VICTOR SHARPE: ARABS OFFER ISRAEL THE “PEACE” OF THE GRAVE
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10524/pub_detail.asp
Remember the Roadmap that Condoleezza Rice and President Bush had earlier forced upon Israel? Well it is still alive and the Obama regime and the Quartet continue imposing what history will recall as an insane repetition of failed policies.
The endless concessions, imposed only upon Israel, known by the morally bankrupt euphemisms of “land for peace” or “risks for peace,” and the “Two-State Solution” guarantee endless war against Israel. That is what the road map is; a veritable cul de sac of death for the Jewish state.
There is no peace partner at this time within the Arab world that Israel can trust, and certainly not among the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. Western absurdity as to which Palestinian Arab group is “moderate” enough to receive enormous amounts of tax payer funds was demonstrated by Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice during the Bush Administration. She certified that Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas, met the qualifications of a genuine peace partner for Israel.
Here the absurdity reached new heights for it was Fatah itself, the peace partner, which at the same time Rice was sanctifying it, sent two suicide killers into the Israeli Negev town of Dimona where they succeeded in murdering an elderly woman while maiming many other civilians. And Abbas, the Holocaust denier, was then, as now, unwilling to end Palestinian terrorism.
Indeed Fatah argued with Hamas and Islamic Jihad over who should take responsibility for the crime. In this macabre contest, the decadent depth to which Palestinian society has plunged was there for all to see. Meanwhile the Obama Administration urges Israel to reach out to the Arabs in search of peace lest Israel becomes too isolated. But which of the vicious Arab neighbors, hardly lovers of peace, should Israel reach out to?
Dr. Rachel Ehrenfield and Alyssa Lappen, wrote in the February 8th, 2008 edition of Front Page Magazine that, “since the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority, led by Abbas, received between $14 and $20 billion dollars in international aid.” These figures were from a 2007 Funding for Peace Coalition (FPC) report to the British Parliament.
“Each Palestinian received $4,000 to $8,000 per year. In comparison, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provided $1 billion in humanitarian aid for 2.5 million Darfur refugees from 2003 to 2006 – only $100 per person annually. Moreover, of the $7 billion pledged in international aid, only $5 billion was spent to assist more than 5 million Tsunami victims in more than 15 countries on two continents.”
“The PA received ‘the highest per-capita aid transfer in the history of foreign aid anywhere,’ according to former World Bank country director for Gaza and the West Bank,Nigel Roberts. Not surprisingly, hundreds of thousands of Arabs in Gaza spent more than $300 million in less than a two week shopping spree after Hamas blew up the border with Egypt. Yet, the Palestinian economy claims to be in ruins. Why?”
Well the answer is there for all to see who want to understand the truth of the enormous scam played upon the West by the Palestinian Arabs and their patron, the Arab League, whose members include regimes awash in oceans of petro-dollars.
The Arabs of Gaza and the so-called West Bank, under Hamas or Fatah control, follow the same script. They are only interested in spending their vast income on weapons, weapons, and more weapons to aim against Israel. Gaza’s economy and the wellbeing of its population come a distant second to the overriding consideration, which is: Kill the Jews!
Any child will tell you that Fatah is no different from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, ad nauseum, and that the entire Arab and Muslim world wants Israel’s destruction and will settle for nothing less. Indeed, we are witnessing Iran poised to take over Iraq once the US withdraws troops from the Iraqi theater. Turkey wishes to take over Syria once Bashar Assad and his Alawite power base is gone. In the complexities of Sunni and Shia mutual animosity anything could happen.
Both branches of Islam are at each other’s throats and have been since the death of Muhammad. But they join in their desire to destroy the non-Muslim Jewish state and come against it in a classic pincer move. However, the historic gulf between Sunni and Shia may yet be for Israel its salvation.
Nevertheless, put simply and starkly, no Arab or Muslim regime will recognize Israel as a Jewish state or permit it to live within Arab and Muslim territory previously conquered in the name of Allah. It makes no difference whatsoever how large or how tiny such a state is. Nor does it matter one iota what its borders are or even if the Jewish state shrunk to merely one down town city block in Tel Aviv; it would still be unacceptable to the Arab and Muslim world.
Mahmoud Abbas with a picture of Yasser Arafat, his predecessor as head of the Palestinian Authority.
The Oslo Accords contained a grave mistake for Israel. Arafat was willing to recognize Israel but not as a Jewish state. Indeed, he hoped to swamp Israel with millions of Arabs thus destroying it. Israel should have insisted that any agreement with the Palestinian Arabs was based upon their recognition of Israel as the Jewish state.
This Muslim refusal to recognize the Jewish State of Israel is a depressing fact but it is a realistic understanding of what Israel faces. Thus Israel cannot, and must not, believe that making concessions to the Muslim Arabs, especially “land for peace,” will ever work. Millennia ago, an ancient Jewish prophet cried out, “Peace, peace, but there is no peace.” Nothing has changed.
Despite Israel’s miniscule size, the international community has no problem demanding that Israel allow the creation of another Arab state, one dedicated to its destruction, to be built upon the very ancestral and biblical Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria – which the world knows by its Jordanian Arab name, the West Bank.
Even the so-called Arab “moderates” publicly and unambiguously announce that any so-called “peace initiatives” are simply hudnas (temporary ceasefires). They parrot the mouthings of the late arch-terrorist, Yasser Arafat, who declared that such initiatives are but “stages” in the Arab strategy of taking a piece of the Jewish state followed by another piece until all the pieces are gone.
If proof was needed of the contempt with which the Arab world now treats all concessions by Israel in its yearning for true peace, we need look no further than to the early 20th century before modern Israel re-established its independence in 1948.
The Jewish liberation movement, Zionism, embodies the yearnings of the Jewish people to rebuild its ancient and biblical homeland and reconstitute itself there. The representatives of the Zionist organization made one concession after another to the representatives of the Arab population of Mandatory Palestine in the hope that both peoples could attain their national aspirations.
Chaim Weizmann.
At first the Arab leaders gave fulsome support for the creation in the geographical territory sometimes known as Palestine of a Jewish homeland. The Emir Faisal 1, son of Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, who for a time was King of Syria and later King of Iraq, signed a treaty with the Zionist leader, Dr. Chaim Weizmann in 1919. It was understood that Arab states would come into existence and that Palestine, on both sides of the River Jordan, would become a Jewish state. Indeed, Faisal wrote in March, 1919 that:
“We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist Movement. Our delegation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference and we regard them as moderate and proper.”
But sadly inter-Arab rivalries, which are endemic to the Middle East, began to erode earlier understandings. Anti-Jewish attitudes by British officials who were involved in the governance of the British Mandate of Palestine had a pernicious effect.
This was the norm so much so that exceptions to their hostility became famous. The growing influence of the Moslem Brotherhood and the weakening of the League of Nations added to the souring of relations between the Arab and Jewish leaderships. In short, the progress of Jewish restoration in Mandatory Palestine was severely curtailed.
In 1929, (long before there were any so-called Israeli occupied territories) the unarmed and deeply religious Jewish population in Hebron (which is one of Judaism’s four holy cities) was attacked by an Arab mob and men, women and children were slaughtered. Despite this massacre, the Zionist leaders continued to offer concessions to the Arabs.
In the early 1930s they offered the Arab leaders sweeping powers, essentially creating equality regardless of majority or minority status. This offer by the Zionist leaders, if it had been accepted by the Arab leadership, would have undermined the very basis of Jewish independence, which was sought so desperately. The Arab leaders did not respond. Instead, in 1936, they launched violent attacks upon Jewish communities resulting in a severe loss of Jewish life.
The British Mandatory authorities, especially those with an anti-Jewish animus, had persuaded Sir Herbert Samuel, then chief of the civil administration, to appoint Haj Amin el Husseini to the post of Chief Mufti and head of the Muslim Religious Council.
Haj Amin el Husseini, who worked with the Nazis and was a hero of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Husseini was viciously anti-Jewish and as a result of his influence over the Arabs was able to instigate riots and bloodshed, such as those in 1936. Husseini spent time with Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker where the two plotted the extermination of the Jewish population of Palestine.
In 1937, the Zionist leaders agreed, for the sake of the ever illusory peace, to try yet again. They agreed to share the country by dividing what was left of the territory promised to them by Great Britain. In 1921/22, Britain reneged on its solemn promise to the Jewish people to establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine when it tore away all the territory east of the River Jordan and gave it to the Hashemites; a territory comprising almost two thirds of the original Palestine Mandate.
Again, in 1947, even though Britain had been compelled by Jewish resistance to relinquish their occupation of Mandatory Palestine, west of the River Jordan, the Zionist leaders offered to the Arabs a willingness to accept partition of the remaining land in order to end the conflict.
The matter was passed to the United Nations, which subsequently voted on such a partition proposal. The Jewish leadership accepted it even though the borders of such a Jewish state were fatally vulnerable to an Arab attack and because of the desperate need to provide a refuge for the survivors of the Holocaust and for the hundreds of thousands of Jews driven out of their homes throughout the Arab world. But yet again, the Arabs rejected the offer and the partition plan was drowned in bloody Arab aggression.
Even though what was left of the mini-Jewish state, west of the Jordan river, would have been indefensible, the Arabs again rejected the plan out of hand. Then, as now, they wanted it all. As Abba Eban, Israel’s statesman, once said: “The Arabs never miss a chance to miss a chance.”
Israel was thus born in a baptism of Arab fire, which consumed a large percentage of the nascent Jewish state’s civilian population. Though invaded by seven Arab countries, Israel survived and beat back the pan-Arab onslaught. Yet even then Israel did not exploit its victory by advancing to improved frontiers, but signed Armistice Agreements within its vulnerable borders in the hope that it would be received by the Arabs as yet another peace overture. No such reaction from the Arab League was forthcoming.
Since 1948, the Arab states have never given up their desire to annihilate Israel. They have fought six wars of genocide against the Jewish state. In between these major conflagrations not a day, not a week, or a month has passed without relentless Arab terrorist aggression against Israeli civilians.
Incredibly, and with all the history of Arab perfidy to guide it, Israel’s leaders arbitrarily withdrew from the narrow security zone in southern Lebanon in another vain peace overture. As a result Hezbollah, an Iranian backed Islamist terror organization, filled the vacuum and a major war inevitably broke out.
Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, forced some 10,000 Jewish villagers in the Gaza Strip to abandon their homes in the hope that the Palestinians in Gaza would create a peaceful and constructive society no longer under Israeli control.
The result was the exact opposite of what was hoped for. Since Israel withdrew, the Gazan Arabs, now living under the regime of the Palestinian Islamist Hamas organization, have fired more than 12,000 missiles into southern Israel, deliberately targeting Israeli villagers and killing and maiming scores of civilians.
Peace might have come with all of its attendant benefits to both Jews and Arabs, and to the entire Middle East, if the attitude of Emir Faisal 1 had prevailed among the Arab masses and leadership. But those hopes were dashed for the reasons described earlier.
Since then the oriental mind of the Arab has been filled with what Shmuel Katz in his ground breaking book, Battleground – Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, describes as a “garland of myths.” Added to the mythology and fantasies, now unassailable fact in the minds of countless Arabs, is the steady and relentless anti-Jewish indoctrination of Arab youth by the Palestinian Authority; itself in flagrant violation of the Oslo Peace Accords.
It would require generations to pass before the poison can be erased from Palestinian Arab consciousness. Here then is further proof that Israeli concessions to the Palestinian Arabs or the Arab League at this time are of no benefit whatsoever.
The “Oslo Peace process of the 1990s became a disaster that Israeli leaders wholeheartedly earlier embraced but it has proven catastrophic because it ignores what was and is most important.
The West fastens almost desperately upon failed Palestinian leaders hoping they will prove to be true moderates. They made such a fatal mistake by conferring the mantle of moderation upon the arch-terrorist, Yasser Arafat, – even ennobling him with the Nobel Peace Prize to the eternal shame of the Nobel Peace Committee.
That Arafat was squirreling away billions of dollars into overseas private bank accounts, using the Palestinian Authority controlled media to poison the minds of Arab children with Nazi like propaganda, and imposing his lethal will as an outright despot and dictator did not deter Western leaders.
Instead, they threw their tax payers’ money at him because they considered him a “strong” leader with whom they could make deals. The same is happening again today with Mahmoud Abbas with yet more catastrophic results.
The time is long overdue for a United States president to end the same failed policies and inaugurate not a roadmap to an illusory peace but a roadmap for Israel’s security. It will not happen with the present White House incumbent, arguably the most unfriendly and hostile president Israel has ever endured.
Whether such a future president could ever overcome the pressures and blackmail of the Arab oil producers or of the endemic hostility within the U.S. State Department towards Israel is open to question. But in its absence, one thing remains crystal clear: The only peace the Arab and Muslim world is ready to offer Israel is the peace of the grave.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer, contributing editor, and author of Volumes One and Two of “Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.”
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