing pool of landless and under-employed Palestinian labourers. No land had been "set apart as a Jewish homeland" at this time. It was the Peel Commission itself that in 1937 recommended partition as a solution of the problem; before that, land had been "set apart" only insofar as it had been targeted and bought by the Jewish National Fund.
Dr Harris's narrative is strangely reminiscent of the fictions put about in the United States in the 1980s by Joan Peters in her notorious book From Time Immemorial, long since recognised by both Israel and Arab scholars as a shabby hoax. Recent Israeli historians - Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe - have demonstrated that the clearing out of Palestinians was a definite and deliberately planned aspect of Haganah policy. Morris, in his book 1948 and After; Israel and the Palestinians, quotes an Haganah/IDF intelligence report produced in the First Truce of the 1948 war, which stresses that "without doubt, hostile [Haganah/IDF] operations were the main cause of the movement of population." - Yours, etc.,
Conor McCarthy, c/o Institute of Irish Studies, Liverpool University.