Past experience tends to repeat itself, creating the most glittering writing on the wall. However, too often it is overlooked by Western policy-makers, who frequently sacrifice long-term interests, strategic complexity and reality-based hope on the altar of short-term convenience, oversimplification and wishful-thinking.
The November 29, 1947 Partition Plan produced a series of long-term geo-strategic lessons – relevant to the 2017 national security of Israel and the US – which have been largely ignored, although they have recurred and have been reaffirmed, systematically, throughout the last 70 years.
Lesson #1. The foundations of the special ties between the US and Israel were not laid down by policy-makers, but – since the 1620 “Mayflower – by the American people. In 1947, the State Department opposed, aggressively, the establishment of the Jewish State, but the US public overwhelmingly supported the Partition Plan, equally among Democrats and Republicans, college-educated and non-college-educated. According to the October, 1947 Gallup poll, support of the Partition Plan was 65%:10% with 25% “no opinion.” Lowell Thomas, a US radio icon, told his listeners on May 14, 1948: “Today, as the Jewish State is established, Americans read through the Bible as a historical reference book.”
Lesson #2. The pugnacious rejection of the 1947 Partition Plan by the Arabs – including the Arabs west of the Jordan River – reflects the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which has never been the Palestinian issue, Jewish settlements, the reunification of Jerusalem, or the size of the Jewish State. It has always been the existence of the “infidel” Jewish State in the Abode of Islam, a land which is, ostensibly, divinely-ordained only to “believers.”
According to the October 11, 1947 issue of the Egyptian daily, Akhbar al-Yom, the Arab League Secretary General, Azzam Pasha warned of “a war of extermination and momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Tartar Massacre, or the Crusader wars… to win the honor of martyrdom for the sake of Palestine… the shortest road to paradise….” In 2017, hate-education dominates the Palestinian curriculum, Friday sermons and public discourse.
Lesson #3. The secondary-to-marginal role played by the Palestinian issue in shaping Arab policy has been demonstrated, repeatedly, since 1947. While Arab leaders have talked passionately about their support of an Arab state west of the Jordan River, they have never walked the walk.
