WHILE fully appreciating Tom Wareing's words about the dangers Britain faces in policing post-war Iraq, I take deep exception to him comparing post-war Iraq to Palestine in 1945-48.

Surely he must know Britain suffered in Palestine where Jews and Arabs had lived together for centuries because we reneged on our solemn commitment made in the Balfour Declaration to give Jews a tiny homeland there.

Doesn't Mr Wareing know that when we policed Palestine after the First World War, we generously carved out and gave Arabs their own large Palestinian State Jordan?

But to our everlasting shame, we never kept our promise to the Jews. History records that instead, we murderously fired upon their boats fleeing from Nazi Germany.

Meanwhile, we freely allowed Arabs like Arafat (an Egyptian) to flow in from surrounding lands.

The final insult occurred when we abstained in the historic 1948 UN vote. Then, after six million Jews had died in the Holocaust, the UN mercifully gave the survivors their own small Israeli homeland.

While we grieve over British soldiers who died in Palestine - Israel, we must note that cruelly persecuted Zionists fighting for their promised homeland were very different people to Saddam's evil butchers.

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