In response to the letter "Israel drawing U.S. into a war," (Feb. 3), several historical inaccuracies need correction. Israel is not annexing Palestinian land. It would have been their land if they had accepted the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947, but chose instead to take all the land by war against the Jews, who had bought their part of the land from the "effendi", rich Arabs who lived in Damascus, Beirut and Cairo. There was no Palestinian country before that. Palestine, after the destruction of the second Jewish temple in 70 CE, was ruled by successive empires, the last being the Ottoman Turks (not even Arabs). This cannot be compared to the German annexation of part of a sovereign Czechoslovakia in 1938.

And the current morass in the Middle East has nothing to do with Israel and the Palestinians. The Arabs were making war against each other well before the creation of the Jewish state, which is a haven of democracy and calm in a very dangerous area of the world. Isn't it our duty to support democracy? I sincerely hope that the Tunisian model spreads to the rest of the Arab world.

Barry Feldman

East Lyme