To the Editor:

George Santayana's famous phrase "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" needs at least one corollary: Those who distort the past condemn the innocent. The story "Israel at 60: A nation still in search of itself" (April 20) contains more than one revisionist distortion, but the most egregious is that Israel "has occupied another nation for 41 years."

There never has been an Arab nation on the land that now is Israel.

Once a part of the Ottoman Empire, British Mandatory Palestine was divided into Arab and Jewish areas by the United Nations in 1947. Decimated by the Holocaust, the Jewish people accepted the meager portion offered them. In return, five Arab nations launched a war to destroy the nascent Jewish state: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades," Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, said on May 15, 1948.

During the last 60 years, wars have drawn and redrawn the map of Israel, as the Israeli people repulsed Arab armies in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 and defended themselves from cross-border infiltrations and terrorist attacks that continue to this day.

Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yassar Arafat rejected opportunities for autonomy, legitimacy and statehood several times, notably the 1993 Oslo Accords, and a generous last-ditch offer from Ehud Barak and then-President Bill Clinton in 2000. Mr. Arafat responded by launching the latest round of terror war.

In 2000, the Arab population in the West Bank was 95 percent under the control of the Palestinian Authority, practically a state. In 2005, Ariel Sharon forcibly removed every Jewish person from the Gaza Strip; a de-facto state now exists. The terrorist group Hamas fires rockets daily to terrorize the Israeli towns of Sderot and Ashkelon. Israeli prime ministers repeatedly demonstrate they have no desire to govern the Arab population of Gaza and the West Bank, and 1 million Israeli Arabs live and work peacefully within the Jewish democratic state. I hope the definition of "state" is clearer now.