A recent letter writer wrote that he usually reads my column "with admiration and amusement." Huzzah--he's the one! But my recent piece on Gaza left him wanting. Let's see what's bothering him.

The letter claims Palestinians "were forcefully exiled" from Israel in 1948. False. In 1947, the UN voted to divide land controlled by Britain into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews said yes. The Arabs said no and started shooting.

The day after Israel's modern independence, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, with a Saudi contingent in tow, invaded. In Haifa, the British police reported that "every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives"; the British high commissioner reported that "total evacuation is being urged on the Haifa Arabs from higher Arab quarters"; and Mahmoud Abbas, the current Palestinian president, wrote in 1976: "The Arab armies entered Palestine . . . [and] forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland."

And if Israel wanted the Arabs gone, it certainly did a lousy job. Israel counts 2.2 million Arabs living inside the country (not including those in Gaza or the West Bank), 21 percent of its population. These Arab citizens have all the rights of any other citizen. Arab parties hold 10 seats in the Knesset. And Arabs have sat on Israel's Supreme Court since 2004.

There was one forcible exile of consequence in this story, and it ran the other way from what the letter writer suggests. In 1948, about 850,000 Jews lived in Arab countries. After Arab pogroms, fewer than 4,000 remain. That's a decline of more than 99 percent.

Nor was there ever a country called Palestine. Foreign empires controlled the land for millennia. The British took the land from the Ottoman Turks in 1917, who took it from the Mamluks in 1516, who took it around 1260 from the heirs of Saladin, a Kurd, who took it from the Crusaders in 1187, who took it from the Arabs in 1099, who took it in 638 from Byzantine Rome, successor to the Roman Empire, which........

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