Someone Else's Letter Got In

I had also sent in a letter (see below) but this is the one that was published:-

Sir, – A. N. Wilson’s review of Andrew Hasken’s biography of Shirley Porter (April 19) makes two points: (1) Dame Shirley, a politician with a bad reputation, is the heiress to the Tesco fortune, and (2, and at luxuriant length) the “co” in Tesco stands for Cohen. As Eric Idle’s man in the Monty Python pub used to say, “Wink wink, nudge nudge”.

Then Wilson writes: “As she wrote on a postcard to her son, ‘love from sunny Israel’, a land which has institutionalized Porter’s belief that the solution to political problems is a brutally creative approach to housing and rehousing”. The reason that sentence takes two readings is that the part beginning “a land” doesn’t logically follow from the part beginning “as she wrote”. It’s a shame Wilson isn’t as fastidious about his grammar as he is about his sense of racial superiority.

JONATHAN MORSE
1325 Lunalilo Home Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 96825.

Here's the one I penned:-

A.N. Wilson, reviewing Andrew Hosken's biography of Dame Susan Porter,
felt the need to draw a corollary relationship between Porter's real estate scandals and the Arab-Israel conflict, thus informing his readers little but of his own prejudicial opinion ("Jiggery-pokery", TLS, 19 April). Wilson claims that Israel, to where Porter and her husband had absconded, is "a land which has institutionalized Porter’s belief that the solution to political problems is a brutally creative approach to housing and rehousing." This is sophistry.

I cannot claim to be familiar with all of Porter's shenanigans, legal or otherwise, but Israel's policies I am well acquainted with and I would suggest that Wilson is not only incorrect but invidious. In pre-state years, Zionist pioneers took up residence in areas that were former swamps and other less-than-desirous locations. Unlike other countries, like England, for example, for the most part Jews purchased back their patrimony, lost to invaders over the centuries following the destruction
of their political sovereignty by Rome, and did not seek to conquer it and drive out any indigenous populace. Moreover, it was in areas where Jews had been living for centuries, for example, Jerusalem, Safed and Hebron, that the Arabs preferred to initiate bloody riots already in 1920, 1921 and 1929 to express their opposition to the establishment of a Jewish national hone, sanctioned by international law. Thus, it was the Arabs, local and regional, who undertook a policy of ethnic cleansing, seeking if not to kill then at least expel Jews from their homes.

This came to a climax in 1947 when, in contravention of the United Nations partition resolution (incidentally, the second time the Jewish national homeland territory had been reduced, following Great Britain's perfidious creation ex nihilo in 1922-1923 of a country, TransJordan, to be ruled by a refugee from Saudi Arabia), Arabs started a war of aggression. In that war, Jewish communities were overrun and destroyed, their Jewish population dispersed. These included Atarot, Neveh Yaakov,
Kalya, Gush Etzion and Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter, among others.

How could the Arabs be surprised to find themselves refugees when it was they who had first adopted a brutal creative unhousing approach and, as happens in war, it is the losing side, especially that side which commenced the violent hostilities, which must pay a price. Yet, consistent in their hate, they began another terror campaign in 1965 which led to the Six Days War and more hardship for the Arabs, including
lose of homes, the fate they had fully intended to visit upon their enemies.

Israel has not institutionalized any discriminatory policy. Arabs have been awarded citizenship; have been granted full participation in the electoral process; have been partners in economic development opportunites and educational advantages. That they choose, time and time again, to support terror and murder and to promote institutionalized policies of their own that can only be satisfied with the dismantlement of the state of Israel and great injury to it Jewish population,
especially its civilian, non-combatant citizenry, is unfortunate. What is further unfortunate is Wilson's own support for that policy by willy-nilly befuddling his readers with the true facts.

It's easy to understand why his got and mine didn't.