Blinkered pro-Palestinian groups have no plan for establishing a just and lasting peace in Middle East

THE Palestinian solidarity movement proudly stands with its Palestinian brothers and sisters in rejecting every peace offer since 1948 — if not before (Write Back, February 17).

It’s time for the movement to look to the future, not the past. It should set out clearly the Palestinian peace plan which will achieve justice and comply with international law and humanitarian values.

The Hamas ‘peace plan’ calls for the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Islamist state of Palestine. The Hamas founding charter looks forward to the death of the last Jews in hiding. This broadly accords with the

Iranian ‘peace plan’ and the ‘Hezbollah peace plan’.

As Hamas is probably the largest political movement among Palestinians, will the Palestinian solidarity movement confirm it stands shoulder to shoulder with the Hamas peace plan? Or, alternatively, does the movement support the Fatah ‘peace plan’?

The details of the Fatah peace plan are sketchy because the Arafat and Abbas leaderships have never put forward a comprehensive programme for peace. However, it appears to consist of an Arab-majority Palestinian state existing alongside an Arab-majority Israel.

Fatah demands the right of return of five million descendants of Arab refugees to what is now Israel and describes even the Western Wall — Judaism’s holiest site — as an illegal Jewish settlement on Arab land.

If it is a central aim of the Palestinian solidarity movement to destroy Israel as a sovereign state for the Jewish people, let it make that intention very clear.

I maintain that true friends of the Israelis and the Palestinians, anxious for a better future for both peoples, appreciate that the true path to peace comes only from negotiation and dialogue.

STEVEN JAFFE

Co-chair, Northern Ireland Friends of Israel