I'm finding it hard to take J Rudd's letter ‘Standing up for Israel' (The Weekend Sun, July 24, page 21) seriously. It's reminiscent of various US Zionists' arguments I have similarly found impossible to take seriously. For example, his claim: 'most modern-day Palestinians come from Jordan” is based on the Zionist dogma: 'a land without a people for a people without a land” easily refuted once you start asking who the Crusaders massacred when they took Jerusalem in 1099.

If the Palestinians never existed, if the land of Palestine, aka Israel aka Canaan, was empty of people from the time the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in CE 70, then the crusaders must have massacred ghosts…Kind of hard to believe, but if J Rudd says it, it must be true…

I've never read that General Allenby on December 11, 1917, considered the Palestinians he saw and met, ghosts. Could J Rudd enlighten us on this?

Wesley Parish, Tauranga.