Why Israel is the Victim The lies behind the terror.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/why-israel-victim-frontpagemagcom/
Editors’ note: Below is the text of David Horowitz’s pamphlet, Why Israel is a Victim. Frontpage editors have deemed it vital to run the pamphlet in our pages today, since it reveals the history that explains Hamas’ current terror against Israel – and the international community’s outrageous bias against the Jewish state.
The Gaza Strip is a narrow corridor of land, 25 miles long and about twice the area of Washington, D.C. situated between the State of Israel and the Mediterranean Sea, and has a small southern border with Egypt. When the U.N. created the State of Israel out of the ruins of the Turkish Empire, in 1948, eight Arab countries launched an attack on the infant regime with the stated goal of destroying it. The attackers included Egypt whose tanks invaded Israel through the Gaza land bridge. In its defensive war against the invaders, Israel emerged triumphant but did not occupy Gaza.
In 1949, Egypt annexed the Strip. In 1967, the Egyptian dictator Gamel Abdel Nasser massed hundreds of thousands of troops on the Israeli border with Gaza and closed the Port of Eilat in an attempt to strangle the Israeli State. Israel struck back and in a “Six Day War” vanquished the Egyptian armies and drove them out of Gaza. After the war, Israel refused to withdraw its armies from Gaza and the West Bank because the Arab invaders, which included Iraq, Jordan and several other states refused to negotiate a formal peace treaty. In the years that followed, a few thousand Jews settled in Gaza.
By 2005 they numbered 8,500, a tiny community compared to the 1.4 million Palestinian Arabs. While they lived in Gaza, the lives of the Jewish settlers were in constant danger, particularly after the formation in Gaza of one the world’s leading terrorist organizations, Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state “from the [Jordan] River to the Sea.”
After the rejection of the Oslo Peace process in 2001 by Yassar Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians launched four years of unrelenting terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. The attacks were led by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an arm of the Palestinian Authority. As a result of the Palestinian rejection of the peace process and the unrelenting terrorism, the Israeli government decided that a secure peace could probably not be negotiated with its Palestinian antagonists. It therefore built a fence along its borders both on the West Bank and Gaza to prevent further infiltration by suicide bombers, a measure which dramatically reduced the attacks. The Israeli government further decided to remove all Jews living in the Gaza Strip and to withdraw the Israeli Defense Forces which protected them. By September 2005, the Israeli government evacuated every Jew who had been living in the Gaza Strip.
Forget for a moment all the strategic and geopolitical rationales for the Gaza pullout and consider only the reason that the Jewish settlements in Gaza were an issue at all: Palestinian Arabs and indeed all the Arab states of the Middle East hate Jews and want to dismantle the Jewish state. They hate Jews so ferociously that they cannot live alongside them. There is not an Arab state or Arab controlled piece of territory in the Middle East that will allow one Jew to live in it. This is why in 1948 the Arab states rejected the two- state solution that would have created a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza alongside the State of Israel. They wanted to destroy the Jewish state more than they wanted to create a Palestinian one.
In contrast to the hostility of all Arab states to any Jew, Israel has welcomed Palestinian Arabs to its communities. There are more than a million Arabs living safely in Israel where they enjoy more citizen rights than the Arabs living in any Arab country, or for that matter the Muslims living in any Muslim country. If Arabs treated Jews half as well, there would be no Middle East “problem.”
But the ethnic cleansing of the Jews has always been the objective of Arabs and Palestinians. The real goal of Arab nationalism has always been an Islamic Arab Middle East with no competing nationalities or cultures. Palestinians have shown twice in 1948 and again in 2001 that they want to kill Jews more than they want a Palestinian state.
The tiny Jewish population of Gaza created an agricultural industry in fruits, vegetables and flowers. During their years in Gaza, they constructed greenhouses that produced an abundance of vegetables. In just this industry alone, Jews, representing less than one-hundredth of the Gaza population, produced nearly 20% of its gross domestic product. Now, the entire gross domestic product of Gaza is only $770 million.1 If the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza weren’t consumed with ethnic hate, they would have done everything in their power to import more Jews rather than agitate to get rid of them. With 50,000 Jews – still a small minority in a population of 1.4 million they could have doubled their economy.
When the Jews left, there remained the problem of what to do with the existing greenhouses. A Jewish philanthropist in America stepped forward to solve the problem. Mortimer Zuckerman, the publisher of U.S. News and World Report,’ raised $14 million to buy the greenhouses from their Jewish owners and give them to the Palestinians in Gaza. It was a gesture of peace, an effort to encourage the Palestinians to look on the withdrawal from Gaza as a step in the process of ending the fifty year war of the Arab states and the Palestinian Arabs against Israel.
The Palestinian answer to this peace offering was unambiguous and swift. As soon as the Israeli troops left, Palestinians rushed in to loot the greenhouses that had been given to them, stripping them of the pumps, hoses and other equipment that had made them so productive.2
The withdrawal from Gaza is an emblem of the entire Middle East conflict. It is not a conflict of right versus right. It is a conflict inspired by ethnic hate, by the unwillingness of the Arabs of the Middle East to live as neighbors with a people that is democratic, non-Arab and non-Muslim. The cause of the conflict is that the Arabs hate Jews more than they love peace.
The Jewish Problem and Its “Solution.”
Zionism is a national liberation movement, identical in most ways to other liberation movements that leftists and progressives the world over—and in virtually every case but this one— fervently support. This exceptionalism is also visible at the reverse end of the political spectrum: In every other instance, right-wingers oppose national liberation movements that are under the spell of Marxist delusions and committed to violent means. But they make an exception for the one that Palestinians have aimed at the Jews. The unique opposition to a Jewish homeland at both ends of the political spectrum identifies the problem that Zionism was created to solve.
The “Jewish problem” is just another name for the fact that Jews are the most universally hated and persecuted ethnic group in history. The Zionist founders believed that hatred of Jews was a direct consequence of their stateless condition. As long as Jews were aliens in every society they found themselves in, they would always be seen as interlopers, their loyalties would be suspect and persecution would follow. This was what happened to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, whom French anti-Semites falsely accused of spying and who was put on trial for treason by the French government in the 19th Century. Theodore Herzl was an assimilated, westernized Jew, who witnessed the Dreyfus frame up in Paris and went on to lead the Zionist movement.
Herzl and other Zionist founders believed that if Jews had a nation of their own, the very fact would “normalize” their condition in the community of nations. Jews had been without a state since the beginning of the diaspora, when the Romans expelled them from Judea on the west bank of the Jordan River, some 2,000 years before. Once the Jews obtained a homeland—Judea itself seemed a logical site— and were again like other peoples, the Zionists believed anti-Semitism would wither on its poisonous vine and the Jewish problem would disappear.
But something altogether different happened instead.3 In the 1920s, among their final acts as victors in World War I, the British and French created the states that now define the Middle East out of the ashes of the empire of their defeated Turkish adversary. In a region that the Ottoman Turks had controlled for hundreds of years, Britain and France drew the boundaries of the new states, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. Previously, the British had promised the Jewish Zionists that they could establish a “national home” in a portion of what remained of the area, which was known as the Palestine Mandate. But in 1921, the British separated 80% of the of “Transjordan.” It was created for the Arabian monarch King Abdullah, who had been defeated in tribal warfare in the Arabian peninsula and lacked a seat of power. Abudllah’s tribe was Hashemite, while the vast majority of Abdullah’s subjects were Palestinian Arabs.
What was left of the original Palestine Mandate—between the west bank of the Jordan and the Mediterranean sea—had been settled by Arabs and Jews. Jews, in fact, had lived in the area continuously for 3,700 years, even after the Romans destroyed their state in Judea in 70 AD. Arabs became the dominant local population for the first time in the 7th Century AD as a result of the Muslim invasions. These Arabs were largely nomads who had no distinctive language or culture to separate them from other Arabs. In all the time since, they had made no attempt to create an independent Palestinian state west or east of the Jordan River and none was ever established.
The pressure for a Jewish homeland was dramatically increased, of course, by the Nazi Holocaust which targeted the Jews for extermination and succeeded in killing six million, in part because no country—not even England or the United States— would open their borders and allow Jews fleeing death to enter. In 1948, the United Nations voted to partition the remaining portion of the original Mandate, which had not been given to Jordan, to make a Jewish homeland possible.
Under the partition plan, the Arabs were given the Jews’ ancient home in Judea and Samaria— now known as the West Bank, and the “Gaza Strip” on the border with Egypt. The Jews were allotted three slivers of disconnected land along the Mediterranean and the Sinai desert. They were also cut off from the slivers, surrounded by Arab land and under international control. Sixty percent of the land allotted to the Jews was the Negev desert. The entire portion represented only about 10% of the original Palestine Mandate. Out of these unpromising parts, the Jews created a new state, Israel, in 1948. At this time, the idea of a Palestinian nation, or a movement to create one did not even exist.
Thus, at the moment of Israel’s birth, Palestinian Arabs lived on roughly 90% of the original Palestine Mandate — in Transjordan and in the UN partition area, but also in the new state of Israel itself. There were 800,000 Arabs living in Israel alongside 650,000 Jews (a figure that would increase rapidly as a result of the influx of refugees from Europe and the Middle East). At the same time, Jews were legally barred from settling in the 35,000 square miles of Palestinian Transjordan, which eventually was renamed simply “Jordan.”
The Arab population in Israel had actually more than tripled since the Zionists first began settling the region in significant numbers in the 1880s. The reason for this increase was that the Jewish settlers had brought industrial and agricultural development with them, which attracted Arab immigrants to what had previously been a sparsely settled and economically destitute area.
If the Palestinian Arabs had been willing to accept this arrangement in which they received 90% of the land in the Palestine Mandate, and under which they benefited from the industry, enterprise and political democracy the Jews brought to the region, there would have been no Middle East conflict. But they were not.
Instead, the Arab League—representing five neighboring Arab states—declared war on Israel on the day of its creation, and five Arab armies invaded the slivers with the aim of destroying the infant Jewish state. During the fighting, according to the UN mediator on the scene, an estimated 472,000 Arabs fled their homes and left the infant state. Some fled to escape the dangers, others were driven out in the heat of war. They planned on returning after what they assumed would be the inevitable Arab victory and the destruction of the infant Jewish state.
But the Jews—many of them recent Holocaust survivors—refused to be defeated. Instead, the five Arab armies that had invaded were repelled. Yet there was no peace. Even though their armies were beaten, the Arab states were determined to carry on their campaign of destruction and to remain formally at war with the Israeli state. After the defeat of the Arab armies, the Palestinians who lived in the Arab area of the UN partition did not attempt to create a state of their own. Instead, in 1950, Jordan annexed the entire West Bank and Egypt annexed the Gaza Strip. There were no international protests.
Refugees: Jewish and Arab.
As a result of the annexation and the continuing state of war, the Arab refugees who had fled the Israeli slivers did not return. There was a refugee flow into Israel, but it was a flow of Jews who had been expelled from the Arab countries. All over the Middle East, Jews were forced to leave lands they had lived on for centuries. Although Israel was a tiny geographical area and a fledgling state, its government welcomed and resettled 600,000 Jewish refugees and made them citizens.
At the same time, the Jews resumed their work of creating a new nation. Israel had annexed a small amount of territory to make their state defensible, including a land bridge that included Jerusalem.
In the years that followed, the Israelis made their desert bloom. They built the only industrialized economy in the entire Middle East. They built the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. They treated the Arabs who remained in Israel well. To this day the very large Arab minority, which lives inside the state of Israel, has more rights and privileges than any other Arab population in the entire Middle East. This is especially true of the Arabs who lived under Yasser Arafat’s corrupt dictatorship, and live presently under the the Palestine Authority, which inherited his totalitarian rule and today administers the West Bank.
The present Middle East conflict is said to be about the “occupied territories”—the West Bank of the Jordan and the Gaza strip—and about Israel’s refusal to “give them up.” But during the first twenty years of the Arab Israeli conflict, Israel did not control the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. When Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt annexed the Gaza strip after the 1948 war, there was no Arab outrage. But the war against Israel continued.
The Arab Wars Against Israel.
In 1967, Egypt, Syria and Jordan—whose leaders had never ceased to call for the destruction of Israel—massed hundreds of thousands of troops on Israel’s borders and blockaded the Straits of Tiran, closing the Port of Eilat, Israel’s only opening to the East. This was an act of war. Because Israel had no landmass to defend itself from being overrun, it struck the Arab armies first and defeated them as it had in 1948. It was in repelling these armies that Israel came to control the West Bank and the Gaza strip, as well as the oil rich Sinai desert. Israel had every right to annex these territories captured from the aggressors—a time honored ritual among nations, and in fact the precise way that Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan had come into existence themselves. But Israel did not do so. On the other hand, neither did it withdraw its armies or relinquish its control.
The reason was that the Arab aggressors once again refused to make peace. Instead, they declared themselves still at war, a threat no Israeli government could afford to ignore. By this time, Israel was a country of 2 to 3 million surrounded by declared enemies whose combined populations numbered over 100 million. Geographically, Israel was so small that at one point it was less than ten miles across. No responsible Israeli government could relinquish a territorial buffer while its hostile neighbors were still formally at war. This is the reality that frames the Middle East conflict.
In 1973, six years after the second Arab war against the Jews, the Arab armies again attacked Israel. The attack was led by Syria and Egypt, abetted by Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and fi ve other countries who gave military support to the aggressors, including an Iraqi division of 18,000 men. Israel again defeated the Arab forces. Afterwards, Egypt— and Egypt alone—agreed to make a formal peace.
The peace was signed by Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, who was subsequently assassinated by Islamic radicals, paying for his statesmanship with his life. Sadat is one of three Arab leaders assassinated by other Arabs for making peace with the Jews.
Under the Camp David accords that Sadat signed, Israel returned the entire Sinai with all its oil riches. This act demonstrated once and for all that the solution to the Middle East conflict was ready at hand. It only required the willingness of the Arabs to agree.
Even to this day, the Arabs claim that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are the obstacle to peace. But the Arab settlements in Israel—they are actually called “cities”—are not a problem for Israel so why should Jewish settlements be a problem for the Arabs? The claim that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are an obstacle to peace is based first of all on the assumption that the Jews will never relinquish any of their settlements, which the Camp David accords proved false. It is really based, however, on the assumption that Jewish settlements will not be allowed in a Palestinian state—which is an Arab decision and is the essence of the entire problem: the unwillingness of the Arabs to live side by side with “infidel” Jews.
The Middle East conflict is not about Israel’s occupation of the territories; it is about the refusal of the Arabs to make peace with Israel, which is an inevitable byproduct of their desire to destroy it. This desire is encapsulated in the word all Palestinians – “moderates” and extremists – use to describe the creation of Israel. They call the birth of Israel the “Nakhba,” the catastrophe.
Self Determination Is Not The Agenda.
The Palestinians and their supporters also claim that the Middle East conflict is about the Palestinians’ yearning for a state and the refusal of Israel to accept their aspiration. This claim is also false. The Palestine Liberation Organization was created in 1964, sixteen years after the establishment of Israel and the first anti-Israel war. The PLO was created at a time the West Bank was not under Israeli control but was part of Jordan. The PLO, however, was not created so that the Palestinians could achieve self-determination in Jordan, which at the time comprised 90% of the original Palestine Mandate. The PLO’s express purpose, in the words of its own leaders, was to “push the Jews into the sea.”
The official “covenant” of the new Palestine Liberation Organization referred to the “Zionist invasion,” declared that Israel’s Jews were “not an independent nationality,” described Zionism as “racist” and “fascist,” called for “the liquidation of the Zionist presence,” and specified, “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.” In short, “liberation” required the destruction of the Jewish state.
For thirty years, the PLO covenant remained unchanged in its call for Israel’s destruction. Then in the mid-1990s, under enormous international pressure following the 1993 Oslo accords, PLO leader Yasser Arafat agreed to revise the covenant. However, no new covenant was drafted or ratified. Moreover, Arafat simultaneously assured Palestinians that the proposed revision was purely tactical and did not alter the movement’s utlimate goals. He did this explicitly and in a speech given to the Palestine Legislative Council when he called on Palestinians to remember the Prophet Muhammad’s Treaty of Hudaybiyah. The Prophet Muhammad had entered into a 10-year peace pact with the Koresh tribe back in the 7th century, known as the Hudaybiyah Treaty. The treaty was born of necessity. Two years later, when he had mustered enough military strength, Muhammad conquered the Koresh who surrendered without a fight. Arafat was signaling that whatever he might say, he intended to follow the example of the Prophet.
Even during the “Oslo” peace process—when the Palestine Liberation Organization pretended to recognize the existence of Israel and the Jews therefore allowed the creation of a “Palestine Authority”—it was clear that the PLO’s goal was Israel’s destruction, and not just because its leader invoked the Prophet Muhammad’s own deception. The Palestinians’ determination to destroy Israel is abundantly clear in their newly created demand of a “right of return” to Israel for “5 million” Arabs. The figure of 5 million refugees who must be returned to Israel is more than ten times the number of Arabs who actually left the Jewish slivers of the British Mandate in 1948. Moreover, a poll of Palestinian refugee families in the West Bank conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in the spring of 2003 revealed that only 10% of those questioned said they actually wanted to return.
In addition to its absurdity, this new demand has several aspects that reveal the Palestinians’ genocidal agenda for the Jews. The first is that the “right of return” is itself a calculated mockery of the primary reason for Israel’s existence—the fact that no country would provide a refuge for Jews fleeing Hitler’s extermination program during World War II. It is only because the world turned its back on the Jews when their survival was at stake that the state of Israel grants a “right of return” to every Jew who asks for it.
But there is no genocidal threat to Arabs, no lack of international support militarily and economically, and no Palestinian “diaspora” (although the Palestinians have cynically appropriated the very term to describe their self inflicted quandary). The fact that many Arabs, including the Palestinian spiritual leader—the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem— supported Hitler’s “Final Solution” only serves to compound the insult. It is even further compounded by the fact that more than 90% of the Palestinians now in the West Bank and Gaza have never lived a day of their lives in territorial Israel. The claim of a “right of return” is thus little more than a brazen expression of contempt for the Jews, and for their historic suffering.
More importantly, it is an expression of contempt for the very idea of a Jewish state. The incorporation of five million Arabs into Israel would render the Jews a permanent minority in their own country, and would thus spell the end of Israel. The Arabs fully understand this, and that is why they have made it a fundamental demand. It is just one more instance of the general bad faith the Arab side has manifested through every chapter of these tragic events.
Possibly the most glaring expression of the Arabs’ bad faith is their deplorable treatment of the Palestinian refugees and refusal for half a century to relocate them, or to alleviate their condition, even during the years they were under Jordanian rule. While Israel was making the desert bloom and relocating 600,000 Jewish refugees from Arab states, and building a thriving industrial democracy, the Arabs were busy making sure that their refugees remained in squalid refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, where they were powerless, rightless, and economically destitute. Despite economic aid from the UN and Israel itself, despite the oil wealth of the Arab kingdoms, the Arab leaders have refused to undertake the efforts that would liberate the refugees from their miserable camps, or to make the economic investment that would alleviate their condition. There are now 22 Arab states providing homes for the same ethnic population, speaking a common Arabic language. But the only one that will allow Palestinian Arabs to become citizens is Jordan. And the only state the Palestinians covet is Israel.
The Policy of Resentment and Hate.
The refusal to address the condition of the Palestinian refugee population is—and has always been—a calculated Arab policy, intended to keep the Palestinians in a state of desperation in order to incite their hatred of Israel for the wars to come. Not to leave anything to chance, the mosques and schools of the Arabs generally—and the Palestinians in particular—preach and teach Jew hatred every day. Elementary school children in Palestinian Arab schools are even taught to chant “Death to the heathen Jews” in their classrooms as they are learning to read. It should not be overlooked, that these twin policies of deprivation (of the Palestinian Arabs) and hatred (of the Jews) are carried out without any protest from any sector of Palestinian or Arab society. That in itself speaks volumes about the nature of the Middle East conflict.
There are plenty of individual Palestinian victims, as there are Jewish victims, familiar from the nightly news. But the collective Palestinian grievance is without justice. It is a self-inflicted wound, the product of the Arabs’ xenophobia, bigotry, exploitation of their own people, and apparent inability to be generous towards those who are not Arabs. While Israel is an open, democratic, multi-ethnic, multicultural society that includes a large enfranchised Arab minority, the Palestine Authority is an intolerant, undemocratic, monolithic police state with one dictatorial leader, whose ruinous career has run now for 37 years.
As the repellent attitudes, criminal methods and dishonest goals of the Palestine liberation movement should make clear to any reasonable observer, its present cause is based on Jew hatred, and on resentment of the modern, democratic West, and little else. Since there was no Palestinian nation before the creation of Israel, and since Palestinians regarded themselves simply as Arabs and their land as part of Syria, it is not surprising that many of the chief creators of the Palestine Liberation Organization did not even live in the Palestine Mandate before the creation of Israel, let alone in the sliver of mostly desert that was allotted to the Jews.
While the same Arab states that claim to be outraged by the Jews’ treatment of Palestinians treat their own Arab populations far worse than Arabs are treated in Israel, they are also silent about the disenfranchised Palestinian majority that lives in Jordan. In 1970, Jordan’s King Hussein massacred thousands of PLO militants. But the PLO does not call for the overthrow of Hashemite rule in Jordan and does not hate the Hashemite monarchy. Only Jews are hated.
It is a hatred, moreover, that is increasingly lethal. During the Second Intifada 70% of the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza approved the suicide bombing of women and children if the targets were Jews. There is no Arab “Peace Now” movement, not even a small one, whereas in Israel the movement demanding concessions to Arabs in the name of peace is a formidable political force. There is no Arab spokesman who will speak for the rights and sufferings of Jews, but there are hundreds of thousands of Jews in Israel— and all over the world— who will speak for “justice” for the Palestinians. How can the Jews expect fair treatment from a people that collectively does not even recognize their humanity?
A Phony Peace.
The Oslo peace process begun in 1993 was based on the pledge of both parties to renounce violence as a means of settling their dispute. But the Palestinians never renounced violence and in the year 2000, they officially launched a new Intifada against Israel, effectively terminating the peace process.
In fact, during the peace process—between 1993 and 1999—there were over 4,000 terrorist incidents committed by Palestinians against Israelis, and more than 1,000 Israelis killed as a result of Palestinian attacks—more than had been killed in the previous 25 years. By contrast, during the same period Israelis were so desperate for peace that they reciprocated these acts of murder by giving the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza a self-governing authority, a 40,000 man armed “police force,” and 95% of the territory their negotiators demanded. This Israeli generosity was rewarded by a rejection of peace, suicide bombings of crowded discos and shopping malls, an outpouring of ethnic hatred and a renewed declaration of war.
In fact, the Palestinians broke the Oslo Accords precisely because of Israeli generosity, because the government of Ehud Barak offered to meet 95% of their demands, including turning over parts of Jerusalem to their control—a possibility once considered unthinkable. These concessions confronted Yassir Arafat with the one outcome he did not want:
Peace with Israel. Peace Without the Destruction of the “Jewish Entity.”
Arafat rejected these Israeli concessions, accompanying his rejection with a new explosion of anti-Jewish violence. He named this violence—deviously—“The al-Aqsa Intifada,” after the mosque on the Temple Mount, giving his new jihad the name of a Muslim shrine to create the illusion that the Intifada was provoked not by his unilateral destruction of the Oslo peace process, but by then-hardline opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s highly publicized visit to the site. Months after the Intifada began, the Palestine Authority itself admitted this was just another Arafat lie.
In fact, the Intifada had been planned months before Sharon’s visit as a followup to the rejection of the Oslo Accords. In the words of Imad Faluji, the Palestine Authority’s communications minister, “[The uprising] had been planned since Chairman Arafat’s return from Camp David, when he turned the tables on the former U.S. president [Clinton] and rejected the American conditions.” The same conclusion was reached by the Mitchell Commission headed by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell to investigate the events: “The Sharon visit did not cause the al-Aqsa Intifada.”
In an interview he gave after the new Intifada began, Faisal Husseini—a well-known “moderate” in the PLO leadership, compared the Oslo “peace process” to a “Trojan horse” designed to fool the Israelis into letting the Palestinians arm themselves inside the Jewish citadel in order to destroy it. “If you are asking me as a Pan-Arab nationalist what are the Palestinian borders according to the higher strategy, I will immediately reply: ‘From the river to the sea’”— in other words, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, with not even the original slivers left for Israel. Note too, Husseini’s self-identification as a “Pan-Arab nationalist.” Just as there is no Palestinian desire for peace with Israel, there are no “Palestinian” Arabs.4
Moral Distinctions.
In assessing the reasons for the Middle East impasse one must also pay attention to the moral distinction between the two combatants as revealed in their actions. When a deranged Jew goes into an Arab mosque and kills the worshippers (which happened once) he is acting alone and is universally condemned by the Israeli government and the Jews in Israel and everywhere. But when an Arab suicide bomber wades into a crowd of families with baby strollers leaving evening worship, or enters a disco filled with teenagers or a shopping mall crowded with women and children and blows them up (which has happened frequently), he is someone who has been trained and sent by a component of the PLO or the Palestine Authority; has been told by his religious leaders that his crime will get him into heaven where he will feast on 72 virgins; his praises will be officially sung throughout the Arab world; his mother will be given money by the Palestine Authority; and his Arab neighbors will come to pay honor to the household for having produced a “martyr for Allah.” The Palestinian liberation movement is the first such cause to elevate the killing of children—both the enemy’s and its own—into a religious calling. Even Hitler didn’t think of this.
It is not only the methods of the Palestine liberation movement that are morally repellent. The Palestinian cause is itself corrupt. The “Palestinian problem” is a problem created by the Arabs themselves, and can only be solved by them. The reason there are Palestinian “refugees” is because no Arab state— except Jordan—will allow them to become citizens and the organs of the PLO and the Palestine Authority, despite billions in revenues, have let them to stew in refugee camps for 50 years. (In contrast, Israel has been steadily absorbing and settling Jewish refugees over the same time period). In Jordan, Palestinians already have a state in which they are a majority but which denies them self determination. Why is Jordan not the object of the Palestinian “liberation” struggle? The only possible answer is because it is not ruled by the hated Jews.
The famous “green line” marking the boundary between Israel and its Arab neighbors is also the bottom line for what is the real problem in the Middle East. It is green because plants are growing in the desert on the Israeli side but not on the Arab side. The Jews got a sliver of land without oil, and created abundant wealth and life in all its rich and diverse forms. The Arabs got nine times the acreage but all they have done with it is to sit on its aridity and nurture the poverty, resentments and hatreds of its inhabitants. Out of these dark elements they have created and perfected the most vile antihuman terrorism the world has ever seen:
Suicide Bombing of Civilians.
If a nation state is all the Palestinians desire, Jordan would be the solution. (So would settling for 95% of the land one is demanding—the Barak offer rejected by Arafat.) But the Palestinians want to destroy Israel. This is morally hateful. It is the Nazi virus revived. Despite this, the Palestinian cause is generally supported by the international community with the singular exception of the United States (and to a lesser degree Great Britain). It is precisely because the Palestinians want to destroy a state that Jews have created—and because they are killing Jews—that they enjoy international credibility and otherwise inexplicable support.
The Jewish Problem Once More.
It is this international resistance to the cause of Jewish survival, the persistence of global Jew-hatred that, in the end, refutes the Zionist hope of a solution to the “Jewish problem.” The creation of Israel is an awe-inspiring human success story. But the permanent war to destroy it undermines the original Zionist idea.
More than fifty years after the creation of Israel, the Jews are still the most hated ethnic group in the world. Islamic radicals want to destroy Israel, but so do Islamic moderates. Hatred of Jews is taught in Islam’s mosques; in Egypt and in other Arab countries Mein Kampf is a bestseller; the anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is promoted by the government press throughout the Arab Middle East, and Jewish conspiracy theories abound, as in the following statement from a sermon given by the Mufti of Jerusalem, the spiritual leader of the Palestinian Arabs in the al-Aqsa mosque on July 11, 1997: “Oh Allah, destroy America, for she is ruled by Zionist Jews …”
For the Jews in the Middle East, the present conflict is a life and death struggle, yet every government in the UN with the exception of the United States and sometimes Britain regularly votes against Israel in the face of a terrorist enemy who has no respect for the rights or lives of Jews. After the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center, the French ambassador to England complained that the whole world was endangered because of “that shitty little country,” Israel. This caused a scandal in England, but nowhere else.
All that stands between the Jews of the Middle East and another Holocaust is their own military prowess and the generous, humanitarian support of the United States. Even in the United States, however, one can now turn the TV to channels like MSNBC and CNN to see the elected Prime Minister of a democracy equated politically and morally with terrorists and enemies of the United States such as the leaders of Hamas.
During the first Gulf War, Israel was America’s firm ally while Arafat and the Palestinians were Saddam Hussein’s staunchest Arab supporters. Yet the next two U.S. administrations—Republican and Democrat alike—strove for evenhanded “neutrality” in the conflict in the Middle East, and pressured Israel into a suicidal “peace process” with a foe dedicated to its destruction. Only after September 11 was the United States willing to recognize Arafat as an enemy of peace and not a viable negotiating partner. And now the pendulum has swung back with the ascension of Barack Obama to the Presidency.
In terms of the “Jewish problem” that Herzl and the Zionist founders set out to solve, it is safer today to be a Jew in America than a Jew in Israel. This is one reason why I, a Jew, am an unambivalent, passionate American patriot. America is good for the Jews as it is good for every other minority who embraces its social contract. But this history of the attempt to establish a Jewish state in the Middle East is also why I am a fierce supporter of Israel’s survival and have no sympathy for the Palestinian side in this conflict. Nor will I have such sympathy until the day comes when I can look into the Palestinians’ eyes and see something other than death desired for Jews like me.
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