Sir, – Before Tom Fuller (May 3rd) questions the legitimacy of Israel's right to return, perhaps he should address the fundamental question of why it was implemented in the first place.
The answer would quickly emerge after an afternoon in the National Archives where document after document shows that the Irish State, alongside the other liberal democracies, almost universally rejected the many hundreds of applications for asylum from Germany’s persecuted Jews.
This historical truth is there for any rational person to see, and is exemplified by the almost universally negative government response to Robert Briscoe’s 1930s immigration initiative.
The rejection was so overt that Briscoe, the most assimilated of Irish Jews, was compelled to engage with the New Zionist Organisation in one last desperate attempt to save even a remnant of his European co-religionists.
The realisation by the new state of Israel in 1948 that the West had ignored the plight of Jews only a decade previously propelled it to introduce the right to return as a guarantee that another Holocaust could never occur if Jews had a safe haven.
When the historical imperative is understood, what fair-minded person can question it? – Yours, etc,
Dr KEVIN McCARTHY,
School of History,
University College Cork.