In his letter ["Mideast response" Sept.27], Leon Marcus makes a litany of falsehoods and fabrications. In the First World war the Arabs fought against the Ottoman Empire, in alliance with the British and the French, relying on deceitful promises given by the British government in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence,1915, which the British never intended to honour, as confirmed in the Sykes-Picot Treaty,1916. In 1917, the British government issued its infamous Balfour Declaration, promising to support the creation of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. This fraudulent declaration was best described by the noted British Historian, Arnold Toynbee, who stated ;" We [the British] were taking upon ourselves to give away something that was not ours to give. We were promising rights of some kind in the Palestinian Arabs' country to a third party." The well-known Jewish writer, Arthur Koestler, summed it aptly, describing the Balfour Declaration as a document in which " One nation promised a second the country of a third."

The Palestinians did reject the UN Partition Scheme of 1947 because it was unjust. Under pressure and intimidation by the US, the UN General Assembly[UNGA] offered the Palestinian Jews, who constituted 31% of the population and owned 5.6% of the land, a Jewish state in 56% of Palestine. The Zionist leaders did not genuinely accept the UN resolution. Menachem Begin, the leader of the Herut party stated: "The partition of the homeland is illegal and will never be accepted." David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, on declaring the creation of the state of Israel, in May 14,1948, he refused to define its borders and stated: "We are announcing the creation of a state in the western part of our country." He stated later: "To maintain the status quo will not do. We have set up a dynamic state bent upon expansion." We are seeing nowadays the implementation of this policy.

As to the fable, created by the Israeli government and reproduced by Mr. Marcus, that the Palestinian refugees left their homes on the orders broadcast by their leaders, this is a total fabrication, which was exposed by Israeli historians who documented Israel's policy of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, effected by numerous massacres of Palestinians committed by Israel. This fabrication was systematically demolished by the Irish scholar, Dr. Erskine Childers, who examined all American and British monitoring records of all Middle East broadcasts thoughout 1948 and reported : " There was not a single order of appeal or suggestion about evacuation from any Arab radio, inside or outside Palestine in 1948. There is repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians to stay put." [ The Spectator. May 12,1961.]