I join everyone else in saluting Alan Hart. He has given half a lifetime - and his considerable professional skills - to the Palestinian struggle. Now he's calling it a day. I find the news indescribably sad, but at the same time it should serve as a wake-up call to Palestinians, and indeed Arabs everywhere, that the patience of their most devoted sympathizers is wearing thin.

Some of the reasons Alan gives for his withdrawal from the battlefield deserve repetition and emphasis.

• Zionism could have been contained and defeated by now if resources and money had been available to promote and spread of the truth on a scale necessary to empower the citizens of the Western nations, Americans especially, to make their democracies work for justice and peace. Providers of those resources necessary for winning the information war ought to have been seriously wealthy Arabs in general and seriously wealthy diaspora Palestinians in particular, doing for Palestine what seriously wealthy Jews did and still do for Zionism.

Alan Hart is an author, former Middle East Chief Correspondent for Independent Television News, and former BBC Panorama presenter specializing in the Middle East. He has authored the three-part series Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.

• Because the resources were not there, the war for the truth of history has remained the most asymmetric of all information wars. Zionism’s masters of deception have enjoyed virtually unlimited funds while the truth-tellers remain without the means to put together and implement a coordinated, winning campaign strategy.
• Most seriously wealthy non-Palestinian Arabs don’t care about the occupied and oppressed Palestinians. The Arab masses do care but their élites don’t.