This letter is in response to SK Teoh's defence of Israel.

While I am a non-Muslim, I fully believe that the act of defending Palestine on secular and humanist grounds, and opposing Israel on similar grounds is very justified, as the late Edward W Said demonstrated in his inspiring life.

While the old Israel founded by Jacob the Prophet and his 12 sons (they are the ancestors of the Jewish race) was a reality, the modern republic of Israel is a creation of British colonial designs, not unlike the Boer republic of South Africa founded by Dutch settlers in Africa and legitimised by the British who eventually ruled it.

Modern Israel was created by people with the racist ideology of Zionism which looks down upon the Arab race and Islam. Zionism was founded by German Jewish thinker Theodore Herzl.

Zionists even make up blatant lies about Prophet Muhammad and write that he persecuted Jews and womanised. They are very vile individuals. Daniel Pipes in the United States is one example of a Zionist.

Old Israel was eventually vanquished by the Romans. The Jews were expelled to other parts of the Roman empire and became known as the Diaspora. Most of them intermarried with the Aryan Europeans and Russians and became culturally different from the Jews of old Israel over the ages.

During the time of Muhammad the Prophet and his disciples the Rashidun Caliphs, the Jews who remained in Palestine were treated with untold kindness and love. Muhammad whose love for all of us is a mirror image of Jesus Christ's love for us, loved the Jews as his fellow Semites descended from Shem, son of Noah.

After all, the Jews' ancestor Jacob was the grandson of Abraham, the Arab Prophet from Iraq. Abraham was also the ancestor of Muhammad and the Rashidun Caliphs.

The Prophet and the Caliphs had no problems if the Jews from Europe were to come and live in the Arab lands including Palestine which had been liberated from Roman rule by the merciful Rashidun Caliph Omar Al-Khattab, with the support of both Christian Arabs and Jews who suffered Roman persecution.

But the Jews of that time who lived outside West Asia chose not to live under Rashidun rule for reasons best known to them. They literally forfeited their children's children's right to occupy Palestine and to create the new Jewish republic of Israel in 1948.

They literally decided that Europe, the base of the Roman Empire, was their New Israel, and Rome their New Jerusalem (political Jerusalem that is).

Arabs are not foreigners to the land of Canaan that became Israel. Arabs are the Semites who are the people of all modern Arab lands. Arabs do not - contrary to British historical beliefs - only mean the Bedouins of Arabia alone.

The Palestinian Arabs are descendants of the original Canaanites and even of the Jews who converted to Islam on their own free will. Muhammad and the Rashiduns never spread their faith by the tip of the sword.

Arab anti-Jewish sentiments are very new according to that brilliant author Karen Armstrong. Jews in history have been happiest living under the Arab rule including Arab rule of Spain. Arab anti-Jewish sentiments only came about during the rule of the Turkish Ottomans who pitted Arab against Jew.

Palestine has always existed. Palestine is the region which is called Canaan in Christianity and Judaism. The name Palestine was coined by the Romans (Italians) to describe Canaan during the Roman empire times.

The British, when they ruled Palestine, pitted Arab against Jew. They encouraged both Jewish and Arab terrorism during their rule over Palestine.

The United Nations plan for Palestine was actually very unfair. The Arabs were a majority in the land but they obtained a smaller portion of the land.

As for the Jews fighting for their survival at that time, they were not. They had the full backing of the US and Britain. Zionist politicians who had their own militias (and they included several Israeli prime ministers) terrorised many Arabs and drove them into neighbouring Jordan and Egypt.

Arab countries have indeed been mistreating Palestinians and even Jews living there. In fact, not one Arab country outside of Palestine has a government with popular legitimacy. The only one close to being popularly supported, I am afraid to say, is Muammar Gaddafi's party-less Panchayat democracy (guided with ISA-styled laws though) called Libya.

I advocate what Edward Said advocated during his lifetime. He advocated a single secular republic called Israel-Palestine with an Arab president and a Jewish prime minister.

All Israelis born in modern Israel and every single Palestinian refugee in the world would be citizens with full voting rights. Israel-Palestine would have three official religions namely Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

Said's dream is the dream of almost all Palestinians. A great many Jews share a similar dream, including some inside Israel such as Illan Pappe and Israel Shahak, both non-conformist Jews. It should be the dream of all right-thinking human beings.