In response to Howard Jacobson's column arguing that Jews seem to come last in the liberal pecking order among the dispossessed, The Independent has been printing a large number of critical letters. Here, in today's edition, is an exception:
Misty-eyed about a people's wrongs
Sir: The Independent's letter writers come over all misty-eyed when lamenting the Palestinians' right of return to Israel, yet western liberals consistently fail to put history into any kind of context.
What about the right of return of 800,000 Jews kicked out of their Arab homelands in 1948, from lands they had lived in for centuries. Their communal assets were frozen and their property confiscated. The majority of these Jews from Arab lands were absorbed, mainly into Israel.
This was a few years after six million Jewish men women and children were incinerated in the crematoria of Europe. The Arab world's contribution to humanity was none too misty-eyed.
Sara Cohen
Hove, East Sussex
It was the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin who said, shortly after the liberation of the death camps, that "the Jews are trying to jump to the front of the queue". He made sure that the Jews were placed at the very back, and there we have remained to this day. More than two generations after the end of WW2, Jewish communities in many European countries have not been given back the communal property that was expropriated from them, and individual Jews are deprived of ownership or restitution for the possessions that were stolen from them.
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