David McDowall (Letters, January 19) amplified my contention that UNRWA entrapped Palestinian refugees by recalling the two failed resettlement schemes that were proposed, one in Jordan with Yarmuk waters, another in (Western) Sinai with Nile waters. But of course the process that has always helped to resolve territorial conflicts through the ages was not organized resettlement in imposed locations, but rather voluntary dispersal in whatever direction appealed to the refugees themselves, with the Huguenots the classic example. Their departure ended civil war in France, and they prospered. But otherwise I fully accept the contentions in McDowall’s letter – his personal experience in situ obviously contributed to his insightful comments.
The letter of Lauro Martines in the same issue is another matter entirely: its only purpose is to arrive at the “ethnic cleansing” accusation, and to get there he has to suppress the truth and suggest the false. He writes that my “example is Europe’s 11 million refugees who were resettled elsewhere between 1944 and 1948; hence he is evidently thinking primarily of Jewish refugees”. I did not write that, nor could I have written that, because I am not a Holocaust denier: by 1946 only 3 million Jews or so survived in all of Europe, including the non-refugees who lived in England, across the USSR, etc. I was not “thinking primarily of Jewish refugees”, but rather of the displaced Balts, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians and so on who found new lives in Canada, the US, Australia and so on with the assistance of UNRRA, thus reducing conflict by resettlement instead of perpetuating it by relief in place and only in place, as UNRWA does.
Martines continues: “the result was the swift establishment of a sovereign new state, Israel”. Swift it was not, since Jews had lived there uninterruptedly and “political” Zionists started arriving in the nineteenth century. Second, much of Israel’s population increase came from the 900,000 or so Jews who had to flee for their lives from Arab countries when humiliating subordination under Muslim law was replaced by threats, murders and mass violence. Given his interest in ethnic cleansing, Professor Martines might find out what happened to the Jewish communities of Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, etc: all countries with important Jewish communities where few, if any, Jews remain.
Sailing Alone
I won’t deny that my memory sometimes lets me down these days, as Gregory Martin suggests (Letters, January 19). The quip I attributed to the late Duke of Edinburgh was, though, certainly made by him, and no other, in the version I heard. Yet Mr Martin’s alternative source, Edward Heath, however unlikely a candidate for this kind of drollery, is indeed “confirmed” by Google, no less. Well, “recollections may vary”, as the late Duke’s late wife drily put it. I should have checked. But I believe Mr Martin
